Understanding Child Abuse: The Partners of Child Sex Offenders Tell Their Stories

by Terry Philpot

Understanding Child Abuse is the first book to look at women whose partners are child sex offenders. Much of the book is devoted to the voices of the women themselves, telling their stories and how they feel about the situations in which they found themselves, how they coped, and how they remade their lives and those of their families. They describe what they learned from their experience and how it changed them.

Such experience is largely overlooked by researchers, agencies and policy makers and this book throws unique light on this neglected area. The chapters cover:

What we know about child sexual abuse, offenders and the effect of sexual abuse on children.

A detailed description of the work which allows the women to explore and compare their experiences and feelings about what has happened.

Verbatim interviews with both partners and offenders.

Combining theory, practice and personal testimony in a concise and accessible manner, Understanding Child Abuse is essential reading for social work practitioners and students as well as probation officers and anyone involved with child protection. It will also be of interest to members of the public.

148 pages, Paperback

First published November 19, 2008

Reviews

[Bri · Rating 4 out of 5]

a book I read for research as well as for interest sake. It was a difficult read (naturally, considering the subject matter) but it was fascinating at the same time. The partners of offenders don’t get a lot of air time and people tend to assume the partner knew what the offender was up to and worked to hide what was going on (in one way or another). This generally isn’t the case and these stories reflect that. Being that the experience of partners of sex offenders is one of my specific areas of interest for future research I found this book riveting. 4/5 stars.

[Serenity Magne Grey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really interesting and insightful book. Really helpful for me as I work with RSO's and have often struggled to see how the relationship dynamics work after offending. I'm not really any the wiser as to why people stay BUT this book was very much worth the read.

I only have two gripes and they are really small and don't take away from the book itself, I'm just picky 😆but the book uses the word me instead of my throughout. It would make sense if the rest of the book was written in dialect but its not so it just made no sense to me. And secondly the stories of the wives were massive chunks with no space between and it made reading it tricky as it was a lot to take in 6 or 7 pages without pause for thought between.

Overall this is a book worth reading and important to research on abuse.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The core of this book is a series of transcripts of interviews with women whose partners are abusers. It's a very direct and immediate way of bringing out their stories, which I found by turns to be challenging of my preconceptions, touchingly emotive and illuminating. The transcripts are bracketed by introductory chapters on the issues arising from abuse and closing chapters giving a couple of transcripts of abuser interviews (challenging and illuminating in their own way) and background on the group therapy programme that the interviewees had attended.

(I was niggled by some poor editing in places, but it's not too detracting from the work.)