Preparing services and staff to work with young people who sexually abuse

The central focus of this book is on how to work effectively with young people who sexually abuse others. This chapter however looks at how services and staff can be set up in a manner that will enable them to deliver an effective service. Its underlying premises are simple. Firstly, changing behaviour occurs in the context of empathic, skilled and carefully planned relationships between workers and clients. Secondly, the capacity of workers to create and sustain effective therapeutic relationships is inextricably bound up with the quality of their organisational environments. Thirdly, the majority of young people who exhibit sexually abusive behaviour have multiple and complex needs, therefore the quality of inter-agency collaboration is crucial to the effectiveness of our interventions (Morrison, 2000). Changing their behaviour will require the skills and services of more than one agency or professional discipline. In other words the preparation of staff cannot be separated from the organisational and inter-agency context in which they work. Just as we cannot consider the behaviour of young people without reference to their ecological context, neither can we prepare staff properly without reference to their ecological context. It is these three premises that underpin the approach to this chapter.