Reviewing the Evidence on Sibling Sexual Behaviour: Impact on Research, Policy and Practice.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: This paper reviews recent research into sibling sexual behaviour (SSB). This is an emerging professional and community issue that binds together a limited evidence base across research, practice and policy in psychology, criminology, politics, social work and policy studies. The review will demonstrate that a multi-disciplinary, life course, family system approach is the most effective way of starting to develop interventions to prevent and respond to this issue. RECENT FINDINGS: SSB has previously been researched as a form of intrafamilial abuse or sibling incest. As a result of this SSB is poorly and inconsistently defined as a concept, meaning that research, practice and policy are sometimes at odds with each other and need to pull together to develop a cohesive framing of the issue. This means that a lot of older research needs to be contextualised in new emerging frames of thinking and ways of working. Current research emphasises the importance of understanding the role of the family system in creating conditions where SSB can occur and its central role in preventing and stopping it from occurring. The research also stresses the importance of professionals understanding the family context of SSB and has the confidence to identify and work proactively with families in a multi-agency and cross-disciplinary way. The prevention of, and response to, SSB requires a multi-level, multi-disciplinary approach. Successful prevention of and response to SSB are as much about the family system as it is about the attitudes, behaviours and experiences of the siblings impacted by the abuse.

Seen and Not Heard: The Service User's Experience Through the Justice System of Individuals Convicted of Sexual Offenses.

User experience and client satisfaction is capturing more attention in the field of social services. The provision of treatment services to individuals convicted of sexual offenses, in particular, has expanded exponentially over the last 20 years. This growing population is now interviewed, interrogated, investigated, assessed, managed, treated, supervised, and surveilled, while their perspective as "service users" is almost entirely absent from research. To that end, this article introduces the service user voice within the context of society's responses to sexual offending. We conducted thematic analysis on secondary data from interviews with 93 individuals. These include 74 men from the United States and 19 men from the United Kingdom, all of whom had been convicted for sexual offenses. The original qualitative data from the two original studies were freshly analysed, inductively and deductively, using Thematic Analysis so that the themes, as well as resulting codes, were appropriate and fit for purpose. Specific themes emerged from each of three clear stages in their service user journey: (a) Interactions with the formal criminal justice system (police, courts, and custodial corrections), (b) Interactions with community corrections (probation and parole), and (c) Interactions with treatment providers (rehabilitation, therapists, and evaluators). We describe the service user experience at each stage and discuss how policy and practice can resolve areas of disconnection. We suggest several ways to promote and privilege the service user voice for those convicted of sexual crimes.

Ethics and Issues of Secondary Prevention Efforts in Child Sexual Abuse.

This article discusses the ethical, practical, and moral issues surrounding secondary prevention efforts of child sexual abuse from a professional and practice-based perspective. Transcripts of a semistructured consultation event with n = 15 international experts on the secondary prevention of child sexual abuse were analysed using thematic qualitative analysis. The research identified four main critical areas linked to secondary prevention efforts, including, the psychology of self-reporting and disclosure; the interaction with and within existing legal, social, and professional frameworks; the scale and type of an appropriate response; and potential hurdles (i.e., within media, public, politics). The article outlines these areas, highlighting participant perspectives on risk-enhancing and mitigating factors for each domain.