How negative childhood experiences influence the child sexual offending acting out?

Details

Supervisors

De Mol, Jan

Faculty

Faculté de psychologie, logopédie, sexologie et des sciences de la famille

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences psychologiques, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

The treatment of sexual offenders and the protection of minors has been widely discussed following the adoption of the law of 17 June 1998 introducing a socio- judicial follow up sentence which may include an obligation of treatment. Although sexual criminality is an issue at the border of several other fields of study such as law, criminology or sociology, when it comes to therapeutic care, it is psychology that has to intervene. In order to ensure effective treatment, it is sometimes necessary to understand the life history of the individual offender. In this way, the present study focuses on the negative experiences of an individual during childhood that will impact on their deviant development in adulthood. To this end, we conducted a literature review to examine the etiological factors of child molestation. Although the data on this issue are rich and sometimes surprising, our review allowed us to identify several interesting aspects that should be investigated, such as attachment style (Garofalo & Bogaerts, 2017) and affect regulation (Gunst et al., 2017, among others). Of all the works investigated, including the most popular ones such as Groth's typology (1982) or Knight & Prentky's (1990), we found Ward & Siegert's model (2002) to be the most promising for clinicians and psychotherapists who wish to understand or intervene on difficult pathways of life course in their treatment of child molesters.