Child Abuse and Neglect: Influences of Qualitative Research and Clinical Practice on Child-Care Legislation and Policy

In a previous paper on research findings with adolescent sexual offenders, formal and informal responses to offenders were discussed in terms of offenders’ crystallization of foreclosed deviant social-sexual identity. This paper, therefore, seeks to modulate, with critical psychotherapeutic factors, legislative, judicial, social, interpersonal, and psychotherapeutic attitudes to offenders and victims alike. Chief among these is the twinship transference that, the authors argue, is the essential antidote to secondary trauma in child protection.