Forensic Psychology For Dummies (138 page)

Of course, ignoring constant pressure from stalkers is extremely difficult and victims may be tempted to try and reason with them, which is in fact almost universally pointless. The stalker simply re-interprets the contact as he wants and it usually fuels his actions.

Unfortunately, a nil response can also lead to more aggressive and/or intrusive actions. In that case, the use of harassment laws to get a court order may be the only way forward. In some cases they succeed in getting the stalker to desist. The stalker may find another ‘love object’ to attend to.

Police intervention such as arrest and conviction has to be handled very sensitively, because it can make matters considerably worse, antagonising the stalker and causing even more violent actions. But if combined with some removal of access to the victim, such intervention may be of help.

Sadly, removing the possibility of contact with the victim may require the target to move away totally from any area to which the stalker has access. This requires hiding the new location from anyone who may have contact with the stalker, which can be enormously disturbing and still leave the victim with the fear that the stalker may discover their new whereabouts.

Chapter 15

Treating Sexual Offenders

In This Chapter

Introducing the forms of sexual assault

Assessing sex offenders and their deviance

Looking at some approaches to treatment

Investigating child abuse within the family

Sexual assault is particularly disturbing because it violates the most intimate aspects of the victim. Sexual crimes also raise fundamental challenges around attitudes held by various subgroups or within different cultures. Such problems are illustrated by the stark fact that in Western developed countries, until quite recently the law didn’t recognise rape in marriage. Even today, many countries in the world don’t accept that a husband’s sexual assault of his wife is against the law.

In addition, male victims of rape in many countries still have difficulty getting the crime against them taken seriously. As has recently been widely publicised, certain institutions, such as the Catholic Church or children’s hostels, have hidden from public view – or even implicitly condoned – the sexual abuse of children.

These examples go to show that probably more than any other crime, sexual assault is embedded in a set of norms and accepted values that are part of local customs and ways of life.

Awareness is growing, however, that these crimes have to be dealt with and that sexual offenders may benefit from special forms of treatment. As with all such interventions, the starting point is a careful assessment to diagnose the individual’s particular problems as well as the need for a prognosis, which amounts to a prediction of the likelihood of them offending again (in other words, risk assessment).

In this chapter, I give a brief introduction to the different types of sexual assault and their associated psychological aspects, and I examine ways of assessing the perpetrators. I also discuss several treatment programmes and focus more closely on a particularly widespread and yet problematic area – child sexual abuse within the family.

Defining Sexual Offences and Offenders

Sexual offending is probably the crime with the most connected psychological issues, because it involves behaviour, attitudes and aspects of the offender’s personality and ways of relating to other people. Unsurprisingly, therefore, sexual crimes are the ones that forensic psychologists have studied the most.

Many different types of sexual offences and offenders exist and being aware of this large variation is important, because different types of offence require different forms of treatment (check out Table 15-1).

Table 15-1 Varieties of Sexual Offence

In addition to the criminal sexual offences in Table 15-1, a variety of sexual activities
(paraphilias)
are generally regarded as being sexually deviant. Some of these are clearly illegal and others less so (see Table 15-2). In fact many paraphilias can be part of fantasy explorations between consenting adults. In some cases they shape or cause a person to become involved in the illegal activities listed in Table 15-2 or other crimes that these desires engender.

Table 15-2 Selection of Paraphilias