NCJ Number
166777
Date Published
1997
Length
10 pages
Annotation
The personal and professional impacts of working with juvenile sex offenders are examined, based on discussions with colleagues and responses to several thousand questionnaires distributed to trainees.
Abstract
The discussions revealed that few professionals spend much time discussing with their supervisors, friends, or colleagues the personal and interpersonal effects of their work. However, in isolation they wonder about their own deviance, worry about the implications for the psychic health of their fantasies and thoughts, become overly sensitized to being victimized, and sometimes become hypervigilant about both the safety of their children and their interactions with them. Most struggle with issues of power, control, impulsiveness, addictive impulses or behaviors, and thinking errors. Their work evokes intense feelings. They must manage images, thoughts, and feelings as well as disturbing impulses and urges. Providing sex offender treatment may also generate vivid fantasies. Their work may change their world view and their relationships with loved ones. Practitioners who continue in the field usually learn how to cope with their increased vigilance, anxiety about their children, projections of abusive motivation onto innocuous events, and hypersensitivity to the slightest hint of sexual arousal or inappropriate touching. It is also important to provide a context in which beginning practitioners can work through these and related issues. A higher and healthier level of consciousness about this work should produce greater effectiveness and community safety. Appended instrument and guided fantasy