Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, 120 University Street, Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5, Canada.
School of Psychology, University of Ottawa, 136 Jean Jacques Lussier, Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5, Canada.
Child Abuse Negl. 2018 Feb;76:502-514. doi: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2017.12.005. Epub 2017 Dec 27.
Research on youth sexual offending has focused primarily on its prevalence. However, recent efforts have begun to consider the collateral consequences for the relatives of offending youth, although little has been done in this regard toward exploring caregiver accountability. This study presents qualitative data on parents' sense of responsibility in situations where their child engaged in sexual offending behaviour against another child. We analyzed interview data among 16 parents from 10 families in Canada using thematic coding procedures. Findings illustrated the range of responsible actions that caregivers of sexual offending youth undertook with regard to preventing recidivism and accessing appropriate services for all the abuse-affected children. Caregivers reported on the enormous complexities they encountered as they attempted to simultaneously attend to the best interests of both the victim and offending youth. A particularly significant theme was that, despite the overwhelming challenges caregivers faced in dealing with the needs of their offending child, they were also highly attentive to the well-being of the victims. Our findings point to the importance of comprehensive and non-biased support services for both children and caregivers in order to fully uphold the rights of all affected individuals, and to better meet the needs as well as best interests of sexual abuse-affected children.
青少年性犯罪的研究主要集中在其普遍性上。然而，最近已经开始考虑犯罪青少年的亲属的附带后果，尽管在这方面很少有探索照顾者责任的工作。本研究介绍了有关父母在其孩子对另一个孩子进行性侵犯行为时的责任感的定性数据。我们使用主题编码程序分析了来自加拿大 10 个家庭的 16 名父母的访谈数据。研究结果说明了性犯罪青少年的照顾者为防止再次犯罪和为所有受虐待儿童获得适当服务而采取的一系列负责任的行动。照顾者报告了他们在试图同时兼顾受害者和犯罪青少年的最大利益时遇到的巨大复杂性。一个特别重要的主题是，尽管照顾者在处理犯罪儿童的需求方面面临着压倒性的挑战，但他们也非常关注受害者的福祉。我们的研究结果表明，为了充分维护所有受影响个人的权利，并更好地满足受性虐待影响的儿童的需求和最大利益，为儿童和照顾者提供全面和无偏见的支持服务非常重要。
