Social Work Spotlight - International Episode 20: Peter (Scotland)

Episode Date: May 23, 2026

In this episode I speak with Peter, a lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University and qualified social worker with particular experience of working with children and young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour. He has undertaken research and written extensively about abusive sexual behaviour between siblings.Links to resources mentioned in this week’s episode:Centre of expertise on child sexual abuse - https://www.csacentre.org.uk/Sibling sexual behaviour: A guide to responding to inappropriate, problematic and abusive behaviour and Sibling sexual abuse: A knowledge and practice overview (articles written by Peter and Stuart Allardyce) - https://www.csacentre.org.uk/research-resources/practice-resources/sibling-sexual-abuse/Sibling sexual abuse: What do we know? What do we need to know? Stage 1 analysis of a 2-stage scoping review (article written by Peter and colleagues) - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2024.107076The Sibling Sexual Behaviour Mapping Tool (SSBMT): Supporting practitioner confidence, planning and competency when responding to sexual behaviours between siblings (article written by King-Hill and Gilsenan) - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2024.107080Understanding and responding to sibling sexual harm and abuse (article written by Elly Hanson) - Understanding and responding to sibling sexual harm and abuse | NSPCC LearningThis episode's transcript can be viewed here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ks5u5Jrr7mUelIGA__2FKjHXskJXGcbneh-X6DwihnQ/edit?usp=sharingThanks to Kevin Macleod of incompetech.com for our theme music.

Before beginning, I wish to acknowledge the traditional owners of the countries of guests featured in this podcast and acknowledge their continuing connection to land, waters and community. I pay my respects to the First Nations people, the cultures and the elders, past, present and emerging. Hi, and welcome to Social Work Spotlight, where I showcase different areas of the profession each episode, with a 12-month focus on social workers around the world as of August 2025. I'm your host, Yasmeen Lupus, and today's guest is Peter, a lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University and qualified social worker with particular experience of working with children and young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour. He has undertaken research and written extensively about abusive sexual behaviour between siblings. Hi Peter, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Looking forward to having to chat with you about your experience. in the UK, specifically Scotland, where you're from. Nice to see, Yasmin. Yeah, I'd love to know firstly when you got started in social work and what brought you to the profession. Gosh, there'll be a short and a long answer to that question. I'll maybe be a shorter one. When I first came out to Edinburgh, I came out to Edinburgh in 1995 and I worked in a hospice

so for people living with HIV and AIDS in Edinburgh. So it was a specific kind of specialist hospice for people who were living with HIV and AIDS at that time. So it was a challenging, interesting, you know, kind of area of work to be in, obviously. but, you know, kind of thoroughly enjoyed it. There was something really kind of amazing and special about that, that, you know, the particular work of that hospice and how they kind of engaged with people.

My role at that time was as the volunteers coordinator, so I was doing all the recruitment, training, support, you know, ongoing support and kind of management of the volunteers that worked within the hospice, but along the way also spending, you know, a lot of time with, you know, the residents, you know, with the people who were using the service and really enjoyed all of those kind of aspects of the work,

really in that sort of support work. But there was a really fantastic, fantastic social worker who worked, you know, as part of that hospice as well. And I was always kind of a great admirer of how she worked and what she did. And that was my inspiration really to become a social worker. Yeah, I liked how she worked, like the kind of the value base for how she approached to work. And then, yeah, I kind of thought, well, that's something that I would like to do. So I then undertook my social work training as a result of that. So that would have been sort of, 2000, 2002 is when I did my social work training. So 25 years or so ago now.

Uh-huh. Was volunteering or that sort of philanthropic supportive work, was that important to you in terms of value-based growing up? Was that something that was instilled in you? Did you know anyone who might have been a social worker before you got started? No, not that I can remember. I don't think there was anybody I knew as from a social work background before then. But yeah, I was certainly brought up with, you know, a kind of a strong sense of values, I suppose, from kind of family. But also I would say that in my family, I had a particular role, you know, of being the kind of sort of supportive kind of listener role within my family and, you know, thinking about other people perhaps before I would be quite aware of what it is that I was, you know, I was wanting for myself.

So, and I suppose, yeah, I always kind of had a sense of, you know, and all my kind of friendships and relationships were quite often based around me listening to people and getting a lot of value and reward out of, you know, listening to other people's kind of stories. And so I suppose there was, yeah, something from my kind of background family of origin that kind of brought me up with those kind of values, but also some of those kind of skills or ways of relating generally. And I volunteered quite a bit myself, you know, through university and after university and various organisations. So I suppose I did believe quite a lot in the value of volunteering as the volunteer as well as obviously then providing value in terms of service for other people. So my role as the volunteers coordinator was

a paid role. So I was paid to do that. But yeah, certainly had a good background in a real respect for and value for other people who were giving their time and all of their other kind of skills and experience that they would bring to that. So that was a great, yeah, it was a great role to be in. And it would have meant that by the time you finished university, you had so much experience in the field more so than perhaps a lot of the people that went through your cohort. And that's really valuable. I often think what would have been different if I had done the same thing instead of working in hospitality, say throughout my university degree, but you would have graduated with quite significant volunteer and also your placement experiences. What were those like? And

how did those shape what you wanted to do after you? I thought when I started doing my social work training, I just assumed and thought that I would be working with adults because I thought that was where I was best suited. Those were my skills really was around working with adults. It didn't really occur to me that I would work with children and families, although having said that quite a lot of the work with children and families is with parents. You know, it's with adults anyway. But I had two placements, both of which were in children and families, social work. So one of them was in borders and Galashiels working with their children and families practice team, you know, with a the local authority and then my second placement was within a voluntary sector agency in Edinburgh in Pilton. They took a lot of work though from the local authority so they were doing quite a lot of local authority work but as it sort of subcontracted I guess if you like to this third sector agency so both of my placements really were in and around children and families so yeah it was a bit of a no-brainer after that that that's the direction that I would head in. And was it what seems to happen quite a lot your last place

turns into a role. Did you find a career out of that? Yeah, so the third sector agency that I had my placement in was within Pilton. So a lot of the work came from the local area office in Pilton, which is just kind of particular area of Edinburgh. So then, yeah, when I applied for work, once I'd finished my training, I got a job within that team in Pilton. So within the local authority, rather than within the third sector, it was within the local authority team, but the local team that we'd had lots of connections with, and therefore I knew them all quite well by then. So I think that is a fairly, fairly kind of common experience that people end up in work in or close to the kind of areas that they did their final placement. So that was my experience as well, yeah.

Yeah. It's interesting, though, because what people explain to me is that the transition from being a student in one organization or agency to then being a worker in the same agency can be a difficult period of now, you know, the responsibilities are greater. Perhaps I don't have the same support. Did you find that challenging? I mean, it wasn't, you know, within the same agency that I guess that I did, my. placement so that was helpful I think in there that it was actually you know whilst I knew them and I had contact with them yeah I was a new paid member of staff with an new team it's not somewhere that I'd directly been a student so

I think that was fine and we're talking 25 old years ago and I think then the levels of support and supervision for newly qualified social workers probably pretty good compared to well say compared to it is now but there's there's a lot of emphasis now that's being placed on the first newly qualified year, particularly within Scotland. So there's an awful lot of work that's going into that year now to say that that should be a supported year and that newly qualified social workers should, you know, have access to good and high levels of support that helps to kind of support them into kind of more experienced social worker, not to have quite such a shock to the system of going from

the levels of support that you get as a student to then the levels of support that you would get as a qualified worker. So that there is a lot of work at the moment going on into that newly qualified year, which should make it more supportive. But I guess going back 25 years, I think, I think the levels of supervision and support at that time were probably better than they have been within social work for the last wee while because I think the resources have become more and more stretched really within social work over the last number of years and has made that work quite challenging, quite difficult. So hopefully it's moving back in something like the right sort of direction. Okay. And when did you decide to go back and do more study or look at research? Was it

based on what you were finding in your practice? Yeah, so I worked in the local authority in the children and families team for a few years and then a job came up within the third sector, so working within Bernardo's, within a specialist service, working with children and young people who displayed harmful sexual behaviour. I didn't have any background in that area of work,

but a few people in the team that I was in said, oh, you should go for that, you know, that would be really interesting and it would be right up your street and it just wasn't something that I'd considered, but I think in terms of the style of that work being slower-paced, more reflective therapeutic, you know, having scheduled kind of one-to-one time with children and their families, you know, to do that more kind of reflective therapeutic work. Yeah, that did appeal to me.

I guess that did appeal to me. So I did a lot of reading and sort of preparation for that interview so I could become more familiar with that territory because I didn't, it wasn't an area that I really knew much about before then. So I was really lucky to get that job and that was a fantastic job. So that was a really, really interesting job working within that specialist service. So I did like that. I found the subject really interesting, really interesting to try and understand how is it that young people get involved in this kind of behaviour in the first place.

How can we best support and help them fairly emerging fields? So still learning a lot about how best to do that. You know, it wasn't as if we were doing that work having all the answers. We were still trying to figure it out. And so that was really good learning the whole time that everybody was really committed. into trying to do as best we could and learn as much as we could and change and adapt what we were doing. You know, so it had a really nice energy to the team of everybody really striving to enhance and improve all the time in terms of how we were approaching the work. And because it was particularly

emotive, challenging work, I guess, you know, really good high levels of support as well, good supervision that we had as well as managerial supervision. We also had an external consultant that came in once a month to do, you know, much more kind of more reflective supervision around the work. So, you know, that was absolutely necessary, also extremely valuable as a good model. So yeah, I really liked that, really like that work. And my experience happened to be that all of my cases, I realized, I didn't realize it for a while, but I ended up realizing that all of my cases that I worked with involved siblings, you know, so where there was a child in the family who'd sexually abused, you know, one of their siblings. But then we were, we were talking about it

reflecting on how those cases, you know, those families in which siblings sexual abuse had emerged, felt quite different to work with compared to where it was situations where it was a childhood abused, another child outside of the family and started to explore, you know, what that was and starting to kind of realize that there wasn't really a lot written about it. There was some material written about it, you know, and the more we look, the more we found, but not a great deal. And most of the time, at that point, anyway, sibling cases were just seen as, they were just regarded as cases where children had displayed harmful sexual behaviour towards another child who just happened to

be a sibling rather than seeing them as something, you know, actually a little bit different. So we got interested in that as a project really to think about, well, what does make it different? Why does it feel different to work with these families? And are there any differences between these children who abuse siblings as compared to children who abuse outside of the family? So we did some practitioner research, I guess, you know, just as staff members within that project to try and investigate that a bit and look into that a little bit. So that's then what sparked my kind of interest in research work, I suppose. Yeah, that's where that sort of came from for various reasons. I also felt like having been at that service for a number of years, it was going to be helpful to

have just at break and not be quite so intensively involved in that work for a period of time. I had always intended to go back to it. In the end, I obviously haven't done that, but I had intended to go back to it, but a job came up. Again, just kind of fortuitous, really. I haven't had any great career plan or strategy. I've just kind of gone with opportunities that seem to have arisen. But a job came up, a temporary job came up at University of Edinburgh as a teaching fellow. So teaching social work. And I just thought, that would be really interesting as a temporary job.

I'll do that. It was a year initially. I thought, I'll do that for a year. That'll be good experience. And then I'll go back into practice again after that. But obviously, that's not kind of how things turned out. Yeah. That's how I got involved in, in academia, really.

I don't feel that I've ever let go. of being a practitioner at heart though. So yeah, I always feel quite close to practice in terms of ultimately that's what academia is about is the practice of social work and doing the best we can and supporting the people that social work supports as best we can. So I don't feel like I've drifted off into academia as sort of an ivory tower exercise, but always trying to make sure that whatever we're doing, whether it's teaching or research, is really rooted ultimately in practice and in improving practice, trying to help to improve people's lives as much as possible. You probably hate if people do this, but if we were going to elevate a pitch kind of thing, the research itself sounds fascinating. What was sort of your main questions and what were the findings that I guess you've been able to translate into practice if research is ultimately to support practice?

One of the things that we found, that I found particularly when I was working within that specialist's service, particularly when working with cases that involved sibling sexual abuse, was that. that there were really difficult decisions to be made around whether these siblings should remain living together. And if not, should they have contact with each other? And, you know, at what point when and if, should they return to live together again, you know, how do we make these decisions around sibling living and contact arrangements following sibling sexual abuse? And, you know, I was finding my way with that, you know, because these were new experiences for me as well. and you know there's not a lot written about it to help us to understand how we make these decisions although some things were written about it what we found and what i found was that those decisions

brought us into a lot of conflict with local authority social workers and we found it really hard to agree on those things in ways that were quite difficult to make sense of and to try and find at least some common ground for disagreement to know what it was that we were disagreeing about you know what was the area of debate to kind of engage in. It was really quite difficult to find that. We just kind of disagreed, but in ways that we're, yeah, a bit confusing and puzzling and difficult to sort out because we didn't quite know where that was coming from. So that was when I started to do my PhD research. That's what I then decided to focus on, was to try to investigate. How is it that social workers make decisions in these cases? How do they make decisions

around sibling living and contact arrangements? What's that based on? So I, interviewed 21 social workers across six local authorities in Scotland. In the end, I think, involving, you know, talking about 21 families within which sibling sexual abuse had taken place, I think involving about 54 children. So quite a, you know, a decent number of cases. I think it was something like 40, 45 hours worth of interview material to kind of analyze. And so I used a grounded theory approach, which I can tell you about if you're interested, but a grounded theory approach essentially to kind of analyze those interviews to try to make sense of

how is it that social workers were making these decisions? What was that based on? And the way that I interpreted those interviews through the analysis was that the social workers were approaching these families with a particular kind of way of thinking about children, about parents and about sibling relationships. So they were seeing, in fact, I kind of concentrate on two of those, but they were seeing children, as vulnerable as intending no sexual harm to other children, children are sexually abused by others. We don't think of children as being responsible for themselves sexually abusing others.

You know, child sexual abuse is something that adults do. It's not something that children do. So it was really quite difficult, I think, seeing children in that light to really fully understand and acknowledge that these children had behaved in sexually abusive ways. alongside that a kind of a way of seeing sibling relationships, that sibling relationships are, you know, they're non-abusive, they have some kind of intrinsic value, you know, siblings are really important to each other, they are special to each other, we should be

supporting that relationship and finding it really difficult to contemplate the idea that the sibling relationship itself could be an abusive one. It's difficult to understand that abuse could take place within the context of that relationship, but also difficult to contemplate that that relationship itself could be abusive. So I suppose seeing children and seeing sibling relationships through those, what I call them frames, and there's some literature around frames. Frames is the idea that we don't just see the world as it is. We have our own kind of mental filter that is kind of built up.

So we see the world through that mental filter and that mental filter is built up through our interpretations of our prior experiences, our understanding of concepts and ideas and so on and so forth, that's kind of how we see the world. So if we see the world through these frames of children, you know, are vulnerable and intend no sexual harm to others, and we see the world through a frame of sibling relationships as being non-abusive and of intrinsic value, it's going to be quite hard for us to then to take on board sibling sexual abuse because that really challenges those frames. And one of the features of frames is that people can either not see information or not see information out there in the world if it doesn't quite fit with that frame or engage in

mechanisms that mean that whatever information is seen is interpreted in such a way as to make it kind of fit that frame. It's quite hard to shift the frame. So I suppose what I was finding then was that social workers were, for example, when they encountered a disclosure or discovery of sibling sexual abuse, they might doubt that it's happened. Did you really see that? Is you sure that that's actually what happened? Is that what you've seen, you know, and casting sufficient doubt on it to say, well, let's just see how things go for a while and see if this happens again before we kind of do anything about it. Or then if they have accepted that it did happen, maybe really resisting labeling and talking about that behaviour as being abuse and thinking about it more as it was inappropriate behaviour or it was experimental

or something like that rather than seeing it as being abusive behaviour. Or he's talking about it in the language of it being inappropriate, which therefore seemed to kind of downplay the seriousness of it and the impact of it and therefore influenced decisions in a way that was around keeping siblings together, I suppose. Or then if they did accept that it was abusive, you know, it's all right, it did happen, all right, it was abuse, then saying, okay, but it's just the abuse that we need to stop. You know, the sibling relationship itself isn't abusive.

So as long as the abusive behaviour stops, then the sibling relationship itself is still something that's really valuable and worth supporting, and we should be, you know, know, supporting contact or, you know, or living arrangements between these siblings. It's just the behaviour that needs to stop rather than understanding actually, in some cases, not necessarily in all cases, obviously, but in some cases, the abusive relationship extends beyond purely the sexual

behaviour. And also understanding that because that abuse has taken place within the context of that relationship, that even if the abusive behaviour stops, it doesn't mean that the fear and the trauma stops. Just as you would expect, you know, with adults, you know, if an adult parent has sexually abused or raped their child, even if you can feel confident that they weren't going to rape their child again, you wouldn't necessarily expect the child to be able to sit across the breakfast table from their parents feeling quite happy and comfortable that they're still there and just have a conversation to think, well, now at least they're not going to rape me again. You know, there's damage done to that relationship and there's trauma and there's fear.

And I think there was a sense that because we just don't see children that way and we don't see sibling relationships that way, it was difficult to make some of those kind of similar kind of decisions. That makes sense. Yeah. It's almost as though there's a need, whether it's conscious or not. There's that lens, for me, I'm interpreting that as almost like a plastering over. It's really difficult for the social workers who are hearing about this abuse

to acknowledge that that's what's happening and that this is the harm that's done. And if we kind of say it's something else or we talk about it in a different frame, then it's less traumatic to us as professionals. So that must have been really difficult to come to terms with, of them saying, know, actually this is what we're dealing with. We need to kind of respond in a certain way. We need to talk about it. We need to use the language that is due to it. I think to be, you know, to be really fair to the social workers I interviewed, you know, they came forward because they were really keen to learn.

They came forward to talk about their cases because they found them difficult cases and they wanted to talk them through because they wanted to learn something from the experience as well as to contribute to the learning of other people. You know, these were really thoughtful, reflective social workers, you know, were really kind of doing their best, trying to do their best by the families that they'd work. worked with and really keen to, yeah, use it as an opportunity to kind of learn from how they've managed these cases. So I think it's just that generally where children and family social workers come from is working with children who are vulnerable or who have been the victims of

abuse. That's just the kind of frame through which they see children. You know, families are supposed to be really kind of nurturing safe places. It's quite hard to shift thinking and thinking, And actually, maybe this family wasn't a kind of a safe nurturing place. Maybe our job isn't to try to kind of maintain this family as best we can as a kind of a safe nurturing place. Because that isn't the reality for the children. There's been a lot of emphasis in social work, certainly over the last 10 to 15 years, understanding that not enough emphasis has been put on sibling relationships to understand their value and their importance. If children do need to be removed from their families and their birth families

and then are placed within, you know, kind of foster care or residential care or whatever. One of the things that can be extremely protective for those children is being placed with their siblings and really what the value of those sibling relationships are. So I think social workers have really been imbued with that. You know, sibling relationships are really valuable. They're really important. We should be trying to support those relationships as much as we possibly can. And that's all of that is right, you know, in my view anyway, quite right.

But it's just that it's not the case all the time. You know, there are children who do present risks to other children. There are cyberling relationships that are abusive. If we're seeing, I think social workers have been sort of instilled in them to kind of see children and see sibling relationships through quite a different frame, which just has made it really hard for them to just see that actually this is abuse. Children are capable of behaving in an abusive way. Sibering relationships can be abusive. It's just very difficult for social workers to be able to see that because that's just not the frames through which they see the world, really.

Okay. Does that make sense? It does, yeah. And then I'm wondering what those social workers or even social workers who haven't been exposed to that sort of content, how has your research supported then how they might view things in future and how they might make sense of it? So yeah, apart from, you know, so having, you know, done that research and come up with those ideas, you know, I kind of put together a model of, you know, these are the ways in which we can see these children and these families. these are the ways in which you know this can therefore influence the ways that we make decisions in all of these kind of frames all these ways of seeing children sibling relationships seeing parents they all tend towards decisions making that maintain sibling relationships either through living together or through contact with each other so put together a model to say if we can interrogate that and question those frames questions our way of seeing the world

and some particular kind of reflective techniques to help us to kind of shift out of that mindset a little bit to at least be questioning some of those decisions to think is that right so for example saying you're okay if this was an adult who displayed this behavior rather than a child you know would we think about that behavior differently then or would we think about the impact of that behavior differently and if so why is that you know and sometimes that would be appropriate that we would think about it differently but at least questioning it say well if a child has been raped by their brother why would that be any less impactful and any less traumatic than being raped by their dad do that way So doing some sort of reflective exercises around, you know, if it was an adult, or if this was a girl rather than a boy, or if it was a younger child rather than older child, these kind of thought experiments, I guess, to try and help to kind of interrogate and question our mindset so that we're not getting ingrained in unhelpful ways of thinking.

Yeah. As well as using, you know, supervision and thinking about that model as a way to kind of think about these cases. So that's mainly where it's been taken in terms of how to influence practice. And it's informed a couple of documents. that I was involved in writing along with a colleague of mine, Stuart Allardyce, a couple of guidance documents through the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse. So they provide, you know, kind of support and guidance across the UK really around child sexual abuse generally, but therefore we've got these couple of guidance papers that will help, yeah, social workers within UK to navigate these sibling sexual abuse cases.

So hopefully, you know, they're out there in the world being used and, you know, making a difference to how people approach these things. did it create new questions for you things that you wanted to explore again in future do more research around yeah i mean loads there's so much there's so much to explore how much you have at all yeah so yeah there's so much i mean i think one of the big questions for practice that i still haven't managed to find a way to address is quite what is the impact on families themselves from their perspective of some of these decisions so if we we can speak to children and families, you know, either as children and families or, you know, as adults when they're a bit older, if they can look back on those experiences and say, you know, in my situation, my brother did stay with me at home or my sister did stay with me at home, you know, how did that work out for them? Was that helpful, unhelpful? Did they remain frightened? Did they find a way of healing? Was it constantly traumatic for them? What was that like? Or if they were separated and no longer saw each other and that was the decision that was made, you know, how did that turn out for them? So that we can start to be.

build a bit more of an evidence base around these decisions. So we've got criteria, we've got guidance that kind of says these are the kind of things that we would want to consider around making these decisions. What we don't really have is an evidence base, particularly when it comes to the children and families' experiences themselves of these kind of decisions being on the receiving end of them. So that would be really important, I think, to be able to do is to understand it from their perspective. I think there are all sorts of questions around, which again is kind of related, but also somewhat different around. There are some children who, who may have presented risks or continue to present risks to siblings or other members of the family,

do they also present risks to other children outside of the family? Or if there are children who have presented risk to children outside of the family, do they then, in turn, then present risks to their siblings? How do we know and on what basis can we understand whether there are some children who only present risks within a family context, or only present risks in the kind of community context, to then those children who may present risks across multiple settings. So that can help to inform more kind of nuanced risk assessment. But in particular, you know, child developmental opportunities,

what happens I think quite often is that the children who have displayed some kind of form of harmful sexual behaviour, that it causes an awful lot of anxiety. Can go both ways. On the one hand, it causes an awful lot of anxiety. And it's seen as adult behaviour. So suddenly these children are kind of treated as like mini adult sex offenders and all of their developmental opportunities are clamped down on.

So they've sexually abused their sister at home. So now they can no longer go to school and they can't go to the youth club and they can't do all of these other things that means that their developmental opportunities and learning opportunities are really restricted, which in the long term actually only limits their ability to grow and develop and develop skills. And they're in the long term,

when you're going to present increased risks then, once they're an adult and you can't control their whereabouts quite so much, you know, they'll potentially present more risks. What can also happen is that because these are children, it can't be that serious because these are children, you know, they're not adults. The behaviours can be minimised and the risks minimised. So I think we need to get a lot better at understanding the basis on which we can make those kind of risk assessments so that we're protecting, you know, other children from further forms of abuse, but also so that we can really support the developmental opportunities for the children who have displayed the harmful sexual behaviour. Because they're also children, you know, first and foremost, we've got a duty to value and support them as children and how they can.

best grow and develop rather than allowing them to continue to engage in harmful behavior, which is clearly not in their best interest either or otherwise restricting them from all of these developmental opportunities, which is also not helpful. How do we make some of those more nuanced decisions? Tons of stuff that we need to do in that area. In sibling sexual abuse, generally, I mean, gosh, there's just so much that we don't know that we could do with knowing. We tend to think about sibling sexual abuse as being older brothers, abusing younger sisters. but we know from some of the research and survivor reports that it can be brothers abusing brothers, sisters abusing brothers, sisters, abusing sisters, younger siblings, abusing older siblings.

We don't really know much about all of these other ways in which siblings sexual abuses can emerge. We tend to think about it as emerging within families where there is some other kind of history of abuse and trauma within the family, and that would help to explain why the siblings are also getting involved in harmful behavior. that doesn't seem always to be the case either. Sometimes it seems to be that children can get involved in sexually abusing their siblings where there doesn't seem to be trauma and histories of use within the family. So, you know, why is that? How does that emerge? What might that tell us then about how we can prevent this behaviour from happening in the first place?

What do we do to intervene when it does happen? So there's tons of questions that we need to explore, yeah. Are you able to mentor any students who are doing higher degree research that perhaps can take on at least a little bit of that load? Yes, so I'm supervising one student at the moment. I would like to do more. There's another story behind that, which I can tell you about just in terms of the university landscape at the moment, but one student I'm currently supervising who is doing some work in this area, particularly around the ongoing impact of the abuse on the sibling relationships as they kind of grow older. So that will be extremely valuable. Yeah, there are some other

researchers in the UK that have had students working with them who are also doing research. in this area. In Israel, particularly, there's a really good body of work going on in Israel at the moment with quite a nice, yeah, research community around sibling sexual abuse and students in this area. So they're developing, you know, a lot of good material. So there is plenty of scope for that. Yeah. In my particular university where I work, one of the issues for me, I guess, is that where I work is quite teaching intensive, which I like, I really like the teaching. I like teaching students, like spending time with students. So the opportunities to engage with research are certainly there and they're very well supported, but it's understood, you know, and very well understood in working

at that particular university that the majority of the work is going to be around teaching students rather than undertaking research. So yeah, it's taking me a bit of time to develop my kind of little community of, yeah, research students. Are you able to develop the university content in line with emerging trends or changes in the profession? Is that pretty flexible and dynamic? Yeah, that's necessary generally. So there are two programs, well, there are three programs actually at the university where I work currently. There's the undergraduate program. So those are students who don't have a prior degree and are studying social workers, their undergraduate degree and qualify social workers at the end of it. Then there's a master's program for students who

have already have a first degree, but are now studying social work to qualify as a social worker, but as a master's students. They're still both kind of qualifying programs. There's also a Chief Social Work Officer Programme. So these are for social workers who have, you know, very senior managers, you know, really at the sort of pinnacles of their career who either are already or aspiring to be chief social work officers within their local authority. So we run a program for them too. So that's really interesting, those kind of different levels of programs. And in general, yeah, it's really important that we stay up to date with research and thinking and latest practice and that, you know, whatever we're delivering is fit for purpose in line with or leading driving,

kind of change within the profession. My area around children who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour and sibling sexual abuse is kind of a small part of that overall kind of social work picture. I think one of the things that I've done is to make sure that they are on the curriculum because I see them as important to understand not only child sexual abuse and to understand how we work with child sexual abuse from the point of view of children who have been abused, but it's important without students requiring in-depth knowledge at that stage, but at least to have it on their radar to understand that there are situations where children can present risks to others,

as well as having risk presented to themselves, and that the people who present risks to others and the people who are vulnerable are often the same people. You know, there isn't this real split between the vulnerable people on the one hand and risky people on the other to really understand that actually sometimes they go, or very often go hand in hand. So I kind of see it as my place within the recruitment to make sure that students are aware of that. So talking about children who have displayed harmful sexual

behaviour, there's one way of helping those social workers to understand that, that children themselves can present risks on occasions. How do we take account of that while still remaining child-centred and not demonising those children, which might otherwise, you know, be the danger of what happens? I guess the other thing is around, as I was kind of alluding to earlier, we tend to think of risks being presented to children, either by adults or, you know, by other adults outside of the family and understanding that the family itself can be abusive and the children within the family can be abusive. So again, it's not necessary to go into huge depths and details with students at this stage. You know, they're kind of pre-qualifying work, but at least

them to understand the idea that the possibility that sibling sexual abuse can happen so that they can be a bit more alert to it if they are counter in their practice once they qualify. It sounds as though from what you're saying, the way of qualifying into the social work profession is very similar though. So we, as you do, have the Bachelor course, but then we also have the Masters of Social Work qualifying, which is for people who have done another degree first and then have experience in a different kind of setting, but maybe somehow related and then they want to then go on and study social work. But we don't have the Chief of Social Work course, which I think is a wonderful idea for people who are at that point and feel so disconnected from perhaps

that learning opportunity or being able to network with other people who are perhaps at the same level of social work, same experience. And yeah, that sounds wonderful. I feel like we could take a leaf out of your book for that. It's a really good program that was developed by a colleague of mine, and now I've since become involved in delivering it. It's really, really interesting. Yeah, it's really nice to work with qualified social workers who are that really experienced end of the profession who are still really humble, really keen to learn, you know, really trying to do their best for the people that they're supporting. Yeah, it's really nice to work with them, their experience that they still have all of those values and the humility that they bring to it,

that they are so keen and open to learning. So yeah, that's been a really nice program to be involved with. And it is a lonely job, I think, being at the pinnacle of your profession, you know, you're the only one within your local authority. So yeah, it can be quite a lonely job, I think. So it's nice to have the program so that we're bringing those people together. They can start to develop networks and relationships with each other and can be there for a kind of resource of support for each other as they move forward as well. So it's valuable from that point of view as well as whatever we're helping them to learn around leadership and judgment, decision making and so on and so forth.

Yeah, because I think there's an expectation that when you get to a certain level of social work or any profession, really, that it gets very competitive and that people are kind of cutthroat pushing each other out of the way to get to a role. But in my experience, it is very much supportive of, I know who you are, I respect you as a person, as a professional, let's work through this to get. Yeah, I mean, maybe in other areas or there may be people who are a bit cutthroat and jaggy elbowed and, you know, trying to rise to the top. But my experience of the people on the program, you know, largely is that they've not been trying to get to the top. They're just really

experienced, committed, social workers. And at some point, people are saying to them, you need be going for that. You need be going for that promotion because we need somebody to do it and you're the best person to do it and are getting encouraged in that direction rather than striving to get there, if you like, they're there because they're really experienced and people are asking them to do it. In a similar way, you took opportunities as they come that could have very easily been new of, I don't know how quite I ended up here, but here I am. And what support do you need? How do you, because there are a lot of people that you're supporting, how do you make sure

the work you're doing is sustainable? Gosh, it's a good question. In my current role, I think, yeah, the support that I need is partly around sometimes there are situations that crop up with students or procedural issues and, you know, it's always helpful to kind of talk that through with somebody. So, you know, I very much appreciate my line management support. So I don't get supervision as such, you know, now as a lecturer, but I'll have regular check-ins with, you know, my manager to see how I'm getting on, as well as, you know, they're always available to chat something through if there's an issue with a student that we could do with addressing. But

largely in terms of academic student work, you know, it's not exactly, it doesn't have anywhere near the same level of, or very, very rarely has the same level of pressure and urgency as being in frontline social work. Do you know, front-line social work? You're dealing with real kind of family, difficult issues, you know, that are very urgent and pressing. And, you know, there's a real need for somebody to be involved in it in helping them. That's obviously not the case with students who are adults and can make their own decisions about their own lives, you know that way. So it's quite a, it's a very different landscape. There's very rarely a crisis in academia. Yeah. It's. It's a It does happen, but rarely. So I think the support that I need now more is around research,

really, I think, and I've been teaching for a long time that, you know, that's all good, but it's research and developing research proposals and designs and, you know, kind of navigating the research landscape. That's the support that is most helpful to me at the moment. In terms of the emotional nature of the research and the writing that I'm involved in, I feel generally that I've been involved in this kind of area for, you know, sort of 15 odd years now, you know, so it's familiar territory, which is not to say that it's not still upsetting and affecting. I think I would probably worry if I was hearing these kind of stories and not being upset by it and affected by it. I'd realize that I've lost something a bit. So it's not to say that I'm not affected by it because I certainly am, but I've got quite well tried and tested ways of.

managing that. Yeah. Just in my own life generally. It's not that I then talk to anybody about it, but just I have other kind of coping strategies. And I have really good colleagues as well. So, you know, one of the nice things about research is doing research with other people. You know, it's not just me on my own doing stuff, but, you know, little teams of people to work with. And therefore, it's a bit of a shared experience. And we can talk about it together with each other and, you know, can reflect on, you know, what it's like. So that's very supportive as well. I'm also wondering whether you miss that practice context because you're talking about working as a team. You definitely would work as a team in terms of the risk assessments that you were talking about and that sort of thing.

Do you ever think are going back to it or even just doing more volunteering? I have thought about doing more volunteering actually and I've sort of come close to getting involved in that again on some levels. The job is so busy. It's very difficult to find. I mean, that would be ideal is to be able to do a little bit of practice or some kind of voluntary work alongside the job. I haven't found a way to make that achievable, you know, within the sort of the time that was available. I think it would certainly need to be something like we do outside of work rather than on work time. Yeah.

And then I've got family commitments and, you know, a little border terriers to look after and all that sort of things. So it's hard to fit it in. Having said that, I know some people do, you know, some people do manage to do that anyway, even though they're extremely and even more busy than I am. So it's possibly an excuse. but yeah, I do find it hard to fit in. I haven't ever really ruled out going back into some form of practice. Yeah, whether I would do frontline practice with families again, I don't know. I certainly haven't ruled it out.

But what I really do enjoy still get involved in to some extent is consultancy work with social workers or other professionals who are working with these cases and hearing about those cases through them and helping them to think that through. So I really enjoy that kind of side of things that helps to keep me quite close to practice. Yeah, and because it is such a niche area of the profession, are there seminars, conferences, are there opportunities, I guess, for you to network with people at a similar level? Yeah, so there was a kind of a national sibling sexual abuse conference that was organized through the national project on sibling sexual abuse two or three, maybe three a few years ago.

So that was a really valuable kind of one-day online conference. Nancy Morris then, who is a survivor in Canada. She organized a conference as well online that was. Excellent. There was a conference in Glasgow organized by thriving survivors, again, specifically around sibling sexual abuse. Otherwise, if I go to conferences, it tends to be conferences that are either around sex offending a bit more broadly or around, you know, kind of social work, you know, a bit more broadly within which then there might be an opportunity to talk about a sibling sexual abuse. Okay. And are there any resources, things that you might think that it would be helpful for people

to read or view or listen to that are kind of within this realm. I can put some links in the show notes. That is a good question. I would probably say, and I can send you some links, there are the two guidance documents that have been published through the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse. I think they're helpful and accessible so that it kind of distills a lot of the literature down into a more manageable size of a document to kind of read, but also that makes all of that that literature relevant to practice so that it helps to kind of guide practice. So I think that would be valuable for people to read. There is a mapping tool that's been developed by Sophie King Hill,

who's another researcher in this area who works at the University of Birmingham. She's developed a really helpful template. Yeah, she calls it a mapping tool, but it kind of really helps to steer social workers through all the kind of the considerations in the areas that they should be, you know, thinking about when they're trying to make sense of these cases. I think that's really valuable as well. I think then those three documents together. together, I think, would a nice kind of package for people.

Amazing. The other thing that people might be interested in, it's a bit of self-promotion, but I was involved recently in publishing a scoping review on the sibling sexual abuse literature. So that was like a review of all the research literature on sibling sexual abuse over the last 40 years and trying to bring that together into one place. I mean, it's a stretch because there's too much to say for one journal article, really, in a way, but it does help to kind of, I think, bring together the current state of play of what we know and what we don't know about a sibling situation of view.

So that might be another thing that people could read that's not too lengthy, rather than having to read all sorts of different articles. They can read just that one that will give them a decent insight into the subject, I think. Yeah, perfect. And before we finish up and mindful of your time, is there anything that you wished I'd asked or that we haven't had a chance to talk about? Maybe social workers who are less familiar with this area

or people who are interested in getting into the profession might be good for them to hear. I mean, I think if people are interested in getting into the profession, my experience of social work is that it's hugely kind of varied, so many different areas of social work that people can get involved in, whether it's in the local authorities or in third sector, huge variety of stuff, whether it's children and families or people with disabilities or this kind of particular stuff around sexual offending, or it could be more justice kind of social work stuff, people with mental health problem. There's just such a huge variety of ways of getting involved in social work. I do think it's a really rich, rewarding, extreme. extremely valuable profession working with some of the most marginalised disenfranchised people whose voices need to be heard and valued and respected and supported. There's massive reward to be had, I think, from working with people who really need and benefit from that support, whether they sometimes necessarily always want it or not. And actually, it's sometimes the people

who really don't want the support that need and benefit the most. If we can find ways to engage people and to support people. So yeah, I totally thoroughly recommend it as a profession. It's not to say that it's without challenges. It's got huge challenges and particularly currently within the resource political landscape. It's got huge challenges. But massive rewards, massive variety. So if people are interested or think that they might be interested in social work,

I would just encourage people to speak to social workers who are currently working, maybe listen to this kind of podcast, get in touch with their local, University, social work department, hear about the course, you know, how what's offered, just find out as much about it as they can to help to make an informed decision about getting involved and do some work, paid or unpaid work within health and social care, some kind of related fields to get some experiences to quite what this work is about and put themselves in the strongest position, not only to get a place on a program, but to kind of understand really what's involved in this kind of area of helping profession, if you might. Yeah, exactly what you did in terms of being able to build an understanding of what the profession could be before you even start your course. I think your story is quite a unique and interesting one, having had that supporting volunteers work before you even had the social work exposure, but then your movement through the child and family agencies and transition from a student to a similar position, a paid role. And then going on from that to supporting children with the problematic behaviour having led to research. So you've taken opportunities as they've come, you've gone, okay, that sounds like something I

could either do or I'd be interested in doing and then being able to look a bit further into how do we make decisions regarding children being able to live together or even how social workers support these people who are dealing with quite difficult context and how they're conceptualising their work, I guess. So you've been able to develop that model for practice, which is hopefully being widely used within the UK, but maybe in other areas. And you're developing university course content. You've got fingers in many pies, which it sounds to me is the way you like it in terms of being able to diversify your practice experience and making it interesting. So you've always got something happening every day. If you don't feel like doing this today, you can always

be doing that. You can kind of mix it up and it keeps it fresh as well for you. So it's further indication that there are so many opportunities for social workers out there in diverse fields and especially in academia, and especially if you've got that experience in practice where you can see a real need, you can see a gap in knowledge, and you can think of ways to bring people together to network ideas, workshop things and say, here's how we can hopefully fill those gaps. So, yeah, I think you've explained it perfectly. I think it's very interesting and I'm so grateful that you could spend the time talking to me about your work and hopefully what things you're able to do in future and yeah I think those resources if you can send me those links that will be wonderful

I'll pop them in the show notes and people can reach out if they've got any further questions perfect yeah absolutely always very happy people to get in touch yeah if there's anything particularly around this kind of subject area that people would want to get in touch about I'm always really happy to hear from people so yeah grand thanks for much for the opportunity yes it's really nice to talk to you I hope there is something of value in there yes thank you I appreciate it so much lovely to chat with you thanks for joining me this week if you would like to continue this discussion or ask anything of either myself or peter please visit my anchor page at anchor.fm slash social work spotlight you can find me on facebook instagram and

blue sky or you can email sw spotlight podcast at gmail.com i'd love to hear from you next episode's guest is paul who has over 45 years experience managing child welfare and protection services in the statutory sector at local, regional and national level in Ireland. He currently operates as an independent consultant specialising in serious case reviews, expert witness and policy development for state bodies and voluntary organisations. I release a new episode every two weeks. Please subscribe to my podcast so you're notified when this next episode is available. See you then.