Sexual offending
Sexual normativity vs. sexual deviance
• Ideas about what is ‘normal’ change overtime
• E.g., you only have sex within your marriage (christian moral)
• E.g., homosexuality was a mental disorder until 1973
• E.g., rape within marriage was not unlawful in BE until the ’90
“If I were to see the case of a boy aged 10 or 11 who’s intensely erotically attracted toward a man in
his twenties or thirties, if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally
mutual ... then I would not call it pathological in any way.”(John Money, 1991)
Paraphilia and paraphilic disorder
Paraphilia = “the deviation (para) is in which the individual is attracted (philia) “→A deviation in what
you are (sexually) attracted to
Any intense and persistent sexual interest other than sexual interest in genital stimulation or
preparatory fondling with phenotypically normal, physically mature, consenting human partners
Paraphilic disorder: + Currently causing distress or impairment to the individual or a paraphilia whose
satisfaction has entailed personal harm, or risk of harm, to others
Paraphilia ≠ illegal
• Telephone scatologia = Obscene phone calls
• Partialism = Body parts
• Necrophilia = Corpses
• Zoophilia = Animals
• Coprophilia = Feces
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, • Urolagnia = Urine
• Klismaphilia (enemas) = Injecting liquids via the anus
• Autoerotic asphyxiation = Self-induced asphyxiation, sometimes tothe point of near
unconsciousness
• Gerontophilia = Elderly people
• Somnophilia = Sleeping people
Exhibitionism
• Nuisance or sexual crime?
• First appeared in DSM-III (1980)
• DSM-5:
o Exhibitionistic disorder involves persistent and intense sexual arousal from exposing
one’s genitals to a nonconsenting person, typically a stranger, as manifested by
fantasies, urges, or behaviors (APA, 2013)
• Period of at least 6 months of acting on these urges with a non-consenting person, or the
urges/fantasies have causes clinically significant distress or impairment in important life
domains
• Preference of exposure to prepubescent child, adult or both
• Prevalence
o ≈ 2-4% (?)
o National survey Sweden (N = 4.800): 4.3% M, 2.1% F
o 43% of victims did not report to the police (Riordan, 1999)
o Presumption of large ‘dark number’
o Lifetime victimization: ≈ 33%-52% (Clark, Jeglic, Calkins, & Tatar, 2016)
o Perpetrators primarily target:
Young females
Strangers
• Location
o Parking lots, public transportation, parks/woods, public street, inside vehicle
• Behavior
o Mostly not the ‘trenchcoat’ stereotype
o With or without masturbation
• Etiology (= the cause)
o Not clear yet
o Often begins in adolescence/early adulthood
o Few hypotheses
• Some etiology theories
o Behavioral theory
Early age: random event in which child (non-intentionally) exposes genitals
and finds it pleasurable and sexually stimulating
Repetition of the act, fantasizing, planning, masturbating
Increasing urge and frequency
o →Classical conditioning
o Psychoanalytic theory
Male: defence against castration anxiety
Female: defence against narcissistic wound from castration
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