For this special issue focusing on forensic work with children and young people, we are pleased to welcome Graham Music as our guest editor and are grateful to the expert team he has gathered whose clinical work and thinking compose the collection that follows.
What is ‘forensic’? What does ‘forensic’ mean? It is one of those words much used and much misunderstood. In popular imagination ‘forensic’ is likely to conjure up images of police tape and chalk outlines of dead bodies, popular crime shows featuring over involved and improbably handsome pathologists or documentaries about paedophilia and serial killing that may offer a questionable mix of serious investigation and titillating voyeurism. Technically ‘forensic’ refers simply to a behaviour or event that has or could have a criminal consequence; it concerns offending, the transgressing of a law. What comes through repeatedly in the collection that follows is the unavoidable causal thread that the children and young people whose capacity to offend has brought them for treatment are precisely those who have already been most reprehensibly offended against. It is the nature and the inevitability of the journey from victim to perpetrator, and how we may most hopefully intervene to alter this course for a happier and healthier one that preoccupies our author-clinicians and produces the rich content of their papers.
In addition to the articles gathered from work at the Portman, we are very pleased to be able to include a Clinical Commentary on a session from the therapy of a young man in foster care, a survivor of neglect and abuse, who is struggling on the cusp of his own adolescence with both a legacy of attachment issues and with how a prematurely awakened sexuality can now emerge into an ordinary teenage experience of sexual intimacy. It is a testament to his therapist that he brings this material to his session and we are grateful to both the young person and his therapist for allowing us this window into their work from which we all then have the opportunity to learn and help others. Our three commentaries are substantial and complementary, each from a senior clinician with extensive forensic experience. Ann Horne speaks tenderly to the need to park our ‘adult agendas’ and to prioritise building a trusting relationship with children who have been intruded on, encouraging curiosity and a therapeutic space that offers permission to experience and develop at their own pace. She warns against rushing ahead to issues that our patients are simply not yet able or ready to face and encourages us to pay very close attention to the nuance of our countertransference as the way into vital healing attunement. From a slightly different angle Valli Kohon advises on the need for the therapist to step towards the sexual content of the material however embarrassing or horrifying, and to resist an anxious retreat to a more ‘innocent’ form of relating that may seek to avoid sexuality by speaking to the young person as if they were a younger child. She emphasises the unique position of the psychoanalytic therapist and the unique potential of the therapeutic encounter to offer a space where thinking about such difficult matters can begin to occur. By contrast Valerie Sinason brings us a wealth of research evidence about the very real risks of future offending and future mental ill health sequelae for those like this young man; the distinctions that emerge in the literature regarding early onset sexual offending, sexual or non-sexual recidivism in adult life and the pernicious effects of ‘poly-victimisation’ are each of particular interest. Both Sinason and Horne note the signal importance to patients who have been woefully and chronically betrayed by adults of a therapist who can admit their mistakes and is ready to be wrong and revise their approach. Is there here, within the psychoanalytic relationship, an active evidencing of contingent responsiveness by the therapist of a much abused patient that offers a compensatory attachment experience alongside the more traditional examined and introjected experience with which we are so familiar? Much food for thought.
Jo Russell