1st Edition
The Challenges of Working with Child Sexual Exploitation and How a Psychoanalytic Understanding Can Help
Sexual exploitation is becoming endemic in our society. It involves victims being coerced to enter abusive sexual relationships with individuals or gangs. It can occur with children from care homes – or from more privileged backgrounds. Sexual exploitation is so addictive that it is really difficult to extract the victims. This is the first book that we are aware of that examines exploitation using a psychoanalytic framework which makes the behaviour and motives of victims and, in some cases, exploiters comprehensible. The book looks at a range of situations from care homes to refugee camps and elite schools.
We expect this book to become indispensable for social workers, psychotherapists, counsellors, and care workers who have to tackle child sexual exploitation. Giving up an addiction is a struggle. Our clinical examples show how much and what kinds of work are needed to start to release girls from their addiction to their exploiters.
The roots of vulnerability lie in an attack on the maternal function. This is reflected in the huge expansion of day-care taking children from as little as three months old. Care for mothers and children can be transformed. We demonstrate how powerful properly organised maternal-type care can be, to give young people a sound start to their lives.
Chapter One - Introduction
Chapter Two - Excitement as a defence against despair: An adolescent girl’s failed mourning of childhood and childhood attachments
Julie Long
Chapter Three - Children having children: The cycle of exploitation in pregnancy and premature motherhood
Fiona Henderson
Chapter Four - Understanding the significance and function of protective aggression in clinical work with young people who were groomed and sexually abused
Ariel Nathanson
Chapter Five - Victim/Victimizer: Grappling with some of the dynamics of exploitation
Robin Solomon
Chapter Six - Lost and found and the need for belonging: Exploring the risk of exploitation for young people living on the edge of care
Alison Roy
Chapter Seven - A father in mind: The importance of considering ‘paternal functions’ when caring for vulnerable young women who are at risk of sexual exploitation
Robin Solomon
Chapter Eight - The social and political context
Steve Bambrough and R.M. Shingleton
Chapter Nine - Shame, blame and the thinking community
Janine Cherry-Swaine
Chapter Ten - Abuse and exploitation in groups and organisations: A psychoanalytic psychiatrist’s perspective
Judith Trowell
Chapter Eleven - Child sexual exploitation in a refugee context: The assault on protection
Krisna Catsaras
Chapter Twelve - Community psychotherapy: Creating a therapeutic culture in frontline care organisations
Ariel Nathanson
Chapter Thirteen - Don’t we all envy mothers
Marion Bower
Biography
Marion Bower has postgraduate diplomas in Education and Social Work. She was a Consultant Social Worker at the Tavistock Clinic and is a Senior Adult Psychotherapist. She has written and edited four books on related subjects and is currently working on a biography of Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, to be published by Routledge.
Robin Solomon has been a Clinical Social Worker/Psychotherapist for over 40 years. She has held senior posts at the Tavistock Clinic as a clinician and as an educator. She now works independently as an external staff consultant with CAMHS services in Britain and abroad and with residential care homes for Looked After adolescents.
