BASW England Children and Families Seminar: Online child sexual abuse – managing risk after online offending
Join the BASW England Children and Families Thematic Group for these lunchtime sessions in conversation with specialists across the sector. The BASW Children and Families Thematic Group address issues that arise, concerning social work with children and families, within England. Group members hold expertise across social work policy, practice, research, and education. In these lunchtime seminars group members will be in conversation with specialists from across the sector. BASW members are warmly invited to join in the conversations.
In 2021, there were over 850 arrests across the UK for accessing child sexual abuse material, including sexual images of children under 18, every single month, and this number has been increasing since. Of these arrests, many individuals will have been likely to have children of their own or in their wider family. In fact, research shows that compared with those convicted of other forms of sexual offending, people who access child sexual abuse material are more likely to be married and have children. In addition, research has been increasingly identifying a link between abuse that happens on line and that that takes place within the family environment.
For the partners of people who have offended in this way, discovering that the person they love has been viewing or sharing child sexual abuse content can bring feelings of shock, fear, and confusion. For children the impact can be devastating; they may feel ostracised at school and in their community, experience verbal abuse, miss their offending parent, or worry about what will happen to them. There is also a significantly increased risk of suicide among men arrested for these crimes - and so mitigating this risk is paramount for the whole family's wellbeing.
This session will introduce the CSA Centre’s new resource for social workers, providing the latest research and practice-led information to help you to confidently safeguard and support families at a time of great emotional distress.
Anna Glinski, Deputy Director, Knowledge and Practice Development Anna is a qualified social worker and has worked within statutory front line child protection and specialist services as a practitioner and manager throughout her career. She specialised in child sexual abuse work, acting as an expert witness in the family courts on child sexual abuse cases. She was previously the CSA Centre's Practice Improvement Advisor for Social Work and, before that, the practice development lead for child sexual abuse within her local authority and contributed to local and regional service and policy development. Anna developed and led a multi-disciplinary specialist sexual abuse team, which provided assessments, interventions, supervision, consultation and training.
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