Forensic Psychology For Dummies (145 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
• Attitudes and beliefs that condone domestic violence.
• Poor emotional control.
• Deficits in social skills.
• Anger or other reasons for offending.
Taking a more direct approach: Chemical castration
On the assumption that sex offending is a product of heightened sexual proclivity and uncontrollable libido, from time to time special medication has been administered to persistent sex offenders in order to reduce their sexual desires and greatly reduce their libido. This procedure has had some success in very specific cases.
However, if the sexual assault arises from anger, power or feelings of revenge (issues that I discuss in the earlier section ‘Inquiring into the reasons for rape’), this sort of ‘castration’ can in fact lead to the offender becoming violent and much more dangerous.
Dealing with Child Sexual Abuse in the Family
Around one out of ten adults report that they experienced some sort of abusive sexual contact as a child. The prevalence for women is somewhat higher than for men. The sexual abuse of children most commonly occurs within the family, although the perpetrators are also likely to carry out sexual assaults on people who aren’t family members. The great majority of abusers are men, but as many as 1 in 20 are female.
Examining child abuse in the family
The disturbing fact is that many children are abused within the home and family and suffer sexual and/or physical assaults a number of times, often by different people and over many years. This abuse typically occurs within an abusive family that is able to hide what they are doing from the authorities so that the child’s disclosure of the abuse to teachers, social services or others is ignored. In contrast, a one-off assault by someone the child has little or no prior relationship with is more likely to be acknowledged by the child’s carers and dealt with quickly, reducing its impact and ensuring that it doesn’t happen again.
All types of abuse and neglect of children can leave their mark in many different ways:
Aggressive behaviour
Unsurprisingly, given the far-reaching effects on the individual that such childhood abuse can cause, as many as three out of every four young people in prison have been abused and/or neglected when they were children. However, the resilience of young children is shown by the fact that as few as one in ten sexually abused boys goes on to commit sexual assaults later. The ones that do are usually the children who suffered multiple and varied assaults and neglect. Girls who are sexually abused are quite likely to become violent in later life.
Sexual child abuse is frequently associated with violence within the family, especially towards the child’s mother. Therefore, any consideration of sexual abuse needs to take into account the possibility of many other forms of dysfunctional activity within the home. Abuse of alcohol and drugs is to be expected as part of this pattern as well as a generally coercive and violent atmosphere. Relatives such as uncles, brothers or cousins may also be party to extended sexual abuse.