A Trauma-Informed Understanding of Online Offending. Adult Losses from Adolescent Searches.
The covid pandemic of 2019 created the perfect storm for online sexual offences. With individuals trapped in their homes with only the Internet as access to the outside world, there became a tsunami of online sexual offences as (predominantly) men viewed indecent images of children online while viewing pornography, and had indecent conversations with children online via social media. It was considered that over a thousand individuals a month were being arrested (getting ‘the knock’) for online sexual offences over a two-year period, and thousands more were considered to have evaded the attention of the police. Although the number is considered to have dropped to about 850 a month, it is still a massive number. Vast policing resources were diverted to try and capture and arrest everyone, leading to logjams in the High Tech Crime Units investigating each individual’s (sometimes many) devices - phones, tablets, laptops, games consoles, etc - capable of accessing the Internet, followed by delays in The Crown Prosecution Service’s overview of potential charges, and then delays getting each individual through the courts. In some policing areas, it takes 3-4 years for an individual's journey through the Criminal Justice System, leading to the stress, anxiety and depression of long-term uncertainty and high suicidality. Did this mean that there was a huge number of covert paedophiles living in our midst? Did this mean that these arrests were making our children safer within our society? The answer to both questions is negative. A minority of these individuals would have groomed and arranged to meet a child or a teenager with evil intent. But the majority are viewers of imagery, trapped in an addictive process of Internet browsing and sexual arousal, changing the way they feel from their own hidden traumas of childhood. That is not to undermine the enormity of the trauma victimisation of the children within these images, but this book is written to try and put this Zeigeist into perspective, to try and understand from where this from omnipresent problem stems, as the paradox is that the punitive (and essentially unsuccessful) response to it is creating attachment injuries, trauma and psychological damage to the families and children of the offenders.
Chapter 1: The Knock. Implications and Subsequent Losses. Gordon returns
Chapter 2: Beginning Therapy and History-taking.
Chapter 3: Understanding attachment injuries and it's effect on neural development.
Chapter 4: What is Neurodiversity?
Chapter 5: The Addictive Nature of Online Pornography
Chapter 6: Transgenerational transmission and the development of the self.
Chapter 7: Trauma and the early sexualisation of children.
Chapter 8: Theories for online offending sexual offending.
Chapter 9: Rehabilitation and Desistance
Chapter 10. Do the forensic services meet the needs of their users?
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