When I was at University I volunteered on the student nightline service and for a local information and counselling service for young people. I undertook a ‘train the trainers’ course in HIV and AIDS awareness and when I moved to Edinburgh I was lucky enough to get a job supporting and managing volunteers at a hospice for people living with HIV and AIDS.

This was an extremely interesting job, which involved a fully integrated team including doctors, nurses, social workers and chaplains, and where the medical staff were supervised and line managed by the senior nurse. Quite an interesting traditional role-reversal. I worked there for five years before undertaking my social work training, and then worked for several years in a local authority Children and Families practice team. I moved back to the voluntary sector to work as a senior practitioner in a specialist service for children and young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour, and I have kept up my interest in this area ever since.

Following a few years teaching social work at the University of Edinburgh, I undertook a PhD examining social worker decision making in cases involving sexual abuse between siblings. I started at Edinburgh Napier University in 2015 as a lecturer and co-ordinator of the child and public protection team within the School of Health and Social Care.

My role has since changed and I’m currently programme lead for social work, leading on the development of a new qualifying social work programme at Masters level, due to start in January 2019. In keeping with health and social care integration, this programme is being developed closely alongside two other Masters programmes in Physiotherapy and Occupational Therapy. We have designed the courses so that there is a collaborative inter-professional module in each term of the programme in order to support an understanding of different professional roles and to instil an ethos of cross-disciplinary partnership working so as to be able to provide services which are personalised and responsive to the needs of service users. As far as we know, this level of inter-professional education across these disciplines has not been attempted before. It is an exciting project, with fantastic colleagues, and great to be a part of.

Why did I choose this career path? I don’t suppose there are many people who become social workers without a tale or two to tell. The short answer, however, is that working in the hospice taught me, amongst many other things, that prevention is far better than cure, or, as the case may be, palliative care. High quality end-of-life care is vital (in all senses of the word), but good help really has to be provided much further upstream. The same can obviously be said of working with children and young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour. Responding appropriately when it happens is crucial, but stopping it from happening in the first place would clearly be preferable.

Social work is tremendously rewarding. It is an extremely important and valuable job, and it is also a highly privileged one. I have learnt a huge amount from the people I have worked with over the years. The move into teaching and research followed naturally from some of the training roles I have had throughout my career, but there are certainly times I miss the practice of being a social worker.

I’ve not really had any bad jobs, but the worst part of one of the jobs I had was having to unblock blocked toilets. I was in charge of the office facilities – anything and everything from ordering stationery, building maintenance, sorting out computer problems, and, yes, maintaining the ‘facilities’. Not pleasant. I’ll spare you the details. But the job overall was great – lots of very interesting and dedicated, hard-working people from all walks of life.

Early in 2016, my colleague Stuart Allardyce and I were approached by a publisher to ask if we would be interested in writing a book about children and young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour. We have both worked directly and undertaken research in this field, and we jumped at the chance of exploring the topic in great depth and writing something that would bring together our knowledge of the subject with our practical understanding of working with children and families affected by this issue.

Approximately one third of child sexual abuse is carried out by children and young people themselves, and there is growing recognition among professionals that this is a key concern in the safeguarding of children. Working with children and young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour raises challenging dilemmas around balancing the risks they may present to others with the need to provide these children with opportunities for social and emotional development. Strong feelings of anxiety are present among professionals and considerable levels of shame and stigma are often experienced by these children and their families.

We argue in the book that children and young people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviour are not mini-adult sex offenders – they are children first and foremost, whose rights as children need to be respected, and who require an individualised, trauma-informed and systemic response. In particular we suggest an approach that moves away from an exclusive focus on the psychology of the individual child towards a wider contextual understanding of the child and the meanings of their behaviour within their family and environment.

The book covers a number of important topics: Professional attitudes and values; how to differentiate normal childhood sexual exploration from harmful sexual behaviour; how to understand why children may abuse others sexually; how to respond when they do; and some of the more recent developments around harmful sexual behaviour online. We finish the book with a chapter on prevention. Clearly it would be much better to stop this behaviour happening in the first place rather than having to deal with the aftermath of pain and hurt that the behaviour causes. We argue in the book that prevention can be approached on a number of different levels, but at root this behaviour takes place within a pervasive culture of gendered power imbalances. If we wish to prevent harmful sexual behaviour and for our children to respect the rights of others, then we need above all to respect and uphold their rights to grow up in a safe, caring and nurturing environment, and we need a culture change that no longer legitimises social injustice.

So far the book has received very favourable reviews, and as the Foreword by Professor Simon Hackett says, “At a time when a better-informed picture about the realities of child sexual abuse is urgently needed, this book provides a vital part of this complex jigsaw”.

Mostly, I relax by playing with my boy. We love trips to the zoo, especially watching the cheeky little chimp, Velu, getting up to all sorts of mischief in the Budongo trail, and we have been very excited by the arrival of the new rhino, Qabid. He seems already to be something of a character. Otherwise, if I get chance to watch any television, it usually consists of Go Jetters or the Clangers, and I enjoy music, both playing and listening, but mostly listening these days.