| Summary: | The primary purpose of this project was to examine some
of the factors which lead child molesters to sexually abuse
their victims. To understand why these sexual activities
occurred, molesters' own past histories of abuse were
considered. To determine how molesters sexually abused
children, their approach to selecting, seducing, and
silencing the children was examined. The secondary purpose
of this project was to evaluate the child molesters'
strategies on ethical reasoning tasks after being involved
in a sexual relationship with a child . Subjects included
twenty convicted male offenders who volunteered to
participate while residing at a medium security prison: ten
were convicted of extra-familial offences, while the rest
were convicted of intra - familial offences. During
unstructured interviews, these offenders provided
descriptions of their previous sexual experiences, including
the sexual activities that occurred with their victims. The
semi-structured interviews consisted of meta-ethical tasks
measuring the offender's sense of personal continuity over
time and skeptical doubt tasks measuring the offender's
ability to resolve conflicting issues. These meta-ethical
tasks were followed by normative ethical tasks involving
three hypothetical dilemmas to measure moral competence and
a personal dilemma to measure moral behavior. The results
for the unstructured interview supported Marshall's (1989)
theory that sex offenders select children that will meet
their needs, thus avoiding loneliness. Child molesters
reported selecting more non-vulnerable than vulnerable
children. Frequently they admitted seducing children
through acts of comforting. Not only did they comfort the
child , the child would comfort the molester. The majority
of child molesters reported they knew the would remain
silent about the events that had occurred. The results for
the meta-ethical task, personal continuum, indicated that
molesters who received the most treatment used higher
levels of reasoning. They also used more flexible
strategies on the skeptical doubt tasks. For the normative
ethical tasks, performance by molesters on the
hypothetical dilemmas was more advanced than performance on
the personal dilemmas. For the personal dilemmas, the
intra-familial offenders in the high-treatment group
demonstrated less advanced levels of reasoning than the
intra-familial offenders i n the low-treatment group.
Further research is needed to clarify these results from a
theoretical , empirical and practical level. === Arts, Faculty of === Psychology, Department of === Graduate
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