The Sexual Abuse of Adolescent Girls by Stewart Kirk

Author:Stewart Kirk [Kirk, Stewart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General
ISBN: 9780429781377
Google: aTeDDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-01-04T03:45:17+00:00

The Attitude of the Girls to the Child Protection Process

The social workers had to confront the girls’ (often-changing) attitudes towards elements of the child protection process. They had to deal with issues such as the girls’ willingness to actively participate in plans for their own protection and varying degrees of cooperation and conflict between themselves and the girls. Before these issues could be confronted social workers needed to gain access to the girls.

Access only emerged as an issue in those cases where attempts were made to deny or limit it, the social workers in such cases expressing concern over not being able to become or remain aware of what was going on. They found that girls rarely attempted to avoid contact. Rather, it was members of the girls’ families who attempted to make access to the girls more difficult. The social workers saw these attempts at minimising contact as tending to coincide with times when girls were beginning to retract their allegations or minimise the degree of risk they were subject to. They saw these two factors as related, families bringing pressure to bear on girls to retract as part of an overall familial effort to minimise what had happened (or was happening) and thus remove themselves from the scrutiny of the child protection process. There is a well established motif in the research literature (Waldby, 1985; Vizard and Tranter, 1988a; for example) that shows families adopting strategies to minimise or rationalise girls’ allegations of sexual abuse, and persuading or coercing girls to retract those allegations. Survivors’ accounts (Bass and Thornton, 1983; Women’s Resource Centre, 1989) suggest these strategies are largely perpetrator driven, both directly through coercion of the girl, and indirectly through bringing pressure to bear on the girl’s mother.

When access was made difficult the social workers were concerned about the familial pressure they believed the girl was probably under, and about the reduction in their own capacity to observe the eruption of any emotional problems or any increase of risk for the girl. The social workers saw familial influences on girl’s change over time and exert a substantial influence on the degree of cooperation between the girls and themselves. Often girls would appear fully cooperative in their interactions with the social workers, but would fail to cooperate in their behaviour outside those interactions, by, say, maintaining contact with the perpetrator. Dingwall et al (1983) point to parental non-compliance and/or refusal of access as a critical point in the transformation of a child abuse concern into a fully fledged child protection case. The social workers took any parental refusal of access as an indicator that something was amiss. Once they gained access the social workers tended to informally assess the girls’ attitude to the child protection process.

One way in which they understood the girls’ attitude was through their willingness to participate in various procedural aspects of the process, such as the Initial Child Protection Conference. 10 Several girls attended Initial Child Protection Conferences, and the social workers took this as a sign that they were prepared to cooperate in the child protection process in general.

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