Dealing With Serious Sexual Assault

Dealing with Serious Sexual Assault Workshop

Serious sexual assault can create significant psychological, physical and sociological sequalae for the victim. Many issues faced by the victim are poorly understood by therapists including problems arising from physical injuries, risk of disease, PTSD, police interviews and court appearances, maintaining silence and non-disclosure, media interest and blame.

Therapeutic viewpoints in treating the aftermath of serious sexual assault often tend to polarise into two categories - politicisation and/or revictimisation in the form of the "survivor movements" (long term support groups, recovered memory therapy, abreaction therapy), and brevity (use of the "fast phobia cure"/VK dissociation).

This workshop will explore the nature of the different problems that survivors of serious sexual assault may present to therapy immediately following the assault (i.e. shock, injury, disclosure), in the medium term (i.e. familial, social and legal implications) and in the long term time frame (i.e. identity). The personal and professional responsibilities and difficulties faced by therapists working with these issues will be explored.

Some Statistics:

• In the UK Police recorded 53,540 sexual offences in England and Wales in the year ending March 2008. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (1999) estimated that 91% of U.S. rape victims are female and 9% are male, with 99% of the offenders being male. In one survey of women, only two percent of respondents who stated they were sexually assaulted said that the assault was perpetrated by a stranger. (Wikipedia)
  
  
• Only 16% of rapes and sexual assaults are reported to the police (Rape in America: A Report to the Nation. 1992).
  
  
• 1 of 6 U.S. women has experienced an attempted or completed rape.
  
  
• According to a news report on BBC One presented in 12 November 2007, there were 85,000 women raped in the UK in the previous year, equating to about 230 cases every day. According to that report one of every 200 women in the UK was raped in 2006. The report also showed that only 800 persons were convicted in rape crimes that same year.
  
  
• According to The Guardian: "The government estimates that as many as 95% of rapes are never reported to the police at all. Of the rapes that were reported from 2007 to 2008, only 6.5% resulted in a conviction, compared with 34% of criminal cases in general. The majority of convictions for rape resulted from an admission of guilt by the defendant, whereas less than one quarter of all those charged with rape were convicted following a successful trial."