Lecture 9 - Sexual Crime

Question 1

What are three examples of non contact sexual crime?

Answer 1

Voyeurism
Exhibitionism
Illegal pornography

Question 2

What is telephone scatologia?

Answer 2

Seeking sexual gratification through making obscene phone calls

Question 3

Why is it hard to know the incidence of non contact sexual offences?

Answer 3

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

Question 4

According to the home office 2012/2013 survey how many sex offences were committed?

Answer 4

Between 430,000 and 517,000

Including contact and non contact

Question 5

How many woman compared to men are likely to have been victims in the most serious kinds of sex offences in 2012/2013

Answer 5

68,000-103,000 woman

5,000 - 19,000 men

Question 6

Is rape a commonly reported violent crime? Who researches this?

Answer 6

No one of the most under reported serious crimes

Blagden et al (2012)

Question 7

What are the three broad categories for theories of sexual offending ? (Ward & beech 2006)

Answer 7

Multi factorial (level 1 theories)
Single factor (level 2 theories)
Descriptive (level 3, describe the triggers just prior to the event)

Question 8

So loosely what can most theories be split into explaining?

Answer 8

Rape
Child molestation
Both

Question 9

What is a brief definition of rape? What are the criteria ?

Answer 9

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

Question 10

What is one model of rape?

Answer 10

Malamuths confluence mol of sexual aggression (1996)

Question 11

In malamuths model what two categories does he split the causes of sexual aggression into?

Answer 11

Ultimate - evolutionary, mans desire for reproduction with many different women
Proximate - there are four elements

Question 12

What are the two pathways in the ultimate causes that can lead to sexual aggression?

Answer 12

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

Question 13

What are the 4 proximate causes of male aggression?

Answer 13

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.

Question 14

What does the flow diagram of the proximate causes, (environment) in the confluence model look like?

Answer 14

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

Question 15

What are the three categories of adults who are interested in children ?

Answer 15

Infantophiles
Paedophile
Hebephile

Question 16

Is paedophilia a disorder?

What did winder & Thorne (2012) find about paedophiles?

Answer 16

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

Question 17

What is a model that looks at child molestation? What kind of model is it?

Answer 17

Finkelhor’s precondition model (1984)

multi factorial model.

Question 18

What did finklehor suggest were 4 underlying factors that constantly associated with sexually abusive behaviour towards children ?

Answer 18

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

Question 19

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?

Answer 19

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.

Question 20

What are the three motivations finklehor suggests, but that don’t all have to be present necessarily?

Answer 20

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

Question 21

What are internal inhibitors?

How do you overcome them?

Answer 21

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

Question 22

What does literature say about about sex offenders and internal inhibitors ?

Answer 22

Says they don’t have any

Question 23

How do sex offenders overcome external inhibitors?

Answer 23

This is the process of planning

Essentially they gain access to the child through grooming and building a trusting relationship

Question 24

What are some of the strategies used to overcome the resistance of a child ?

Answer 24

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

Question 25

What are some of the problems with finklehor’s model ?

Answer 25

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

Question 26

What are the two broad categories of sexual crimes?

Which researchers defined these?

Answer 26

Non contact and contact

Hocken & Thorne (2012)

Question 27

Which theory have we studied that takes an integrated approach? What does this mean?

Answer 27

Marshall and barbaree (1990)

Integrated Models look at explanations for both rape and child molestation rather than just one or the other

Question 28

What is the key concept of Marshall and barbaree ‘s theory?

Answer 28

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

Question 29

If you had an equation to explain Marshall and barbaree ‘s model what would it look like?

Answer 29

Vulnerability factors + situational factors = sexual aggression

Question 30

Explain what we mean by vulnerability factors in Marshall & barbaree’s model

Answer 30

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

Question 31

Marshall and barbaree suggest that there are similar brain structures in males for sex and aggression, what do they mean?

Answer 31

Very similar neural pathways for sexual pleasure and aggression

Question 32

What Happens with situational factors, how can they lead to deviant sexual behaviour?

Answer 32

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

Question 33

Give an example of how sexual offending is perpetuated by reinforcement

Answer 33

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

Question 34

What are some of the problems with Marshall and barbaree’s integrated model?

Answer 34

• 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.

Question 35

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?

Answer 35

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.

Question 36

What are the significant of distorted cognitions for treatment?

Answer 36

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.

Question 37

Following distorted cognitions we started to look at implicit theories. What are they?

Answer 37

Implicit theories are unconcious ways that we view the world and process the information we have into neat folders that we can understand

Question 38

Polaschek (2002, 2004) looked at implicit theories of rape. List 5

Answer 38

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

Question 39

Ward (2000) looked at 5 implicit theories to do with child molestation. What are they?

Answer 39

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

Question 40

What are some of the problems with theories based around implicit theories?

Answer 40

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