There are thousands of crimes committed everyday. Some are planned and others can happen suddenly without any real thought taking place. But for a sexual offender, the optimal word for their disgusting decisions is without a doubt planning. Sexual offenders are some of the most calculated criminals walking around in our society. When they are committing sexual offenses they are doing so through an act called the offense cycle. According to Sexual Offenses and Offenders (2013), the offense cycle is the series of decisions made by offenders prior to the act as well as decisions made post crime. The fascinating thing about these decisions is that the timing of them can go in either direction. Some can take place after prolonged periods of time …show more content…
As also explained by Sexual Offenses and Offenders (2013), the cycle talks about the feelings these offenders have before during and after the crime. It discusses thoughts, the grooming of a victim and even how these sick individuals talk themselves into feeling that what they did was ok (Terry, 2013). Each and every sexual offender on this planet carries with them a specific and different offense cycle. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Jeffery Dahmer, Ted Bundy or John Wayne gacy. Each and every sexual offender has a different way of going about their crimes and this is what makes these acts so scary. No matter how much we know about these types of offenses, you never know when a new suspect emerges with a whole different offense cycle in …show more content…
According to our book Sexual Offenses and Offenders (2013), this phase is all about selecting their prey and convincing the victim to take whatever sexual abuse is about to occur. This is easier done with kids than adults because kids are easier to manipulate (Terry, 2013). And along with picking of prey and convincing this phase is also the time when offenders make themselves seem they would be the farthers thing from one. According to Laurel House (2015), Many establish themselves in the community as maybe even too nice of a person. Someone who is hard working and helps everyone out. This allows the offender to embed themselves in and get the trust of everyone there (House, 2015). In the case of Hanses, he moved to Alaska to start a new life where he opened up a successful bake shop everyone in the community loved. As explained by the youtube video “Robert Hansen: Alaska’s Serial Killer-crime documentary” (Don’t Look, 2013), Hansen seemed like a great family and business man and someone who wasn’t capable of such terrible crimes (Don’t look, 2013). However no one knew Hansen secret life and the sick thoughts going on in his mind. According to Murderpedia.org (2016), Hansen victim of choice were local exotic dancers, prostitutes or something similar. He felt that due to his victims either age or profession it would make it easier for him to get away with it because police might lack trust in the
Witt, P., Greenfield, D., & Hiscox, S. (2008). Cognitive/behavioural approaches to the treatment adult sex offenders. Journal of Psychiatry & Law, 36(2), 245-269, retrieved from EBSCOhost
Offenders are able to identify weaknesses in a child’s personality or life circumstances and then exploit them. There can be many different characteristics a Child Molester or Pedophile uses for their selection process. The characteristics are the foll...
According to federal law, the term ‘serial killings’ means a series of three or more killings, not less than one of which was committed within the United States, having common characteristics such as to suggest the reasonable possibility that the crimes were committed by the same actor or actors. Throughout history, serial killers have always been a fascination among many individuals. On numerous occasions, law enforcement has tried to dive into the psyche of these killers to determine why they kill. There have also been numerous stereotypes placed on serial killers. Typical stereotypes are serial killers are all white males, loners, and that their crimes are driven by sex.
Crimes are deliberate acts, with the intent of benefiting the offender. 2. Benefiting unsuccessfully in choosing the best decisions because of the risks and uncertainty involved. 3. Decision making significantly varies with the nature of the crime. 4. Involvement decisions are quite different from the commission (event decision) of a specific act. 5. Involvement decisions are divided into three stages: first time involvement (initiation), continued involvement (habituation) and ceasing to offend (desistance), 6. Event decisions include a sequence of choices made at each stage of the criminal act, involvement model, background factors and situational life styles, initiation (of becoming involved in a crime), habituation (deciding to continue with crime), distance (deciding to stop criminal behavior) and event model – criminal even
It is typically thought that sex offenders are the type of individual that needs to be tried in our courts and then sentenced because there is really no hope for an individual that harms the most innocent of our society. But there just may be an exception to this way of thinking. Juveniles who at one point themselves may have been victims, and as they have grown into adolescence not knowing why they are thinking the way they are, turn around and abuse others. Then what happens is that these adolescents once found out, are then tried in our courts as adults because in the mind of the court they are committing an adult crime. But there are alternatives for these juveniles that are being placed in our court system. Because at this stage in their development they are more receptive to treatment options and there are treatments available with valid research to substantiate them. Our judicial system just needs to recognize these options in order to try to lessen the amount of trauma inflicted on these already potentially traumatized individuals.
Many people might think that sex offenders are repugnant to society and that people who commit sex crimes should be removed from our society. The reality is that many people do not know that most people who commit sex offenses are normal people. In most cases, they are hardworking people who got caught doing something our society ‘thinks’ is wrong and get labelled sex offenders. This is where Labeling Theory comes into places, because it focus on social and institutional responses to an individual. The book PERVERTS and PREDATORS: The Making of Sexual Offending Laws talks about the emerging of Perverts and Predators, and which types of people society labels “Pervert and Predators.”
Vandiver, D. M., & Teske, R. (2006). Juvenile female and male sex offenders a comparison of offender, victim, and judicial processing characteristics. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 50(2), 148-165.
It is a common stereotype that all sex offenders have some form of psychopathy, and therefore they cannot be treated, however most sexual offenders do not have major mental illness or psychological maladjustment (Ward, Polaschek and Busch, 2006), therefore it is not impossible to treat them. Finkelhor’s (1984) precondition model was made with the assumption that the psychopathology of an individual will only take us so far in explaining sexually abusive behaviour, Finkelhor states that 4 stages of preconditions must exist before sexual abuse can take place, these are; Primary motivation to abuse a child sexually, overcoming of internal and external inhibitions and dealing with a child’s resistance to sexual abuse, for each subsequent precondition to occur the previous one must be achieved. Finkelhor argues th...
Sex offender legislation has been encouraged and written to protect the community and the people at large against recidivism and or to help with the reintegration of those released from prison. Nevertheless, a big question has occurred as to if the tough laws created help the community especially to prevent recidivism or make the situation even worse than it already is. Sex offenders are categorized into three levels for example in the case of the state of Massachusetts; in level one the person is not considered dangerous, and chances of him repeating a sexual offense are low thus his details are not made available to the public (Robbers, 2009). In level two chances of reoccurrence are average thus public have access to this level offenders through local police departments in level three risk of reoffense is high, and a substantial public safety interest is served to protect the public from such individuals.
In today’s society, juveniles that commit a sexual assault have become the subject of society. It’s become a problem in the United States due to the rise of sexual offenses committed by juveniles. The general public attitude towards sex offenders appears to be highly negative (Valliant, Furac, & Antonowicz, 1994). The public reactions in the past years have shaped policy on legal approaches to managing sexual offenses. The policies have included severe sentencing laws, sex offender registry, and civil commitment as a sexually violent predator (Quinn, Forsyth, & Mullen-Quinn, 2004). This is despite recidivism data suggesting that a relatively small group of juvenile offenders commit repeat sexual assaults after a response to their sexual offending (Righthand &Welch, 2004).
It is also noteworthy that this is not limited to child sex offenders. Many adults that are arrested as sex offenders were involved with people they knew or had seduced; instead of the stereotypical brute that forces his or herself on their victim. No matter the methods employed in committing the crimes that they do, there is still the question, what drives a sex
Cashwell, C. S. and Caruso, M. 2014. Adolescent Sex Offenders: Identification and Intervention Strategies. [e-book] Sage Publications. 1. http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/C_Cashwell_Adolescent_1997.pdf [Accessed: 14 Mar 2014].
There are several identifiable psychological factors that increase the likelihood an individual will demonstrate deviant sexual behavior. One of the most important contributing factors is physical or sexual abuse endured as a child. According to Becerra-García, García-León and Egan (2012), sex offenders are twice as likely to report being sexually, emotionally, or physically abused as a child in comparison to other offenders. There are also other factors besides abuse that must be taken into consideration. A recent study on female sex offenders by Roe-Sepowitz and Krysik (2008) states, “the data reveal that many of the 118 female juvenile sex offenders came from chaotic and disorganized families and had poor parental supervision and serious school and mental health problems”. As Becerra-García, García-León and Egan (2012) discuss further, there are also personality traits that sex offenders are likely to possess, which makes it possible for psychologists to distinguish general characteristics of sex offenders. These personality traits can be identified using the Five Factor Model, which scales an individual’s level of neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
Sex offenders have been a serious problem for our legal system at all levels, not to mention those who have been their victims. There are 43,000 inmates in prison for sexual offenses while each year in this country over 510,000 children are sexually assaulted(Oakes 99). The latter statistic, in its context, does not convey the severity of the situation. Each year 510,000 children have their childhood's destroyed, possibly on more than one occasion, and are faced with dealing with the assault for the rest of their lives. Sadly, many of those assaults are perpetrated by people who have already been through the correctional system only to victimize again. Sex offenders, as a class of criminals, are nine times more likely to repeat their crimes(Oakes 99). This presents a
There have been many serial killer cases that have attracted the attention of not only the media but of mental health experts as well. Many experts from a variety of different fields have come together to answer one question: Why did they do it? It is believed that most, if not all, serial killers have a mental illness, motives, and/or trauma during their lives that made them start killing. Serial killers are not only the effect of nurture but also nature. The environment of their country, the United States is our focus, can cause the number of serial killers to increase especially if the country itself is unstable.