Victims of sexual abuse

Victims of sexual abuse may be in a very fragile state emotionally and so must be treated with the utmost care. Social workers have the responsibility of establishing and maintaining an appropriate therapeutic relationship with their clients, and paying careful attention to the management of boundaries between the two (NASW, 1998). The social worker must recognize that the client may be influenced by their opinions, conjecture, or suggestions, and so must take care in expressing them. The social worker must not minimize the power and influence they have on the client's impressions and beliefs, and must guard against self-disclosure and premature interpretations during the treatment process. The social worker should also guard against using leading questions to uncover memories, and be cognizant that disclosures of forgotten experience is a part of the process but not the goal of therapy. The social worker must respect the client's right to self-determination.

This is particularly true when trying to uncover details of prior sexual abuse such as childhood sexual abuse in an adult client (NASW, 1998). Confrontation of victims of sexual abuse should only be used to meet the objectives of the interview (Kadushin and Kadushin, 1997). It should only be used if the social worker has sufficient and valid reasons to support a supposition that there are contradictions which need to be resolved. The social worker needs to be selective in the frequency and timing of confront

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it. They may have already passed it on to numerous people., since it often has a long latent period before symptoms develop. It may also be difficult to know anything positive if the offense occurred recently even if the offender is known because the offender may still be in the latent stage of the disease. Being confrontational with a victim of sexual abuse may seem a little heartless at first, but given the importance of the crime, and the need to get sexual offenders prosecuted and off the streets, it may be necessary at times to get to the truth. The caveat would be that it has to be done in a supportive manner and the client has to be coaxed into it in that they have to be prepared. For this to happen, the social worker has to gain their confidence and they have to trust the social worker and believe that they are truly trying to help them. Victims of sexual abuse, particularly those who have had it happen to them repeatedly over many years, have evolve strategies to hide from the truth, and some of these strategies are very complex, so they may not even know what is the truth anymore, so confrontation must also proceed very carefully. Not every sexual abuse victim will respond to this kind of questioning and it w

Category: Psychology - V