The Reasons Sex Offenders Offend

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Recommended: Sociological theories of sexual offending

The Reasons Sex Offenders Offend

I am going to look at two books, which explain why people become sex offenders. The first book that I looked at examines four theories. These theories are psychodynamic theories, behavioral theories, biological theories, and empirical theories. The second book that I looked at showed some case studies of men that had committed sex offences and looked at some of the different things that caused these men to offend.

The first theory is the psychodynamic theory, which looks at three ways of classifying the purpose of the act. The first is an aggressive purpose, which is to humiliate, dirty and belittle the victim. This purpose usually shows that the men usually have a lot of trouble in heterosexual relationships. The second is a sexual purpose where the aggression is in the service of sexual wishes, which means that the rapist has a fantasy that he wants lived out. The third is tied in with the second which is the aggressor has a sadistic aim where he feels that some violence must occur for there to be sexual pleasure. (Hollin, p. 41)

The second theory is the behavioral theory, which states that "rapists in general are less aroused by stimuli depicting forceful sex that by stimuli depicting mutually enjoyable sex."(Hollin, p. 42) There is an exception to this with extremely violent rapists whereas they are just as aroused by forceful depictions as they are by mutual enjoyment depictions

The third theory is the biological theory, which says that there are three types of biological explanations offered to explain rape. The first one is that some rapists have a brain dysfunction, which causes them to do it impulsively with the aggression being a part of that. The second one is that rapis...

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...men wish to have power. All men need intimacy. And most men feel deprived at one time or another. The way the men deal with these needs will all depend on whether he is going to become a sexual offender." (Marshall, p. 85)

So as you can see here there are many different ideas of why men become sex offenders. I think that they are all very valid, but I found the second book a lot easier to understand and I found that the reasoning behind it was a lot better because you had several situations where you could put a sex crime to a person and see what had gone wrong in the persons life that may have made the offend.

Bibliography

Hollin, Clive R., et al. Clinical Approaches to Sex Offenders and Their Victims. England:

John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1991.

Marshall, W.L., et al. Criminal Neglect: Why Sex Offenders go Free. Toronto:

Doubleday Canada Ltd., 1990.

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