Quote of the Day

At the close of the second millennium, one of the social issues most vexing to governments, social work and criminal justice professionals across the world had emerged as that of sexual abuse. In England and Wales, the Sex Offender Register, which came into force during 1997, now requires all those cautioned or convicted of a sexual offence to notify the police of their names and addresses — in some cases a lifetime requirement. High-profile sexual killings, such as that which led to ‘Megan’s Law’ in the USA, the deaths of 8-year-old Sarah Payne in the U.K. and 14-year-old Valentia Farmer in South Africa, have raised public condemnation to a point where sexual abusers of all kinds have become the new social pariahs of the world.
Concerning enough an issue when related to adult perpetrators, this state of affairs is even more troubling when viewed in relation to adolescent sexual abusers. Research has shown that in the USA, an estimated 30 - 50% of sex offences against children were committed by adolescents and, in the U.K., that around 30% of all sex offence convictions or cautions were of young people under 21 years of age (Davis and Leitenberg, 1987; Vizard, Monek and Misch, 1995). A more recent research review concluded that, although the majority of adolescent sexual offenders appear unlikely to reoffend as adults, a large proportion of adults who offend against children report tat these preoccupations began in adolescence (Grubin, 1998)

In the early 1990s Bentovim (1991) referred to a growing awareness in the UK of the problem of adolescent perpetrators, commenting that the tendency had been for them to be seen as a sub-group of a violently delinquent population, rather than as a group in their own right. He suggested that:

Work with children and young people as abusers needs to be integrated into the total concern for abused children since so many have been both subject to abuse and are re-enacting their own abuse. This may have been sexual abuse or may have been other forms of traumatic handling which have led to re-enactment in a sexual context. (Bentovim 1991: 54)

In a plea for international consensus on the treatment of young people who sexually abuse, Calder (1997) emphasised the need to consider new and specific ways of working with sexually abusive and reactive behaviour in young people, without transposing material developed in work with adult sex offenders. He argued that young people should be viewed and treated in their total context, rater than focusing exclusively on their presenting sexual behaviour. Thus, although not all adolescent abusers are criminalised, it is clearly of the utmost importance that there be made available treatment facilities which seek to address and eradicate their behaviour at a major developmental life-stage.

GWYNETH BOSWELL AND PETER WEDGE
Boswell, G. & Wedge, P. (2003) A pilot evaluation of Therapeutic Community for Adolescent Male Sexual Abusers. Therapeutic Communities. Vol. 24 No. 4 Winter 2003 pp 259-260