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VICTIM WORK:FERTILE TRAINING FOR
OFFENDER THERAPISTS
Working with victims provides insight into work
with sex offenders.
By Kathy Ellis, LMFT
Sex offender treatment requires both cognitive restructuring and
the development of victim empathy. The cognitive work requires a
lot of thought, discussion, intellectual examination. Working with
sex offenders, however, also requires a new awareness and empathy
for the victims as well as cognitive change. The cognitive work
alone can be difficult with all the distortions, minimization, entitlement,
and beliefs clients typically exhibit. It is difficult to get someone
to change how they think but to get them to feel empathy for those
they see only as objects is a true test.
Changes in behavior and cognition can be taught through relapse
prevention and other modalities. Through treatment a client can
gain insight into his or her destructive family patterns, personal
childhood trauma and pain, personal development, etc. This can help
a client begin to feel his or her lost emotions of anger and hurt
and begin to feel more forgiving toward him or her self.
Cognitive behavioral changes and the development of self worth and
understanding are crucial to a sex offender’s treatment. In
addition to those changes a sex offender also needs to gain empathy
for victims, especially his/her victims. It can be difficult to
‘teach’ victim empathy without the exposure to a victim,
to see the anger, hurt, fear, and a myriad of subtle and overt expression
in the child’s face, voice, eyes, body.
Working with victims of sexual abuse provides a therapist also working
with offenders a unique perspective on the effects sexual abuse,
that is, the victim’s perspective. The therapist can see first
hand the effects of abuse on victims. The pain, damaged self-esteem,
fear, confusion and more can be directly observed in treatment.
The therapist hears first hand accounts of grooming, betrayal, coercion,
confusion and on. Clinical work with sexual abuse victims offers
a therapist a great opportunity to impress upon sex offenders the
victim’s point of reference on the many and complicated nuances
of this abuse. This allows the therapist to use the language of
child victims when “teaching” empathy. they can express
victims’ anger, rage, fear, confusion, powerlessness, and the
many related emotions and reactions. The therapist can be the voice
of the victim, a voice of experience.
When a therapist works with victims they gain an awareness of the
far reaching effects of sex abuse. They can then help the offender
develop a sense of the experience of victims that the offender may
not otherwise understand. For example, an offender may learn that
his or her behavior caused a child emotional pain but may have more
difficulty understanding the long term effects on the victim’s
development, stability, etc. Examples could include the following.
A victim that has tremendous anxiety when she sees any man and may
develop a phobia or anxiety disorder. A young victim who begins
be doubt his or her own reality because the offender and/or family
says “it didn’t happen”, ‘it didn’t hurt”,
or he “won’t do it again” and from this loses the
ability to sense an unhealthy or dangerous person or relationship.
or a preadolescent girl who dresses and acts like she is 17 in keeping
with cultural trends and learned ‘seduction’ from the
confusion of sex means love. In this case an offender may recognize
the inappropriate behavior of that child and he or she may feel
empathy that the child is “growing up too fast” but the
offender may not recognize the behavior as counter phobic or a search
for love and a confused connection between sexual behavior and a
feeling of protection from a male. These are only some of the many
examples a therapist can become aware of from working with victims
and then use the more specialized or detailed information to help
the offender better develop a deeper sense of empathy and a better
awareness of the far reaching effects of his or her sexual offending.
How working with sex abuse victims makes me a
more effective offender therapist.
Niki Delson, LCSW
He was her father, her mentor, the man who taught her to ride her
bike, and the one who helped her with her homework. He told her
she looked pretty as a daisy. She thought he loved her. And he betrayed
it all in the service of his sexual desire.
I could imagine what he did, how he touched her, how he smiled without
seeing her fear and confusion. But without hearing from her, I could
not truly understand what he left behind in the wake of his misuse
of her. He fondled her breasts. He fondled her vagina. How easy
it would be if I only had to fathom what the act did to her body.
When offenders come into treatment, they usually admit to the acts
– but my job is to help him comprehend the meaning, and the
irreversibility of those acts. Through my work with victims I am
able to create a bridge for offenders - from limited acceptance
to ownership - from acknowledging what they did, to recognizing
who they were.
I read the police report. I read his statement. I read the victim
statement. He admitted that the victim had told the truth –
he fondled her vagina. He was not in denial. He admitted he did
it 6 times- 288 - a felony. She did not want to tell me about the
sexual touching. She wanted to talk about what the police never
asked her. The sexual touching was not as significant as the fact
that he abused her mother, that he drank and called her names, and
that each time, he promised it would be the last time. She wanted
to tell me that he promised her a bicycle if she complied with his
sexual requests – but he never got it for her. “He promised!
It’s not fair!”
He was at the tail end of treatment. Six years on probation without
one violation. His victims now grown, with children of their own,
were cautious but forgiving. But still they came to talk about the
past. The loss, what he took, was still unfolding. “When I
undress my baby, and he is lying naked on the bed I wonder ‘Is
this how it started with my dad – was I just a baby –
did he start having sexual thoughts about me when I was that little?’”
And then I feel sick because I am having thoughts about my own child
– not like I want to touch him, but just wondering how my dad
started, and I hate that he took from me the ability to love my
child without his perversions in my head.
David Finkelhor gave us the Traumagenic Model to understand the
impact of sexual abuse on child development. This model asserts
that abusive events in a child’s life change the cognitive
and emotional orientation to the world and create a distortion of
self-concept, worldview and affective capacities through four domains,
betrayal, powerlessness, stigmatization and traumatic sexualization.
As an offender therapist I want the perpetrator to “get it”
to see hear and feel how his behavior may have hurt the child’s
core, and spirit. I want him to own it, take responsibility for
it, and make reparations, not just in what he did, but also for
who he must become, for the rest of his life. It is victims who
have helped me understand.
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