Sex Offender Rehabilitation: An Analytical Essay
             Few topics cause as much emotional opinion as sexual abuse and the treatment of the abusers. The development of programs promoting therapeutic changes in sex offenders can be negatively affected by society's emotional responses to these crimes. However, the power of these emotions should not be used to condemn sex offenders as monsters, but to fuel the will to search for appropriate treatments.
             It is important to understand that sex offenders can be very different from one another. The term "sex offender" applies to people who have shown many different kinds of behavior. In considering what to do about treating sex offenders, the diversity of their behaviors, motivations, and victims need to be kept in mind. One classification of sex offenders separates them by their victim preferences. The two main categories are rapists and pedophiles. The term "child molester" is often used as a synonym for "pedophile." Sex offenders that commit incest, referring to those who are biological parents, stepparents or siblings of the victim, are considered a special type of child molester. Whether they prefer victims of the same sex, opposite sex, or both, further classifies child molesters. Exhibitionists, voyeurs, and obscene phone callers, which are another type of sex offender, do not have physical contact with victims. Findings suggest that sex offenders vary with respect to the amount and nature of aggression, vindictiveness and opportunism involved, degrees of fixation and impulsiveness, attitudes toward women, levels of social skills, personal competence, and self-esteem1. Thus, there appear to be no general characteristics that distinguish sex offenders from non-offenders.
             The differences among the sex offender population explain why there are conflicting findings in the research and different theories that attempt to explain the causes f...