“A Long Road Home” — Working with Adult Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse From a Systemic Perspective

Abstract

Working with adults who have been sexually abused in childhood can be a~aunting task: The material~isclosed is often overwhelming in its detail and horror and the consequences for the client are alarmmg. !h~followmg paper offers a methodfor approaching the individual adult client who presents such abuse aspart oftheir hlS!ory. It provides a comprehensive set ofguidelinesfor the practitioner both to explore~ndface the reality. of~buse while not becoming immobilised by horror and impotence. Case examples are used to Illustrate the application of the method.

Domestic violence and the politics of trauma

“…This issue is of particular significance when working with survivors of intimate violence where a key strategy in the abuse has usually been the isolation of the woman through the steady erosion of her support network. The attention to the skills involved in supporting the development of social networks which has been a feature of relationship counselling (Laing, 2001;Sanders, 1992), has not been a prominent aspect of trauma intervention.…”