Treatment programs for serious offenders such as sex offenders typically include an empathy training component as part of a comprehensive intervention package. The reasons for doing so are partly based on research evidence indicating that social disconnection and relationship ruptures related to empathy failures often trigger offending, and also…

Rehabilitation and treatment perspectives and interventions have concentrated efforts on areas where perpetrators of sexual abuse are deficient, neglecting those where offenders actively seek and strategically plan sexual offence situations and scenarios. Whereas sexual offenders may display deficiencies in some aspects of their lives, there are…

An innovative theory of the nature of cognition, the extended mind theory (EMT), has emerged recently in the cognitive science literature. According to the EMT, the boundaries of the mind extend beyond the boundaries of skull and skin, into the world beyond. My aim in this paper is to consider the practical implications of the EMT for therapists…

In this article, the authors draw on literatures outside sexual offending and make suggestions for working more positively and constructively with these offenders. Although the management of risk is a necessary feature of treatment, it needs to occur in conjunction with a strength-based approach. An exclusive focus on risk can lead to overly…