Susan Pervan
Mick Hunter
University of Newcastle
New South Wales, Australia
This study examined the cognitive distortions concerning sexual offending
behaviour and social self-esteem of four groups of men (child molesters, rapists, violent offenders, and a control group of university students) using the Bumby RAPE and MOLEST Scales, the Social Self-Esteem Inventory, and the Marlowe-Crowne SocialDesirability Scale. The Bumby RAPE Scale did not discriminate convincingly between thegroups, although the Bumby MOLEST scale did find less disagreement with cognitive distortions among child molesters compared to rapists and violent offenders, but not less than university students. Social self-esteem scores varied between groups with the child molesters showing the lowest self-esteem scores.Furthermore, offenders with high selfesteem selected more pro-social responses than did offenders with low self-esteem.Recent research concerning sexual offender behaviour has established a number of factors commonly associated with offending (Marshall, 1996; Polaschek &King, 2002). Sexual offenders have been shown to exhibit poor intimacy skills(Garlick, Marshall,& Thornton, 1996; Lisak & Ivan, 1995; Marshall , Bryce, Hudson, Ward, & Moth, 1996; Seidman, Marshall, Hudson, &Robertson, 1994;), to experience high degrees of loneliness(Marshall, et al., 1996; Seidman, Marshall, Hudson, & Robertson,1994;), experience social difficulties (Marshall, 1996); exhibit poor coping strategies and engage in sexual coping (Marshall,Cripps, Anderson, & Cortoni, 1999), hold cognitive distortions.
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