Witnessing, Nurturing, Protesting: Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Abuse of People with Learning Disabilities by Alan Corbett, Tamsin Cottis and Stephen Morris. Published by  David Fulton Publishers, London, 1996;  102 pages, £12.99.

In 1991, a group of enterprising and enlightened social services professionals banded together to create a new organization called Respond, a unique counselling and psychotherapy service designed to provide treatment for adults struggling with different forms of mental handicap or learning disability. Originally based in Wandsworth, in South London, Respond has now become a pioneering charity, located near Euston Station, staffed with experienced psychodynamically orientated clinicians. The core team at Respond has just published this, its first book, which stands as a very rich and much welcome contribution to the steadily growing literature on the psychotherapy of handicap and disability.

Co-authored by Alan Corbett, the Assistant Director; Tamsin Cottis, Assistant Director; and Stephen Morris, the former Director, the book provides us with a clear, thoughtful and readable primer on this vital, though often neglected, area of practice. The authors describe the development of their working model, based on attachment principles, and discuss the importance of an advocacy-based approach. In brief, this philosophy of advocacy involves the clinician functioning as a witness who believes and validates the abuses which so many patients have suffered, and who then endeavours to provide a setting in which further exploration and mourning can be facilitated. Subsequent chapters focus on more detailed clinical issues, such as the treatment of handicapped patients who abuse substances or who smear bodily products. The authors write with tremendous compassion and humanity, and they illustrate their theoretical postulates with vivid case material.

The professional staff at Respond work with challenging and tragic individuals who not only suffer from organic handicaps, but who have been cruelly victimized by dangerous adults. For instance, one of the patients described at some length, a young