The Challenges of Working with Child Sexual Exploitation and How a Psychoanalytic Understanding Can Help

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.