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.

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.

1.Introduction. 2.Excitement as a defence against despair: An adolescent girl's failed mourning of childhood and childhood attachments. 3.Children having children: The cycle of exploitation in pregnancy and premature motherhood. 4.Understanding the significance and function of protective aggression in clinical work with young people who were groomed and sexually abused. 5.Victim/Victimizer: Grappling with some of the dynamics of exploitation. 6.Lost and found and the need for belonging: Exploring the risk of exploitation for young people living on the edge of care. 7.A father in mind: The importance of considering 'paternal functions' when caring for vulnerable young women who are at risk of sexual exploitation. 8.The social and political context. 9.Shame, blame and the thinking community. 10.Abuse and exploitation in groups and organisations: A psychoanalytic psychiatrist's perspective. 11.Child sexual exploitation in a refugee context: The assault on protection. 12.Community psychotherapy: Creating a therapeutic culture in frontline care organisations. 13.Don't we all envy mothers.