Abstract not available

Children belong to one of the most vulnerable population groups to crime. Child victims of crime have to overcome the difficulties emerging from their victimization as well as those resulting from their participation in the adversarial criminal justice process. Child victims are typically treated by legal systems as either mere witnesses -- prosecutorial instruments -- or as objects of protection. Children's human rights and their needs beyond immediate protection are typically ignored. ¶ This thesis combines an examination of children's human rights (articulated largely in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child) with a review of psycho-social literature on children's needs. It integrates the two disciplines thus creating a `needs-rights' model regarding child victims. This model is then used to evaluate the criminal justice process and its successes (and failures) in meeting the needs and rights of child victims. Such an integrated needs-rights evaluation identifies not only the difficulties associated with testifying in court and being interviewed multiple times. It goes beyond these topical issues, and uncovers other shortcomings of the current legal system such as the lack of true participation of child victims in the decision-making process, the neglect of rehabilitative and developmental interests of victimized children, and the inherent inability of the adversarial process to seek proactively the best interests of child victims. ¶ The thesis further explores an alternative to the criminal justice process -- that of restorative justice -- and examines its applicability to child victims. Unlike the criminal justice paradigm, restorative justice fosters the equal participation of the stakeholders (in particular victims, offenders and their communities), and focuses on their emotional and social rehabilitation while respecting their human rights. To explore the suitability of restorative justice for child victims, five restorative justice schemes from New Zealand, Australia and Canada and their evaluation studies are reviewed. Each of these schemes has included child victims, and most of them have dealt with either sexual assaults of children or family violence and abuse. Yet each of the evaluated schemes illuminates different concerns and proposes varying strategies for meeting the needs-rights of child victims. ¶ While these schemes demonstrate the significant potential of restorative justice to better address the full scope of the needs and rights of child victims, they uncover emerging concerns as well. Therefore, in the last part of the thesis, the needs-rights model is used once again to derive subsidiary principles for action, to maximize the benefits of restorative justice for child victims and minimize the related risks. A complex set of needs and rights is managed by a method of grouping them into needs-rights clusters and deriving from them simple heuristics for practitioners to follow. This clustering method of needs-rights-heuristics is a methodological contribution of the research to the psychology of law.

published_or_final_version / Social Work and Social Administration / Master / Master of Social Sciences

AIM: This study endeavoured to explore and understand countertransference reactions that occur when the therapist is exposed to clients‘ stories of violent crime. The study focused on the therapist‘s experiential responses resulting from exposure to traumatic stories and the subsequent consequences thereof. This was contextualized from the particular perspective of South African therapists and their above average exposure to crime related trauma. METHODOLOGY: A qualitative research design was used with Smith‘s Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as the methodology of choice. This included a double hermeneutic approach of analysing firstly the perceptions and secondly the meaning of such perceptions within the context of current literature. Nine South African psychologists were purposively selected and interviewed to provide the required data. CONCLUSION: The results of this study show that both concordant and complementary countertransference play a large role in the therapist‘s experience of 'identification with suffering‘ and feelings of avoidance whilst listening to stories of violent crime. Such concordant identification with the client, if not mediated through awareness of one‘s internal dynamics, can result in the therapist‘s over-identification with the client which may be associated with features of vicarious trauma. One way in which such vicarious trauma states may be resolved by the therapist is through the concordant mimicking of the client‘s need to purge and be contained. Experiences linked to vicarious trauma, however, are not a certainty when working with trauma but rather an outcome that depends greatly on a therapist‘s level of experience, self-awareness and ability to implement coping strategies. Through these mediating factors, what may usually be experienced as vicariously traumatic may be transformed into resilience and self-growth. It appears that the implementation of coping strategies (such as normalization and reframing) are also what allow South African therapists to manage in the context of high crime rates and caseloads. Despite the barriers that the public sector poses, the tenacity and hopefulness demonstrated by some of the participants allowed them to overcome some of the difficulties linked to working with trauma. / Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.

<p>Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust is an organisation that trains and supervises a team of women counsellors who provide a counselling service to women rape survivors. The aim of this study was to explore the experiences of the counsellors and the counselling co-ordinator regarding their perceptions on whether the training provided by the personal growth and counselling skills course is adequate in dealing with rape and its complexities.</p>

Thesis (M. Ph.)--Australian Catholic University, 2002. / Title from PDF title page (viewed Aug. 15, 2005). Includes bibliographical references (p. [162]-180).

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Psychology, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 51-55).

Thesis (doctoral)--Universiẗat Passau, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-253).

The prevalence of rape in South Africa is widespread and survivors often experience severe posttraumatic stress and shame. Although secondary traumatic stress (STS) is a risk for everyone who works with primary survivors of trauma it has only been examined in a variety of professionals that provide supportive and clinical services to traumatised populations. Little is known about the impact that this experience has on the friends and family members that support these survivors. In some cases, supporters have to find a way to cope with significant distress associated with witnessing posttraumatic stress in a loved one. This begs the question of how their perceived ability to cope would influence their experience of STS. However, no studies exist that explore the dynamics between severity of posttraumatic stress in rape survivors and secondary traumatic stress and coping self-efficacy in their supporters. For this quantitative study, 23 rape survivors from a local non-governmental organisation completed the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire-Revised (HTQ-R). The 28 informal supporters that were identified, completed the Traumatic Attachment Belief Scale (TABS) and the Coping Self-Efficacy Scale (CSE). Cross-group equivalence, the presence of the outlined factors in the sample, as well as the interaction between factors, are explored and described. Findings indicate that although the survivors endorsed some symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, their scores were not elevated enough to meet the cut-off point for this diagnosis. Findings related to the supporters indicate that the sample experienced average to high average levels of secondary traumatisation. Despite this, the subjects experienced adequate levels of coping self-efficacy. These findings indicate a need to provide more counselling resources to informal supporters in order to alleviate their secondary traumatisation and in turn increase their ability to assist primary rape survivors.

xi, 246 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This dissertation focuses on Latin American survivors of political violence and the staff members involved with one of the few torture treatment centers in the US. Relying primarily on life histories and semi-structured interviews, my research focuses on the social construction of suffering (Kleinman et al. 1997) created by the staff and participants over the course of three different eras of the center. While the clients of this center lead lives that are tremendously impacted by the violent histories of their home countries, they do so while living in a country where this history is almost completely invisible. As exiles, they are removed from the arena of collective memory reflected in debates in postwar transitional Latin American societies about the meaning of the past, the reasons for their suffering, and the need for historical truth. Consequently, I examine the torture treatment center as one arena where this history and the suffering of survivors is acknowledged. As such, I argue that the staff serves as a critical social network--indeed, perhaps the only one--that influences the individual interpretations, narratives, and actions of survivors about the meaning of trauma, the importance of the past, and how one best heals from violence. First, I illustrate how the biographies of staff shape their involvement with the center and the meaning the center has for them, which, in turn, leads to both the promise and predicaments of their work for social change. Second, this research illustrates the diverse forms that trauma can take and argues for a connection among structural, transitional, and political violence. Third, I explore how the meaning attributed to trauma and the past shapes notions held by the center's staff and participants regarding how one best heals from trauma. Throughout the exploration of these themes, my work identifies the presence of certain discourses and the absence of others--the frictions and fragments occurring in engagements between social service networks and those they serve (Tsing 2005)--that reflect the possibilities for and limitations of individual healing and collective change and that make this center a "fragile community." / Advisers: Dr. Lynn Stephen, Co-Chair; Dr. Philip Young, Co-Chair