Once, in a three-day taping that included several sadists, the material was so overwhelming that both the film crew and I got sick – I with a sinus infection, and the entire film crew with...

Oddly then, in our search for meaning, we often assign victims too much blame for their assaults, and offenders too little. Our inconsistencies do not seem to trouble us, but they are truly puzzling. After...

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...

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...

over and over victims are blamed for their assaults. and when we imply that victims bring on their own fates – whether to make ourselves feel more efficacious or to make the world seem just...

The data on organised abuse has been simplified or distorted in an attempt force it to conform to mechanical psychological models of dissociative obedience or else to the psychiatric framework of ‘paedophilia’. Psychopathology alone is...

Like the psychological model outlined above, the psychiatric understanding of ’organised paedophilia’ is a framework that is focused primarily on individual psychological factors and overlooks the role of violence in criminal groups and the contexts...

The survivor movements were also challenging the notion of a dysfunctional family as the cause and culture of abuse, rather than being one of the many places where abuse nested. This notion, which in the...

Some writers have even argued that it may be possible to wean sex offenders away from their criminal activities through the use of pornography – with pornography acting as a substitute for sexual acts rather...

Many professionals have to sign gagging clauses or face the sack if they speak out. The social worker and therapist was familiar with the scare that revelation brings to the survivor. […]We are in this...

The discovery that detonated Cleveland is one of Britain’s great contributions to awareness of child abuse. In 1986 and 1987 the Leeds paediatricians Dr Jane Wynne and Dr Christopher Hobbs reported in the Lancet that...

Malevolence takes a bite out off your spirit. Just sitting with it, just talking with people who consciously and deliberately exploit others, feels like being beaten. Over the years, l have seen many therapists burn...