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There is a growing interest in English-speaking jurisdictions, including Australia, North America, Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, about the prevention of sexual abuse perpetrated by children against other children. The aim of this review was to identify opportunities for research, policy and practice which could enhance the prevention agenda relating to the perpetration of sexual abuse by children through conducting a Critical Interpretive Synthesis. Eleven electronic databases were searched in the period from 22 April to 23 May 2013 and included: SocINDEX, Social Services Abstracts, Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts, Family and Society Studies Worldwide, Project Muse, PsychINFO, Family and Society Plus, Jstor, Expanded Academic ASAP, Web of Science and Google Scholar. Key individual journals were also searched, including Child Abuse and Neglect and the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, as well as the grey literature. The search was guided by the research question: How could the prevention agenda relating to sexual abuse perpetrated by children be enhanced? The systematic literature search yielded 3323 titles, and 34 of these papers were included in the final synthesis. The authors identified five domains operating in the evidence base: characteristics, causes, communications, interventions and treatments. A synthesising construct emerged from the review: prevention-enhancing interactions. This construct referred to the potential for enhancing the prevention agenda which exists as the evidence domains interact with one another, and with the public health model of prevention. The authors consider this review to be a timely contribution to the current agenda pertaining to sexual abuse perpetrated by children. It provides researchers, policy makers and practitioners in the field with an evidence-informed conceptualisation of opportunities for enhancing prevention work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the reasoning processes of social workers in child protection social work as they make decisions. Within this interpretive process, they assign meaning to clients' behaviours in a context containing a multitude of competing discourses relating to the nature and cause of clients' problems. The study used a qualitative approach, specifically a critical incident framework. It asked workers to describe cases they felt ‘pleased with’ and explain the reasoning processes they used in those cases. It also asked clients their views of decisions made about them. This article draws on social constructionist theorising to describe and analyse the discourses used to frame the aims of practice and the causes of clients' problems. It found that workers valued family maintenance and sought to bolster this while managing potential risk. In the cases selected by workers, they constructed the causes of clients' problems in non-blaming but individualised ways, viewed clients as being capable of change and honest in their dealings with workers. It is proposed that these ways of viewing contributed to maintaining relationships with clients despite the challenges of balancing risk, care, control and power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]