Etiology of Sexual Offending - Lecture Notes

The Problem

  • Sexual abuse is a significant international problem:
    • Meta-analysis: 8-31% of girls and 3-17% of boys worldwide experience sexual abuse before age 18 (Barth et al., 2013).
    • International studies: 6-59% of women (Garcia-Moreno et al., 2005) and 0.2-30% of men (Peterson et al., 2011) report adult sexual victimization.
  • It has widespread effects on victims and their families.
  • Separating moral issues from explanatory science is challenging.

Case Example: Peter

  • Peter, a 44-year-old man, was convicted of sexually abusing an unrelated 10-year-old girl.
  • Assessment revealed:
    • Difficulty identifying and expressing emotions.
    • Viewing children as "safe."
    • Lacking relationship and intimacy skills.
    • Unusual sexual preferences.
    • Struggling to understand others' experiences.

Paraphilic Disorders

  • General Diagnostic Prototype:
    • Persistent, strong, and repeated deviant sexual fantasies, urges, and behaviors.
    • Preferred or required for sexual excitement.
    • Distressing or negatively affecting daily life (Frances, 2013).

Specific Disorders:

  • Pedophilia: Preference for sexual contact with prepubescent children for arousal. The person must be at least 5 years older than the child.
    • Not every person that commits sexual offences have paedophilia; many don't make distinction of gender just access.
  • Exhibitionism: Preference for exposure of sex organs to strangers for arousal, possibly with masturbation.
  • Voyeurism: Preference for peeping at strangers when they are having sex or undressing, possibly with masturbation.
  • Sexual Sadism: Preference for inflicting pain or humiliation for sexual excitement.
  • Sexual Masochism: Preference for receiving pain or humiliation for sexual excitement (rape).
  • Frotteuristic disorder: Preference for rubbing against strangers in crowded places for arousal.
  • Fetishism: Preference for fetish objects (panties, bras, stockings, shoes; partialism) for sexual excitement.
  • Partialism: Attraction to certain body parts exclusively.

Nature of Sexual Offending

  • Causal relationships exist between paraphilias and sexual offending, especially pedophilia.
  • However, the presence of a paraphilia is neither necessary nor sufficient for offending to occur.
  • 'Sexual offense' is a legal term for criminal sexual activity.
    • One can have paraphilias without committing illegal acts, and vice versa.
  • Only a small percentage of child sexual offenders are pedophilic.
    • However, those with such interests are more likely to view illegal pornography or commit offenses.
    • Motives can include convenience, empowerment, control, loneliness, or excitement.
  • Sexual offending is a legal term; therefore, cannot use behaviour as primary focus of explanation + treatment programme; 100 sexual offences = 100 diff reasons.

Features of Sexual Offenders

  • Problem clusters and factors considered in theory construction:
    • Emotional regulation problems.
    • Deviant sexual interests/arousal.
    • Offense-supportive attitudes/beliefs.
    • General dysregulation problems.
    • Social/intimacy difficulties.
    • Important problem not particularly discriminative.

Focus of Explanations

  • Should explanations focus on social and psychological problems identifiable in the person, or just the behavior (sexual offending)?

Importance of Theories

  • Need to describe the concept precisely (e.g., empathy).
  • Need to develop theories to describe and explain how it operates (e.g., what elicits empathy, what interferes with it, how it relates to other psychological factors).
  • Need to establish ways of measuring the concept and studying its effects.

Ideas in Clinical Practice

  • Effective interventions require a good theory of the key phenomena.
  • Example: The Relapse Prevention Model suggests reoffending occurs when a person loses control; but some reoffending is planned, so treatments based on this model won't always work.
  • Neglecting theory can lead to theoretical dead ends and therapeutic ineffectiveness.
  • Risk management approach – model of reoffending; why commit offences; this is treatment model; weak theory.

Neglecting Theory

  • A bad idea gives the illusion of knowledge:
    • Depression: Many measurement methods give the illusion we know the underlying mechanisms.
    • Dynamic Risk factors: Measuring factors associated with reoffending doesn't mean we understand its causes.
  • Little point developing valid research designs and sophisticated data analytic techniques if ideas driving research are naive or mistaken.

Theoretical Literacy and Illiteracy

  • "Literacy" is knowledge or competency, while "illiteracy" is a lack of such knowledge.
  • Indicators of theoretical illiteracy:
    1. Failure to understand the role of and need for theory.
    2. Mistaking theory for fact.
    3. Uncritical and dogmatic acceptance of existing theories.
    4. Poor critical analysis skills.
    5. Rigid adherence to manuals, prescribed practices.

Nature of Theory

  • Theories help reveal patterns or underlying mechanisms at different levels of analysis and their observable effects.
  • Epidemiology – study of prevalence and incidence of disease, smoking predictor cancer its risk factor causes smoking.
  • Cause smoking – how changes body pathogenic mechanisms and how it presents symptoms clinical disease.

Good Explanation

  • Pragmatic Values (usefulness):
    • Parsimony (Scope divided by simplicity).
    • Clarity of communication.
    • Fit to purpose – why do you need this explanation?
  • Epistemic Values (truth):
    • Internal cohesion – doesn’t contradict its self.
    • External cohesion – fits with other things we know about the universe.
    • Scope, predictive validity, fruitfulness, etc. (Knowledge related values).

Levels of Theory (Ward and Hudson)

  • Multifactorial models (Level 1).
  • Single-factor models (Level 2).
  • Descriptive models (Level 3).
  • No level of theory is inherently more important than another.
  • Linking theories across different levels helps develop a comprehensive understanding of factors causing and maintaining sexually harmful behavior across time and contexts.

Multifactorial Theory: Finkelhor

  • Four factors typically explain child sexual abuse (Finkelhor, 1984; 2017).
  • Based on the following claims:
    • Sex with children is emotionally satisfying to the offender (emotional congruence).
    • Men who offend are sexually aroused by children (sexual arousal).
    • Men can't meet needs in socially appropriate ways (blockage).
    • Men become disinhibited (disinhibition).
  • Four linked preconditions must be satisfied:
    • (PC1) Motivation: emotional congruence, sexual arousal, and blockage.
    • (PC2) Overcoming internal inhibitions (e.g., alcohol, impulse disorder, senility, psychosis, severe stress, socially entrenched patriarchal attitudes, etc.).
    • (PC3) Overcoming external inhibitions: maternal absence or illness, lack of maternal closeness, social isolation of family, lack of parental supervision, unusual sleeping conditions, or paternal domination, etc.
    • (PC4) Overcoming a child’s resistance: gifts, desensitization, emotional dependence, threats, or violence.
  • Provides a useful research framework, clear treatment goals, and clinical innovations.
  • Critiques of Finkelhor's Precondition Model:
    • Vagueness.
    • Overlapping constructs (e.g., blockage and emotional congruence).
    • Overemphasis on motives (cognition?).
    • Overlooks intact self-regulation.
    • Rich array of vulnerability factors (PC1) that need teasing out and clarification.

Single Factor Theory: Empathy

  • Being able to emotionally respond to other people and to share their experiences is a core psychological skill and an essential ingredient of healthy intimate relationships and strong communities.
  • "Feeling a congruent emotion with another person, in virtue of perceiving her emotion with some mental process such as imitation, simulation, projection, or imagination." (Oxley(2011, p.32).
  • Empathy interventions typically included in sexual offending treatment programs.

Empathy Theory (Barnett and Mann, 2013)

  • Empathy is a cognitive and emotional understanding of another person's experience, resulting in an emotional response for the observer which is congruent with a view that others are worthy of compassion and respect and have intrinsic worth.
  • Five sets of processes converge to create an empathic response:
    • Emotional response to others experience distress.
    • Perspective taking: taking considering how others would feel or how you would feel in a situation.
    • Compassion and respect.
    • Contextual factors.
    • Ability to manage own distress.
  • Evaluation
    • Developed comprehensive account of metalizing that required for actions that are response to other people's interests and needs.
    • Not talking about empathy but rather altruism?
    • Little evidence sex offenders have enduring empathy deficits or that empathy interventions result in reduced reoffending (Barnett & Mann 2013).

Descriptive Theories: The Self-Regulation Model

  • Model of offense process, picks up meaningful patterns in people who commit sexual offences against children
  • Those in prison aren't always ones committing offences against children

Offender Types:

  • Avoidant-Passive: Lacks coping skills.
  • Avoidant-Active: Has good coping skills but doesn't use them.
  • Approach-Explicit: Thinks having sex with children is acceptable, plans and learns from experiences.
  • Approach-Automatic: Impulsive, under-regulated. More difficult to treat ppl automatic approach easier impulsive regretful
  • All feel happy before the offense, after it group didn’t want to feel terrible.
  • More difficult to treat ppl automatic approach easier impulsive regretful
  • Evaluation
    • Grounded in empirical (interview) data and been the subject of a number of studies that have supported its content validity, and to some extent its construct validity .
    • Provides useful, comprehensive overview of core cognitive, affective, behavioral and contextual features of the relapse and offense process.
    • Descriptive
    • Captures pathways rather than individuals.
    • Some areas relatively impoverished and require fleshing out- background factors.

Future Directions

  • Offense categories and subcategories are too heterogeneous to be good explanatory targets.
  • Classification: offense types, risk bands, risk factors, or motivational systems and associated tasks?
  • Take single factors and "deconstruct" them to arrive at explanatory targets and then engage in causal modeling.

Agent-Action-Context Schema (Ward & Durrant, 2022)

  • Agent: The features or characteristics of individuals (e.g., needs, motivations, personality traits, cognitive capacities).
  • Context: The situational features in which agents and actions are embedded (e.g., normative expectations of particular roles or situations, opportunities, crime scenes).
  • Action: The actual behaviors engaged in, including their temporal patterning (e.g., specific actions, offences pathways, developmental trajectories).
  • Take one factor deconstruct it across 3 factors: Agent – person; Context – context of offending; and Action – offending.

Modeling Possible Causes

  • Initial coarse representation (black box): complex relational and intimacy needs as “intimacy deficits.”
  • Researchers “open up” black boxes and provide further, more detailed representations of the clinical phenomena and their causes.
  • Problem such as intimacy deficits translated into more specific and precise problems: poor communication skills, fear of rejection by adult partners, impaired perspective taking skills, and so on.
  • Ultimately results in a nested set of boxes, each depicted in greater details: Russian dolls. Each box depicted in greater detail.

Intimacy Deficits

  • Agent: Relationship style, Emotional congruence, Fear of adults
  • Action: Callous behavior, Avoidance of conflict, Grooming of children
  • Context: Lack of relationships, Social isolation, Engagement in Paedophilic networks

Explanatory Modeling

  • Weave together and link back to ACC: psychological models of offending related and unrelated problems and their causes (e.g., intimacy, mood regulation, social recognition and status)
  • Then construct more fine-grained explanatory targets and causal modelling: Russian dolls
  • Develop level 2 models using AAC as starting point.

Conclusions

  • Theories of sexual offending are cognitive tools used to structure assessment and inform treatment.
  • Range of theories related to varying explanatory interests, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
  • Theoretical pluralism is useful strategy in situation of relative ignorance- opens up space for critique and development
  • Future developments: functional accounts of sexual offending; “seeing through” crime to life tasks and non crime related problems.