Obstacles to Help-Seeking for Sexual Offenders: Implications for Prevention of Sexual Abuse

ABSTRACT

Persons with potentially harmful sexual interests such as attraction to minors are unlikely to seek or receive treatment before a sexual offense has been committed. The current study explored barriers to help-seeking in a sample of 372 individuals in treatment for sexual offending. Results revealed that the shame and secrecy resulting from stigma associated with pedophilic interests often prevented our respondents from seeking professional counseling, and only about 20% tried to talk to anyone about their sexual interests prior to their arrest. Barriers to seeking and receiving psychological services included concerns about confidentiality, fears of social and legal consequences, personal shame or confusion about the problem, affordability, and challenges finding competent therapists who were adequately equipped to help them. Understanding and ultimately reducing obstacles to help-seeking can improve the quality of life for people with harmful sexual interests and potentially prevent sexual abuse of children or other vulnerable individuals.     

Looking Back to Move Forward: The Value of Reflexive Journaling for Novice Researchers

For novice qualitative researchers, each encounter in the field yields a ream of questions and uncertainties. While fieldwork has inherent ambiguities for all researchers, novice researchers have less experience on which to draw to assess their interactions with participants. Adding to this uncertainty, gerontological fieldwork is frequently imbued by age-and cohort-related nuances, characteristics which new researchers often do not share with participants. It is also not uncommon for new researchers to work primarily alone on projects, such as dissertations and theses. Mentors and academic advisors can help examine research encounters, however advice may be most constructive following engagement in reflexive exercises. We discuss the benefits of using reflexive journaling to assist with answering the many questions generated while conducting qualitative interviews during a study with family carers. Advisors should consider encouraging the use of reflexive journaling to help novices grow as researchers.     

Ecological Risk Ranking: Development and Evaluation of a Method for Improving Public Participation in Environmental Decision Making

This article reports an extension of the Carnegie Mellon risk-ranking method to incorporate ecological risks and their attributes. On the basis of earlier risk-perception studies, we identified a set of 20 relevant attributes for describing health, safety, and environmental hazards in standardized risk summary sheets. In a series of three ranking sessions, 23 laypeople ranked 10 such hazards in a fictional Midwestern U.S. county using both holistic and multiattribute ranking procedures. Results were consistent with those from previous studies involving only health and safety hazards, providing additional evidence for the validity of the method and the replicability of the resulting rankings. Holistic and multiattribute risk rankings were reasonably consistent both for individuals and for groups. Participants reported that they were satisfied with the procedures and results, and indicated their support for using the method to advise real-world risk-management decisions. Agreement among participants increased over the course of the exercise, perhaps because the materials and deliberations helped participants to correct their misconceptions and clarify their values. Overall, health and safety attributes were judged more important than environmental attributes. However, the overlap between the importance rankings of these two sets of attributes suggests that some information about environmental impacts is important to participants' judgments in comparative risk-assessment tasks.     

Patterns of Intergenerational Transfers in Southeast Asia

This article explores motivations for intergenerational exchanges of time and money using data from Indonesia. The extent of exchange and underlying motivations differ across families but substantial evidence supports the theory that transfers within families serve as insurance for family members. The results also suggest that between some parents and children money is exchanged for time. Additionally, some evidence is consistent with the idea that parents pay for their children's education partly as a loan that is later repaid. The authors compare their results to those that they obtained previously for Malaysia using similar data and methods. The findings regarding motivations for transfers are remarkably similar across the two countries.     

Motives for interqenerational transfers: Evidence from Malaysia

In this paper we discuss a number of hypotheses about motives for intergenerational transfers within the family. We use data on time and money transfers between generations in Malaysia, where there is neither Social Security nor Medicare, to explore these hypotheses empirically. We find evidence supporting the hypotheses that children are an important source of old age security and that old age security is, in part, children s repayment for parental investments in their education. This repayment is partly a function of the children’s in come and, in the case of females, a function of their spouse’s in come. We also find evidence supporting the hypotheses that parents and children engage in the exchange of time help for money.     

Explicit Verbal Sexual Consent Communication: Effects of Gender,Relationship Status,and Type of Sexual Behavior

Objectives: College students believe that they are supposed to be explicit and verbal in their sexual consent communication. We examined various contexts to determine when sexual consent is likely to be communicated explicitly and verbally. Method: We surveyed U.S. college students’ (n?=?707) sexual consent communication. Results: We identified contexts when explicit verbal consent cues are less likely—when the person is a woman, when the sexual relationship is casual, and when the sexual behavior is not vaginal-penile intercourse. Conclusions: If sexual consent is contextual, that means communicating consent should not ever be taken for granted.