What Causes a Person to Become a Sex Offender - Term Paper Example

What causes a person to become a sex offender? 2006 Outline Introduction A. The Role of the Internet in the Children Life B. Internet and Sex Offence C. Definition of Sex Offender D. History of the Problem E. Child Sexual Abuse by Strangers F. Types of Child Sexual Abuses and Abusers G. Psychological Characteristics of Child Sexual Abusers H. Methods of Solving the Problem: Technical, Legal and Medical Conclusion Description. In this paper we will investigate the problem of the sex offence and the Internet. We will dwell on the theories of sex offenders, offered by different scholars and typology of CSA acts. Finally, we will discuss the possible methods of children security on-line and treatment of sex offenders. The development of the Internet influenced all sides of the contemporary life. Very important is this issue for children. According to /Child Safety online, 1997/ over 4 million children had the Internet access from their homes in 1996 and with each coming day this number increases. Now the approximate number of children accessing Internet from homes is near 20 million. On the one hand, Internet is a perfect source of new knowledge and information. It enables children to acquire new skills, develop thoroughly in all spheres of life. In this respect importance of the internet can not be overestimated and the desire of parents to provide their children with home access to the internet is rather sound. But on the other hand, Internet has its dark sides, which should be taken into consideration. The main constraint to the “internatization” of US kids is the issue of safety of the cyberspace. Of course, the majority of all risk factors exist not only in the Internet, but in the ordinary life as well. The problem is that many children are more internet-active than their parents or teachers and that’s why it is difficult for the latter to keep an eye on children’s on-line safety. SECTION 1. Statement of the crime problem. One of the main Internet problems concerning children safety is internet sex offenders. And this problem is very urgent for the cyberspace. The problem is that pedophiles can easily pretend to be of the same age in the child chat room and thus luring a child into private meeting or showing him/her sexually explicit images /Child Safety online, 1997/. One of the most popular strategies of all pedophiles is on-line grooming, which presupposes that a sex offender wants to create an abusive situation with the help of the Internet or mobile phones. The victims of the online groomers are kids, browsing on-line / What id Grooming, 2002/. Parents can not control the majority of the on-line chat rooms and children remain unprotected and exposed to danger, their vigilance blunted by usual home surrounding and lively talk with peers. In this private surrounding such sexually disturbed strangers have tete-a-tete talk with children. But Internet has other possibilities of development of pedophilia as a social phenomenon. There appear constantly different pedophile communities in the Internet, where sex offenders can share their views and practices and assure each other in the normality of the sexual contact with children. They also impart to their associates their ideas concerning luring and trapping children. One more negative aspect of pedophile communities is the support from the same-minded sexually-disturbed people, which makes them feel that sex with children is a normal state of affairs /Child Safety online, 1997/. Very common in such communities is invention of possible means of influencing public mind and legal base concerning sex with children. Governmental and Internet organization are leading constant straggle against pedophile sites and chat rooms but the latter are still easy to find and access /Child Safety online, 1997/. SECTION 2 Literature review of the problem If we try to discover the roots of the problem; we will see that it exists for quite a long time. The problem of sex offenders relates mostly to the problem of child sexual abuse. It should be emphasized that there is no generally-accepted list of behaviors considered as CSA and the definition itself differs from country to country. We have reviewed the works by researchers, who focused mostly on the origin of the problem of sex offenders, its historical development through time, frequency of the crime, main types of offenders, their cheracteristics and main victims of sex offenders. In the USA as well as in the majority of other western countries the following types of behavior, involving children under 18, are considered CSA: penetrative intercourse (oral, anal or vaginal), fondling or touching a child’s genitals or asking him/her to do this him/herself or to undress, to force a chills to look at grown-up’s genitals, making a child watch sexual behaviour in all its manifestations, initiating child prostitution or pornography /Grubbin, 1999/. Although it is a well-known fact nowadays, but it’s not until 1980s when the fact, that perpetrators are generally known to the victims, was recognized in by psychologists /Corby, 2000/. Until that time “paedophiles” were considered to be “a society’s arch folkdevils” /Gallagher, 1998/ and this term was generally used to define a person outside the family, who abuses the child sexually. Grubin considers that although the topic is not so widely discussed it is wide-spread: only 10-20 % of all CSA acts were performed by strangers, and 80-90 % were perpetrated by persons, whom the child knows: members of the family, relatives, nurses or teachers /Grubin, 1999/. On the other hand, it should be mentioned that although a stranger abuse occurs rarely but it is generally more violent and has more serious results /Gallagher, Braford & Pease, 2002/. Now researches differentiate also between different types of abusers. This classification appeared in the 1970s, and since then researchers tried to realize the driving motives of adult abusing children sexually. Among the many others, who focused on this problem, we can name the following researchers, who contributed greatly to the study of the problem: Berliner, Conte, Groth, Hobson, Simon, Sales, Kaskniak, Kahn. Further we will dwell on the main achievements of these researchers. Among all existing classifications, the one proposed by Groth is of particular interest as it serves as the basis for further classifications. The author differentiates between two main types of sex offenders depending on the depth of entrenchment of the deviant behavior, and psychological needs: fixated and regressed /Groth, Hobson & Gary, 1982/. The fixated offenders are characterized by continual, persistent and compulsive inclinations to sexual relations with children. This type of offenders is of particular danger to the society. They have attractions only to children, who are generally not related to them. This attraction appears in the adolescence and often irresistible. Such offenders usually share some common features with children and have not grown up fully /Groth, Hobson & Gary, 1982/. This type of offenders is inclined to pedophilia by nature and their behavior doesn’t result from any stress experienced in childhood. Such offenders typically don’t have any sexual relationships with coevals and, moreover, they are usually are unable to psychosexual maturity. The victims of fixated offenders are males not related or even not acquainted to them. These offenders usually chose as their victims vulnerable children and usually keep them for a continuing sexual relationship /Berliner &Conte, 1995/. Fixated offenders usually are strongly convinced that children derive satisfaction and experience from the sexual relations and believe that the relations they established are strong caring and interdependent. The worse is that this type of abuse often passes unreported and according to some researches such abuser can hurt about 70 children before he is stopped and convicted /Groth, Hobson & Gary, 1982/. The other type of offenders is regressed offenders, who usually develop their deviant behavior in adulthood and whose tendency to CSA results from the external stresses, experienced previously and influencing their childhood. On the other hand, the stress factors may influence a person in the adult age, for example, problems in the private or marital life, unemployment, isolation and others. Such situations often lead to poor self-esteem and in order to fulfill themselves they involve into sexual relations with the children for the sake of self-assertion. The offender though feels guilt for this behavior; in fact, is unable to control his desires. Sexual attraction to children is temporal, not fixed. The offender typically has sexual relations with the people of his age group as well /Simon, Sales, Kaskniak, & Kahn, 1992/. The victims of regressed offenders become usually young females, who are easily reachable, thus regressed offenders very often victimize their own children or relatives. It is almost impossible to differentiate regressed offenders from the normal men as they tend to have the same normal patterns of behavior. Regressive offenders are involved in sexual relations with children not from the sexual desire alone. The offender may also be motivated by the desire to fulfil himself, to show his advantage or simply to subdue the other person, who is his victim /Groth, Hobson & Gary, 1982/. One more classification can be made on the basis of the force application. According to this classification we can differentiate between a sex-pressure offence and a sex-force offence. While performing a sex-pressure offence, the abuser lures his victim to sexual relations. The offender tempts the child to cooperate but if he fails to do this, he usually neither pursues nor forces his victim to sexual relations. Quite on the contrary, in the case of a sex-force offence, the abuser either frightens or forces a child to sexual relations. In the first case the offender verbally makes a child subdue to his sexual desires, showing that he is stronger or superior than a child. For sex-force offenders the sexual relations with the child is only the means of sexual satisfaction or release/Groth, Hobson & Gary, 1982/. The other subtype of sex-force offenders, who apply their physical force and are very aggressive towards the children, is called “sadistic” offenders. For them it’s not enough just to have sexual relations with the child. In order to achieve satisfaction they hurt and inflict pain to a child. These offenders are the most dangerous, though, at the same time they are the rarest /Groth, Hobson & Gary, 1982/. If to look at the psychological world of child sexual offenders, we can draw a conclusion that for the most part these people have low self-esteem, they are confused about their sexuality and often have problems in sexual relations with the partners of their own age. For many abusers the sexual relations with children are a source of love and intimacy, which they are unable to get from their coevals. There are also cases, when offenders use sexual relations with children in order to get control over the other adult. The majority of abusers were also abused or neglected in their childhood, when a child they felt abandoned, insecure or lonely. The other abusers could have a normal and happy childhood, but experienced heavy and crucial crises in their adult life. The efforts should be applied to cure the problem of sex offence as a social phenomenon. In this respect much was done and still much is to be done. There are quite a number of various techniques of treatment sexual abusers and I consider it important to make an overview of the main achievements in this sphere. SECTION 3 Theory application One of the most problematic issues in the topic of sex offenders is their treatment. A wide variety of possible theories were proposed on this very topic. We will try to shortly dwell on the most popular ones, explaining their main tenets, advantages and disadvantages. In order to cure a sex offender, a complete assessment should first be made by mental health professionals to decide what treatment an offender should get. This assessment deals with the risk factors, which instigate a person to become a sex-offender. Professional assess those factors through actuarial and clinical means. Fist ones give an evaluation of a person in perspective of “standardized scores on risk assessment instruments”, and the second are based on evaluation of the offender by mental health professional /Grubin,1997/. The best results can be achieved by the combination of these two methods. One more problem, which is often discovered, is that the majority of offenders is regressed or fixated, which means that they are involved in continuous sexual contacts with children. Numerous studies were made to discover the main reasons of recidivism among sex offenders. Hanson and Harris suggest that the main reasons of regressed type of sex offences are the following: the society is not concerned with the problem to the level it should be, it is too tolerant to the issues of sexual assault, there are not developed self-management strategies for sex-offenders and finally that sex-offenders, even those, who desire to get out of there behavior, face the difficulties of the absence of professional support / Hanson and Harris, 2000/. With the increase of public concern with this problem, a number of measures were invented to understand and limit the recidivism of sex offenders. The most popular among them are the Sex Offender Risk Appraisal Guide (SORAG), Rapid Risk Assessment of Sexual Offense Recidivism (RRASOR), Static-99 and the Minnesota Sex Offender Screening Tool-Revised (MnSOSTR) / Sjöestedt & Långström, 2001; Barbaree, Seto, Langton, & Peacock, 2001/. Anyway, child sexual abuse is a complex issue and it should be approached in the proper way. Pedophilia is often treated as a disease and only when properly treated in adequate support groups, a sex offender can accept socially appropriate behavior. Though there are some ground to state that pedophiles have the highest recidivism rate among all criminals but when treated professionally the sex abuser is very likely not to indulge in his practice again /Goldberg, 2002/. Child offenders should be treated not only as criminals but also as people with serious mental disorders. They should receive a considerable help to understand the reason of their deviant behavior and the damage, they cause to psyche and health of children. Offenders should be taught how to change their behavior and how to acquire appropriate sexual behaviors. The most problematic issue is the issue of incest as in this case the whole family should undergo the therapy of professionals, who should teach them how to cope with this problem and avoid it in future / Brown, 2005/. Fisher and Beech described one of the most effective ways of treatment of sexual offenders. According to them only three of the 63 offender treatment programs were used more than five years, which shows the difficulty of the problem. They prove that the majority of sex offenders, who could be successfully treated, are emotionally isolated people with low self-esteem, who could not find the appropriate sexual partner among their same-age group. These offenders could not understand the whole seriousness of the damage, they caused to children and usually considered the sexual intercourse as normal or almost normal /Fisher & Beech, 1999/. The results of the proposed treatment showed that the vast majority of offenders received the due effect and were willing to change their sexual behaviors, which led to the decrease of the number of child offensive crimes. One of the most effective treatment techniques is the combination of behavioral and cognitive behavioral treatment. These methods take into account the works by famous psychologists like Sigmund Freud, John B. Watson and Alfred Kinsey, Kurt Freund. Many of the non-behavioral, which were used on the early stages of treatment methodology, proved that sex offenders can and should be treated. Now we can say for sure that such method as the sexual preference hypothesis is not effective to treat such a complex problem as well as electrical aversion therapy and other hard-treatment techniques /Laws & Marshall, 2003/. The development of the cognitive models of sexual abuse treatment began a new era in treatment of sex offenders. It is aimed to learn such aspects as self-esteem of the abuser, his sexual preferences and sex education, social conditions, the level of his regressivety. The combination of cognitive behavioral and psychotropic techniques is the most beneficial for sex abusers treatment. Here the whole complexity of approaches is present, like “cognitive behavioral methods, relapse prevention techniques, psychopharmacology, group therapy, and methods including risks and needs of sexual offenders” /Matson, 2002/. According to him, the most effective approach should combine techniques based on cooperation and distribution of information in the process of treatment and supervision. SECTION 4 Main policies used to address the problem of internet sex offenders With the beginning of the total internatization era, the problem of sex offenders in World Wide Web appeared with the new force. Internet made it easier for sex offender to find and to lure his young and credulous victim. Many pedophile internet sites maintain links to children chat rooms and invent constant messages assuring children that adult-child sex is normal and natural. These messages come into opposition with what was said to children by their parents or teachers. And it often happens that children listen to strangers more than to their close people either out of resist or of natural children curiosity. So, let’s briefly discuss the possible preventive measures, which could be taken to secure children. The greatest role in this process belongs to parents, who are the first people to explain children the rules and the norms of the safe Internet use. But of course, in order to achieve the result all the complex of measures should be undertaken. The first requirement is for parents to be Internet-educated and know about possible risks of the world web. Parents should explain their children the main rules of communication on-line. First of all computer should be paced in the central part of the house, where the parents could easily control their children exploring the Internet. The other rule is for children to avoid meeting on-line friends or giving them contact information including exact address, telephone numbers or full names without parents’ permission /Child Safety online, 1997/ The other measures, which could be undertaken, are technical ones. Nowadays the technology tries to meet parents’ needs and proposes a wide variety of different tools, more effective and simpler to work with. Nowadays many families, using such online service providers (OSPs) like Prodigy, America Online or CompuServe, which are intended to limit the scope of e-mail, Internet access and communication beyond the closed safe system and checked chat rooms. Parents can also make use of various blocking and filtering programs like Net Nanny, CyberPatrol, Surf Watch and many others, which screen all the information, viewed or send by the child, and determine “bad sites”, which are included in the database of the program /Child Safety online, 1997/ One more suggested solution of the problem is sites rating. There exist quite many rating companies, like Net Shepherd, RSACi (Recreational Software Advisory Council on the Internet) and SafeSurf /Child Safety online, 1997/ Nevertheless, the number of sites rated is negligibly small comparatively to the general quantity of web sites, which increases with each coming day and it’s only up to parents to decide whether they desire to limit the number of web sites, available to kids, to the scope of whose checked. The above-mentioned measures show how parents want to secure their children from the sexual threat, coming from the World Wide Web. But of course parents’ efforts alone are not enough to solve the problem. Therefore we will also investigate what measures were undertaken on the Governmental level. First legal act, which tackled upon the problem of sex offenders in the Internet, was the Communication Decency Act (CDA), which although highlights the problem, does not solve the problem as it is much ambiguous and does not present any laws, limiting or controlling pornography on the Internet /Child Safety online, 1997/ There are some laws concerning the distribution of child pornography in the Internet, which limits distribution to adults and children in the same way. The law defines the child pornography as any visual material, showing a child under 18 years old, in the process of sexual intercourse with an adult or an exhibition of the child’s genitals. Here the law adheres the opinion that any visual sexually-connected material including children is considered and punished as child sexual abuse as “it is harmful to the physiological, emotional, and mental health of the child” /Byron White, 1982/. The deficiency in early laws until 1996 concerning child pornography in the internet was that in order for these laws to be applied the actual child was to be depicted. But the computer technologies made it possible to depict children bodies in washed pictures, for users to be able to understand whom they belonged but not clear enough to be pursuit by the law /Child Safety online, 1997/ This shortcoming was amended in 1996 by The Child Pornography Prevention Act, under which all child images involved in sex, even when they are generated by computer, are considered unlawful /Child Safety online, 1997/. There are also laws, which prohibit usage of the Internet to corrupt children, sending messages with sexual content with the aim to harass children. But in spite of all efforts, current laws, controlling the transmission of the sexually-context material to children in the Internet, are not perfect and sex offenders are still using internet for luring and corruption of children. SECTION 5 Conclusions So, we can see that the problem of sex offenders is very urgent and requires serious consideration and complex treatment. Based on the researches, made by different scholars, we can make a conclusion that sex-offensive behavior towards children is a result of various psychological deviation. It can be either psychological trauma experienced for the most part in childhood as in case of regressed sex offenders, or psychosexual immaturity of an adult person, as in case of fixated sex offenders. To my mind the problem is very complicated and requires serious consideration. There is no only possible way to solve this problem. In order to eliminate the problem, the authority and parents should combine rigid legal approach with more efficient security measures for children in the Internet and actual life, which were suggested by me in the previous section of the paper, and, of course, psychological treatment of sex offenders, conducted on the basis of combination of cognitive behavioral and psychotropic techniques, which was suggested by Matson and other scholars in the third section of the paper. REFERENCES BARBAREE, H.E., SETO, M.C., LANGTON, C.M., & PEACOCK, E.J. (2001). Evaluating the predictive accuracy of six risk assessment instruments for adult sex offenders. Criminal Justice & Behavior, 28 (4). BERLINER, L., and CONTE, J. (1995). The effects of disclosure and intervention on sexually abused children, Child Abuse & Neglect, 19. CHILD SAFETY ONLINE (December, 1997). Internet Online Summit: Focus on Children, Washington DC. CORBY, B. (2000). Child Abuse: Towards a Knowledge Base, Buckingham, Open University Press. FISHER, D., & BEECH, A.R. (1999). Current practice in Britain with sexual offenders. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 14 (3). GRUBIN, D. (1999). Sex Offending Against Children: Understanding the Risk, London, Home Office. GRUBIN, D. (1997). Inferring predictors of risk: Sex offenders. International Review of Psychiatry, 9. GALLAGHER, B. (1998). Paedophiles: What’s the problem? NOTA News, 28. GALLAGHER, B., BRAFORD, M. and PEASE K. (2002). The Sexual Abuse of Children & Society, Wiley InterScience. GOLDBERG, Y.Ch. (2002). Can Sex Offenders Ever Be Cured? The Jewish Press. GROTH, A., HOBSON, W. and GARY, T. (1982). The child molester: clinical observations, Social Work and Child Sexual Abuse, 1. HANSON, R.K. & HARRIS, A.J.R. (2000). Where should we intervene? Dynamic predictors of sexual offense recidivism. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 27. LAWS, D.R., MARSHALL, W.L. (2003). A brief history of behavioral and cognitive behavioral approaches to sex offenders: Part 1. Early developments. Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, 15 (2). MATSON, S. (2002). Sex offender treatment: A critical management tool. Corrections Today, 64 (6), 114-118. SIMON, L., SALES, B., KASHNIAK, A., and KAHN, M. (1992). Characteristics of child molesters: Implications for the fixated-regressed dichotomy, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 7. SJÖESTEDT, G. & LÅNGSTRÖM, N. (2001). Actuarial assessment of sex offender recidivism risk: A crossvalidation of the RRASOR and the Static-99 in Sweden. Law and Human Behavior, 25. WALN K. BROWN (2005). About Child Sexual Abuse.. [Online]. Available from: < williamgladdenfoundation.org> [21 September 2006]. WHAT IS GROOMING? (2002). [Online]. Available from: [21 September 2006]. WHITE, B.(1982). New York v. Ferber, NY. Read More