NCJ Number
176885
Date Published
1997
Length
320 pages
Annotation
This manual is intended to assist aboriginal community sexual abuse response teams in Canada to develop their own strategies for addressing the issues of sexual abuse in their communities.
Abstract
The manual recommends a team approach that includes the families involved, elders and spiritual counselors, mental health professionals, medical service providers, child protection caseworkers, and police officers. It emphasizes the need to develop a strategy for dealing with sexual abuse that balances the needs of everyone involved in the situation for protection, healing, justice, and the restoration of healthy human relations. It also notes that hundreds of different aboriginal cultures exist across Canada and that each community's own culturally based understanding of how best to do this should provide the guiding framework for developing a program. Individual sections examine the cultural and historical past in aboriginal communities and the teachings and other resources that aboriginal communities have to address the problem of sexual abuse. Further sections describe the historical process that many Canadian aboriginal communities experienced that led to the introduction of alcohol, sexual violence, and other challenges and explain the emergence of the aboriginal community recovery movement. The manual also explains the community wellness approach, caring for the caregiver, interventions at the time of disclosure, interventions that facilitate the healing process, involvement of the community, legal issues, and record keeping. Figures, forms, appended sample training session outline and exercises, and 54 references