3. Five Negative Impacts
3.5 Negative Impacts
3.5.1 Psychological well-being
One of the themes to arise was the impact on all three participants of listening to the distorted cognitions of sex offenders and how they had heard things they would never ‘unhear’ and the struggle of constantly trying to find a way to deal with that. The participants found it particularly hard to hear sex offenders minimising or rationalising their crimes, or hearing their total lack of disrespect towards victims. Participant 1 described an offender she was working with who had been grooming young girls online and how, in his view, they were all ‘sluts, “so it’s very very hard to just sit with that”. The distortions the participants heard and had to sit with were things that would stay …show more content…
She was aware this had been a result of the work, “it freaked me out quite a bit…. It’s quite unpleasant”.
Participant 3 also experienced the world as being a different place and saw harm in places where other people might not, which had heightened her vigilance about her own safety, “I’m quite cautious about things I wouldn’t have been cautious about before and I think that’s because a lot of the guys we work with erm... would have an interest in adults as well, so that would make me concerned for safety in a way I wasn’t before, so yes, that’s definitely a change”.
One other theme to emerge related to issues concerning gender. Participant 2 described a negative impact of the work, which only he experienced due to his gender as, “I found I was really impacted, or my maleness was being really challenged and I felt it was being chiselled away”. He believed this impact to be a result of the fact that every bad thing that happened in the building had been perpetrated by a male and so this continually impacted on him and was something he had to constantly
3.5.1 Psychological well-being
One of the themes to arise was the impact on all three participants of listening to the distorted cognitions of sex offenders and how they had heard things they would never ‘unhear’ and the struggle of constantly trying to find a way to deal with that. The participants found it particularly hard to hear sex offenders minimising or rationalising their crimes, or hearing their total lack of disrespect towards victims. Participant 1 described an offender she was working with who had been grooming young girls online and how, in his view, they were all ‘sluts, “so it’s very very hard to just sit with that”. The distortions the participants heard and had to sit with were things that would stay …show more content…
She was aware this had been a result of the work, “it freaked me out quite a bit…. It’s quite unpleasant”.
Participant 3 also experienced the world as being a different place and saw harm in places where other people might not, which had heightened her vigilance about her own safety, “I’m quite cautious about things I wouldn’t have been cautious about before and I think that’s because a lot of the guys we work with erm... would have an interest in adults as well, so that would make me concerned for safety in a way I wasn’t before, so yes, that’s definitely a change”.
One other theme to emerge related to issues concerning gender. Participant 2 described a negative impact of the work, which only he experienced due to his gender as, “I found I was really impacted, or my maleness was being really challenged and I felt it was being chiselled away”. He believed this impact to be a result of the fact that every bad thing that happened in the building had been perpetrated by a male and so this continually impacted on him and was something he had to constantly