abusers everywhere, and feeling personally unsafe (Farrenkopf, 1992; Scheela, 2001; Leicht, 2008). Such insecurities may generate increased irritability (Bird Edmunds, 1997), as well as anger and frustration (Farrenkopf, 1992).
In response to these feelings, some workers numb their emotional response to day-to-day experiences and their abilities to respond empathically to harm caused by sexual and interpersonal violence (Farrenkopf, 1992; Bird Edmunds, 1997; Scheela, 2001). Such desensitising inevitably impacts on workers’ professional lives.
Professional capacities to observe, to interpret and to act
The boundary between personal and professional lives is permeable; the impacts of work on interpersonal relations also affect relations with service users. This, however, changes as workers become more experienced. Farrenkopf’s (1992) ‘Phases of Impact’ model identifies four separate phases of adjustment. In the first phase, workers suffer from shock and feelings of vulnerability; they are unable to understand what they were hearing and feeling. In the second phase, workers are immersed in their professional task, characterised by non-judgemental work ethics, empathy for the sex offender and hope that their work will prove to be effective. In the third phase, repressed emotions re-emerge, particularly anger and resentment, leading to cynicism. The final impact phase is either negative, where workers become disenchanted with their task and their client group, or one of accommodation, where workers adopt less idealistic goals for their work.
Scheela (2001) suggests a six-stage ‘remodelling process’. The stages are: falling apart, taking on, tearing out, rebuilding, doing the upkeep and moving on. These phases capture how working with sex offenders initially challenges workers on both emotional and cognitive levels, but how through processes of change or adaptation, this is managed. These models are useful because they emphasise that worker reactions to working with sex offenders are not fixed, but change and develop through the acquisition of both knowledge and skills, and through developing appropriate support mechanisms.
In emotionally charged areas of social work, there is always an impact on the worker(s). The most serious consequence of this is that workers may not be able to engage with the difficult situation(s) they face (McFadden et al, 2015). This has recently been highlighted in cases where social workers have been found unable to engage with issues of sexual exploitation that have involved intra-racial sexual abuse (Jay, 2014; Bedford, 2015; Casey, 2015). This is a complex area that has ramifications across all of the chapters in this book. It relates to emotions, knowledge and values in practice.
Race, ethnicity and social work with sex offenders: towards confident social work practice
In this section, we address issues relating to race, ethnicity and social work practice with people who sexually harm others. We noted earlier in this chapter that the language we use constructs how we understand the issues. The terms ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ carry a wide range of assumptions and values, most of which vary according to who is using the term. The word ‘race’ is historically rooted in an essentialist, biological viewpoint that considers humanity to comprise of a number of ‘races’ defined, primarily, by skin colour and physiognomy. Within the term, which has had currency in Europe since the 18th century, there is an explicit hierarchy, with white people at the top and black people at the bottom (Phillips, 2012, p 35). In the US, Davis (1981, pp 94–5) cites the 1918 work of American scholar Dr Winfield Collins, which accepts this hierarchy as a given and highlights what he considers to be the essential (racial) nature of the ‘negro’ as an inability to control his sexuality and to tell the truth. Davis and others (eg Collins, 1991) argue that these white ‘myths’ have provided the justification for harsh racist criminal justice policies and practice. Thus, ‘race’ is a socio-biological construct that was used to provide ostensible justification for a (white) social hierarchy based on skin colour.
Interestingly, using the folk devil and moral panic framework, we can see that the white media construction of the black rapist as threatening white women and children led to the moral panic that was used to justify the oppression of black men – of the 455 men executed in the US between 1930 and 1967 on the basis of rape convictions, 405 of them were black (Davis, 1981, p 172). Although she did not use the moral panic framework, Davis (1981, p 199) unflinchingly describes the ideological impact of this ‘folk devil’ in creating a particular form of knowledge about sex crimes and sex offenders:
The myth of the Black rapist continues to carry out the insidious work of racist ideology. It must bear a good portion of the responsibility for the failure of the anti-rape theorists to seek the identity of the enormous numbers of anonymous rapists who remain unreported, untried and unconvicted. As long as their analyses focus on accused rapists who are reported and arrested, thus on only a fraction of the rapes committed, Black men – and other men of colour – will inevitably be viewed as the villains responsible for the current epidemic of sexual violence. The anonymity surrounding the vast majority of rapes is consequently treated as a statistical detail – or else a mystery whose meaning is inaccessible.
Racially constructed sex offender ‘folk devils’ continue to feature in popular discourse. In Australia, early this century, there was a spate of rapes committed by ‘Lebanese’ gangs; media reportage highlighted ethnicity and faith (Islam). Two issues were emphasised: the failure of national immigration policies and the likelihood that rape was culturally acceptable to the racial group committing the crimes (Warner, 2004; Humphrey, 2007). In the UK, there are similar racial sexual ‘folk devils’. Following a series of convictions of groups of South Asian men for sexual offences against white children, the South Asian sex offender is being portrayed in terms that emphasise ‘South Asian’ race and ignore similar white offenders (Cockbain, 2013; Gill and Harrison, 2015). Racially based accounts of sex crimes are misleading and generally serve other ideological purposes. At extremes, racist groups use racially presented data to further their own toxic agendas (see, eg, British National Party, 2013).
Ashley-Montagu (1942), writing at the time of Second World War Nazi racism, was one of the first commentators to recognise the dangerous implications of the term ‘race’, and it was he who suggested using the alternative phrase ‘ethnic group’. Phillips (2012, p 37) offers this definition of ethnicity: ‘a self-ascribed collectivity with origins sharing symbolic attributes relating to culture, ancestry, religion, nationality, territory and language’. She further notes that the concept does not have the implicit hierarchies of the word ‘race’. However, we recognise that ascribing a race or an ethnicity to a person, or group of persons, is a dynamic process involving the person giving the name, and the person, or persons, receiving (or refusing) the name (Phillips, 2010).
In this book, we use the terminologies of the sources we cite. When describing racial or ethnic dynamics, we are mindful of the implications of such terminology. For example, we recognise that in most ‘Western’2 countries, the dominant racial group is white; in the UK, a collective term for people not encompassed by the term ‘white’ is ‘black and minority ethnic’ (BME). This is a crude racial term, clustering together a diverse range of people solely by skin colour. It is, however, a term that has been used in government publications when discussing the discriminatory effects of government policies (Aspinall, 2002). Aspinall (2002) describes BME as ‘panethnic terminology’, and suggests that such terms are useful in that they can be used to identify discriminatory practices towards groups who share one characteristic (their skin is not white). However, it also carries an assumption that whiteness is a homogeneous category, and this is clearly not the case (Phillips, 2010). In this book, we use panethnic terminology when discussing issues relating to discrimination – recognising that some white groups (eg Irish people) may also be subject to discriminatory practice. When referring to particular ethnicities or cultural practices, we endeavour to be specific.
An area where ‘racial monitoring’ is helpful is in identifying the involvement of BME people in the processes
