Anyone have any views/opinions about the psychological effect CF (in particular CP I assume) has on investigators?

Would love to hear who sees a councellor regularly and if they thinks it helps etc.

No idea why I thought about this now... but thought it'd make an interesting thread.  

All our staff who have contact with CP have six-monthly psychological assessments. I think that is common/ a pre-requisite amongst similar companies and HTCUs when dealing with such material?

Luckily no one from QCC has been carted off in a straight jacket. Yet.


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Forensic Control
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St Bride Foundation, 14 Bride Lane, London, EC4Y 8EQ 

I call for a second opinion!  

6 monthly? Wow, thought it would be more common than that - I thought it would be monthly or similar.  

Would be interesting to see whether assessments under Health and Safety etc would be applicable to those companies with four or less employees.  

Hi,

The effects of seeing CP on a computer can be very unpleasant. The worst type is often video files where there is sound to accompany the images.

I've had disturbing cases where there has been very little and sometimes even no CP. Hands on abuse cases where your suspect is bragging to a fellow paedophile via chat about what he has done can be worse than seeing images. Sometimes it's paedophilic stories (which aren't an offence themselves to possess in the UK), can be very graphic.

Like Jonathan we also have 6 monthly appointments with a psychologist but I don't think it's these sessions that put us right with the world. We need to be able to deal with what we see, hear and read on a daily basis. Each person has there own way of dealing with it but it must come down the employer to provide a suitably 'sterile' environment and working practices which will limit the possible negative effects.

I don't know if this job is something that certain people couldn't do. More likely it is wouldn't want to do rather than couldn't. It isn't like this field is better paid than other areas of IT, so choosing it must be based purely on the type of work we do.

CP doesn't often bother me and even in the early days it didn't. However, I sometimes wonder how the real life victims of cases I have dealt with are coping after suffering the abuse. In the same way when we see images of people dying in places such as Sudan, as an investigator it is possible to feel that grief or sorrow for the victims of abuse.

The process of following correct procedures in every case helps maintain our objectivity despite the potential stresses of CP. The victims and suspects of the cases we work on are owed a fair and truthful evaluation of the evidence. Keeping that in mind to a great extent enables us to work without distraction or bias.

Steve
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Forensic Computer Examiner, London, UK 

That was a good post Steve862.