Lecture 9 - Sexual Crime Flashcards
What are three examples of non contact sexual crime?
Voyeurism
Exhibitionism
Illegal pornography
What is telephone scatologia?
Seeking sexual gratification through making obscene phone calls
Why is it hard to know the incidence of non contact sexual offences?
They are very under reported because the victim doesn’t know it’s happening.
In 2008 there were 7500 offences of voyeurism and exhibitionism In England and Wales
According to the home office 2012/2013 survey how many sex offences were committed?
Between 430,000 and 517,000
Including contact and non contact
How many woman compared to men are likely to have been victims in the most serious kinds of sex offences in 2012/2013
68,000-103,000 woman
5,000 - 19,000 men
Is rape a commonly reported violent crime? Who researches this?
No one of the most under reported serious crimes
Blagden et al (2012)
What are the three broad categories for theories of sexual offending ? (Ward & beech 2006)
Multi factorial (level 1 theories) Single factor (level 2 theories) Descriptive (level 3, describe the triggers just prior to the event)
So loosely what can most theories be split into explaining?
Rape
Child molestation
Both
What is a brief definition of rape? What are the criteria ?
Penetration including of the mouth when the victim has not consented
Usually applies to adults
Divided into 2 categories, either stranger or acquaintance
Acquaintance is more common
What is one model of rape?
Malamuths confluence mol of sexual aggression (1996)
In malamuths model what two categories does he split the causes of sexual aggression into?
Ultimate - evolutionary, mans desire for reproduction with many different women
Proximate - there are four elements
What are the two pathways in the ultimate causes that can lead to sexual aggression?
Sexual promiscuity - males just need lots of sex doesn’t matter if they’re willing because they prefer impersonal sex and loads of it
Hostile masculinity - if women withhold sex men can become hostile and anxious because their sexual reproduction is effected.
If this happens repeatedly through a males development they can become hostile and impersonal towards women
What are the 4 proximate causes of male aggression?
1) rape occurs after the convergence of 6 predictor variables threat seem to come up over and over to predict rape e.g. Attitudes, early sexual experience
2) causes of male and male aggression aren’t necessarily the same as male on female aggression
3) causes of sexual aggression are similar to causes of other controlling behaviour towards females
4) there are non evolutionary, environmental factors that are important.
What does the flow diagram of the proximate causes, (environment) in the confluence model look like?
Inherent capacity
⬇️
Environmental influences (domestic violence or antisocial sibling)
⬇️
Negative schemata (cynical about women, casual sex, hanging out with an older peer group)
↙️ ⬇️. ↘️
Lack of social skills Delinquency Adult sexual behaviour
⬇️
Coercive sexual acts
What are the three categories of adults who are interested in children ?
Infantophiles
Paedophile
Hebephile
Is paedophilia a disorder?
What did winder & Thorne (2012) find about paedophiles?
Yes it is the sexual attraction to prepubescent children. It’s only illegal if you act on it. It’s in the DSM and ICD 10
Found that normally they don’t rape a child but instead encourage them to touch themselves and the adult or other children
What is a model that looks at child molestation? What kind of model is it?
Finkelhor’s precondition model (1984)
multi factorial model.
What did finklehor suggest were 4 underlying factors that constantly associated with sexually abusive behaviour towards children ?
1) sex with children is emotionally satisfying
2) sexual arousal to children
3) blockage , inability to meet sexual needs in a normal way
4) disinhibition
Finklehor argued his model was a process and that there were 4 stages you had to overcome to reach the level of committing sexual abuse. What are they?
Do you have to go through every stage?
Motivation to sexually abuse
Overcoming internal inhibitors
Overcoming external inhibitors
Overcoming the resistance of the child
It’s a rigid model, so you have to go through every stage to result in sexual abuse.
What are the three motivations finklehor suggests, but that don’t all have to be present necessarily?
A) the child gives them emotional congruence/satisfaction more than an adult . Maybe because they had a bad experience with an adult themselves
B) through the process of conditioning they are sexually attracted to children, might have had a sexual experience with a child as a child, or seen one sexually abused
C) blockage, had a bad experience with a female when they were younger and now can’t receive sexual satisfaction in a normal way
What are internal inhibitors?
How do you overcome them?
The second stage of finklehor’s model
And they are the emotions like guilt and empathy that stop you from sexually abusing a child
Overcome them using alcohol, psychosis or stress
What does literature say about about sex offenders and internal inhibitors ?
Says they don’t have any
How do sex offenders overcome external inhibitors?
This is the process of planning
Essentially they gain access to the child through grooming and building a trusting relationship
What are some of the strategies used to overcome the resistance of a child ?
Have to overcome the physical as well as the verbal urge to tell their parents
Can be done by:
Giving gifts
Desensitising them to sex using play fighting
Threats of violence
Telling them it’s a secret
What are some of the problems with finklehor’s model ?
No explantation of the origins of the motivations in the behaviour
A lot of research suggests there’s no such thing as internal inhibitors
Read ward (2006) in the library
What are the two broad categories of sexual crimes?
Which researchers defined these?
Non contact and contact
Hocken & Thorne (2012)
Which theory have we studied that takes an integrated approach? What does this mean?
Marshall and barbaree (1990)
Integrated Models look at explanations for both rape and child molestation rather than just one or the other
What is the key concept of Marshall and barbaree ‘s theory?
That as a male develop he learns to discriminate between aggressive and sexual impulses.
A male must control this aggression during sexual impulses
Controlling aggression is harder for vulnerable males, so if the two merge you get sexual aggression
If you had an equation to explain Marshall and barbaree ‘s model what would it look like?
Vulnerability factors + situational factors = sexual aggression
Explain what we mean by vulnerability factors in Marshall & barbaree’s model
Neglect or abuse - leads to insecure attachment and poorer development of self esteem, emotional coping and social skills
*learn to self soothe through masturbation
Exposure to anti social or misogynist views at home
Adolescence:
Unsure how to cope with sexual urges
Advances in woman and are rejected, leads to anger + deviant sexual fantasies
Masturbate to deviant fantasies therefore reinforcing them
Marshall and barbaree suggest that there are similar brain structures in males for sex and aggression, what do they mean?
Very similar neural pathways for sexual pleasure and aggression
What Happens with situational factors, how can they lead to deviant sexual behaviour?
Situational factors like:
Loss of relationships
Social rejection
Loneliness
Lead to the person using masturbation or other sexual activities as a coping mechanism leading to a conditioning.
Thus when these social situations happen again there is an associative sexual arousal with it
Give an example of how sexual offending is perpetuated by reinforcement
A man lacking in self esteem sexually offends to feel powerful and in control, his feelings of power increase making his self esteem go up , this reinforces the utility of sexual offending.
The next time he feels powerless he is likely to do it again
What are some of the problems with Marshall and barbaree’s integrated model?
- masturbation isn’t the only way of coping
- the model is very broad as it attempts to explain all forms of sexual offending, this is both a positive and negative
- model doesn’t explain exactly how sex and aggression merge
- not wholly supported by research as it shows that sex and neural pathways are not particularly interlinked.
There have been recent developments in this field that look at the effect of cognitive distortions as a reason for sexual offending. However what are some of the criticisms?
It’s a chicken and egg situation, did the behaviour come first or the distorted cognition. Did they start thinking this way after the act to help deal with the guilt.
What are the significant of distorted cognitions for treatment?
If the cognition comes after you might be able to help them stop reoffending but it’s doesn’t stop it happening the first time.
Following distorted cognitions we started to look at implicit theories. What are they?
Implicit theories are unconcious ways that we view the world and process the information we have into neat folders that we can understand
Polaschek (2002, 2004) looked at implicit theories of rape. List 5
Entitlement - men require their needs to be met
Dangerous world - the worlds dangerous, you should expect something to go wrong
Women as sex objects - women’s purpose is to satisfy men
Women are unknowable - find women threatening, men can’t understand them
Male sex drive is impossible to control
Ward (2000) looked at 5 implicit theories to do with child molestation. What are they?
Children are sexual beings - they have knowledge of sex and have desire
Entitlement - superior individuals should be afforded superior rights
Dangerous world - the world is dominated by negative, abusive and self promoting people
Uncontrollable - the world is unchangeable external locus of control
Nature of harm - they aren’t hurting them physically so it’s harmless
What are some of the problems with theories based around implicit theories?
Although it looks at the cognition at a deeper level, it still doesn’t explain the underpinning mechanism
Assumes offenders verbalisations match up to their mental state
Chicken and egg
Often discrepancy between what offenders say and what they believe
