Steve Myers

Social Work: Making a Difference

Making a difference Making a difference: lessons from history Making a difference in preparation and assessment Making a difference in intervention Making a difference in advocacy Making a difference in risk assessment and management Making a difference in your practice in your agency Making a difference in demonstrating professional competence.

Revisiting Lancaster: More Things that Every Social Work Student Should Know

It has been argued previously that social work students need to understand what is known about those people who sexually offend and abuse in order to provide adequate services to both victims/survivors and offenders/abusers. This article explores how engaging with a highly emotional topic can be undertaken in ways that make links with other forms of knowledge within social work education programmes. It also presents techniques based on the experience of teaching and learning about sexual offending that have been useful, allowing students to think and talk about issues that are often obscured by emotion, rhetoric and claims for truth.

Children and young people harming animals: intervention through PSHE?

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) commissioned a project to explore issues around children harming animals. More than 1000 young people and 100 adults engaged with the research, which initially focussed on the way children and young people themselves make sense of harm towards animals, and then extended into a range of other areas. A critical evaluation of the literature informed a research design that included: questionnaires distributed to schools producing 841 returns from individual pupils; interviews with 10 young people; 28 group interviews involving a total of 270 young people; and individual interviews with many involved professionals. In addition, retrospective data was gathered from 25 adults regarding their early experiences of harming animals and on 276 children from a centre working with young children with behavioural problems, some of whom had harmed animals. Issues arising from this pilot study include the suggestion that children and young people harming animals is more widespread than generally accepted. The majority of all those contacted thought that future intervention should focus primarily on ‘education’, and the many teachers involved proposed Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) and Citizenship as the appropriate forum.This paper offers a brief summary of the main elements of the research process and outlines some of the emerging issues. A full account appears in the unpublished research report, (Piper et al. 2001 1 ). It is hoped this paper may stimulate further research, especially in the UK.

Children and young people whose behaviour is sexually concerning or harmful: assessing risk and developing safety plans

For this issue we present two reviews on sexual offending populations, one with a focus on children and young people and the other on adults. The first review is presented by Steve Myers of Jackie Bateman and Judith Milner’s (2014) book, “Children and Young People Whose Behaviour is Sexually Concerning or Harmful: Assessing Risk and Developing Safety Plans” (London, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, ISBN: 9781849053617).The reviewexpresses appreciation of the authors’ experience in working with young sexual abusers and how this has contributed to the book’s usefulness. The second is a review provided by Kelly Babchishin of Mark Carich and Steven Mussack’s (2015) book entitled “The Safer Society Handbook of Sexual Abuser Assessment and Treatment” (Vermont, The Safer Society Press, ISBN: 9781884444999). This review provides a summary of the book’s contributors and sections, and praises the authors for their thorough coverage of the literature and practical examples relating to the assessment and treatment of adult sexual abusers. Both reviewers suggest that these books are useful for both researchers and practitioners, and provide practical, actionable, and empirically-based suggestions for working with the specified sexual abuser populations in focus. On behalf of the Journal we would like to express thanks to the reviewers for the time, effort and consideration taken to complete the book reviews and we hope that their reflections on the nature and content of the texts will entice readers to purchase copies of the books.

Brief training in brief therapies

Having attended voluntary agency conferences in the UK on Youth Crime for a number of years, presenting workshops on a variety of issue, but predominantly about the sexual misbehaviour of young people, I have begun to introduce elements of Solution-Focused and Narrative work in this field. The opportunities afforded by having perhaps a maximum of one and a half hours to introduce any topic are limited, but certainly hone the mind in thinking about the most effective methods to impart key points that are understandable, stimulate interest in further study, and are rooted in practice. The participants in the workshops are from a wide variety of backgrounds, disciplines, and experiences. However, they are all involved in work with children and young people who are in the criminal justice system at some point. This allows for some commonalities of experience and a presumption that they may actually want the best for the young people with whom they work. In the UK, the age of criminal responsibility (at which a child can be held fully responsible in law