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…

Child sexual offenders are hypothesized to hold offence-supportive beliefs that set them apart from others. The current study seeks support for this view via a cognitive-experimental approach. Child sexual offenders and offender controls were exposed to pictures of semi-clothed children (priming condition) or clothed, mature adults (control…

A qualitative analysis of interview data with 41 rapists determined that five implicit theories (ITs) underlie rapists' offense supportive beliefs/feelings/motives: (a) dangerous world (DW)--where men have feelings of generalized anger and/or resentment toward others; (b) women are dangerous--where men hold a set of attitudes that are hostile…

While the phenomenon of sexual fantasy has been researched extensively, little contemporary inquiry has investigated the structural properties of sexual fantasy within the context of sexual offending. In this study, a qualitative analysis was used to develop a descriptive model of the phenomena of sexual fantasy during the offence process.…