Victim Perpetrators Quotes

Are Child Molesters Really Just Victims Themselves? "All victims are offenders," one professional challenged me at a conference, "and all offenders are victims. How does your work address that?"My work doesn't address that because I don't believe there's any evidence for that assertion. Obviously, not all victims are offenders, but it is also likely that most offenders weren't victims. The studies that find a high proportion of child molesters who were victims of child sexual abuse themselves are almost always based on self-report, and even there, study results differ dramatically. Studies show the number of child molesters who were themselves molested as children ranges from 22 percent in some studies to 82 percent in others.[101]

Anna C. Salter

But in any case, validity, offender self-reports have dubious validity, especially when the offender's self-interest is at stake. The only rule for deception in sex offenders I have ever found is this: If it is in the offender's best interests to lie, and if he can do it and not get caught, he will lie. Being victimized as a child has become a ready excuse for perpetrating child molestation. The offender who claims he himself was victimized gets seen as less of a "monster" than one who wasn't a victim, and he gains much more empathy and support. It is hard to trust self-reports of sex offenders about abuse in their past when such reports are in their best interest.Only a few studies on this topic have used objective measures, and they have found very different results.[102]

Anna C. Salter

Treating Abuse Today (Tat), 3(4), pp. 26-33Freyd: I see what you're saying but people in psychology don't have a uniform agreement on this issue of the depth of -- I guess the term that was used at the conference was -- "robust repression."TAT: Well, Pamela, there's a whole lot of evidence that people dissociate traumatic things. What's interesting to me is how the concept of "dissociation" is side-stepped in favor of "repression." I don't think it's as much about repression as it is about traumatic amnesia and dissociation. That has been documented in a variety of trauma survivors. Army psychiatrists in the Second World War, for instance, documented that following battles, many soldiers had amnesia for the battles. Often, the memories wouldn't break through until much later when they were in psychotherapy.Freyd: But I think I mentioned Dr. Loren Pankratz. He is a psychologist who was studying veterans for post-traumatic stress in a Veterans Administration Hospital in Portland. They found some people who were admitted to Veteran's hospitals for postrraumatic stress in Vietnam who didn't serve in Vietnam. They found at least one patient who was being treated who wasn't even a veteran. Without external validation, we just can't know --TAT: -- Well, we have external validation in some of our cases.Freyd: In this field you're going to find people who have all levels of belief, understanding, experience with the area of repression. As I said before it's not an area in which there's any kind of uniform agreement in the field. The full notion of repression has a meaning within a psychoanalytic framework and it's got a meaning to people in everyday use and everyday language. What there is evidence for is that any kind of memory is reconstructed and reinterpreted. It has not been shown to be anything else. Memories are reconstructed and reinterpreted from fragments. Some memories are true and some memories are confabulated and some are downright false.TAT: It is certainly possible for in offender to dissociate a memory. It's possible that some of the people who call you could have done or witnessed some of the things they've been accused of -- maybe in an alcoholic black-out or in a dissociative state -- and truly not remember. I think that's very possible.Freyd: I would say that virtually anything is possible. But when the stories include murdering babies and breeding babies and some of the rather bizarre things that come up, it's mighty puzzling.TAT: I've treated adults with dissociative disorders who were both victimized and victimizers. I've seen previously repressed memories of my clients' earlier sexual offenses coming back to them in therapy. You guys seem to be saying, be skeptical if the person claims to have forgotten previously, especially if it is about something horrible. Should we be equally skeptical if someone says "I'm remembering that I perpetrated and I didn't remember before. It's been repressed for years and now it's surfacing because of therapy." I ask you, should we have the same degree of skepticism for this type of delayed-memory that you have for the other kind?Freyd: Does that happen?TAT: Oh, yes. A lot.

David L. Calof

After a victim is made to participate in an act of evil, the people in charge put a lot of energy into convincing the child or adult that he or she is evil and a perpetrator rather than a victim.p324

Alison Miller

Ritually abusive groups also convince children that something evil has been put inside them. For example, a child is made to believe he or she has a "black heart" - seeing the abuser holding an animal heart and then feeling severe chest pain while it is supposedly inserted. In "brain transplants", the brain of an abuser or of a despised animal such as a rate is supposedly put into a child. Children are told that they are demons or monsters or aliens, or internal copies of an abuser whose "seed" has been implanted by rape.Ch29, p324

Alison Miller

Jan Hindman knows all too well that people who have lied for decades about their offending would lie to her about being victimized as a child, so she compared the reports of abuse by child molesters who were not being polygraphed on their answers with a later group who was informed that they would have to take a polygraph after the interview. The group that was being polygraphed was also given immunity from prosecution for crimes previously unknown in order to take away one of the many reasons that offenders lie

Anna C. Salter

Victim Perpetrators Quotes

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