An investigation of adult male sexual offenders' state-of-mind regarding childhood attachment and its relationship to victim choice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The attachment experiences of sexual offenders have been regarded as significant by researchers and clinicians attempting to explain the etiology of sexual offending behaviour. The goals of this study were: (1) to investigate sexual offenders' state-of-mind regarding childhood attachment and to compare these patterns to a sample of nonsexual offenders and to documented patterns of the general population, (2) to investigate potential differences in state-of-mind regarding attachment among subtypes of sexual offenders in order to gain insight into differential developmental patterns in typology, (3) to investigate the influence of attachment phenomenon such as abandonment, loss, and abuse, and (4) to investigate the relationship between state-of-mind regarding attachment and emotional congruence with children. Interview participants were 61 sexual offenders (extrafamilial child molesters, incest offenders, and rapists) and 40 nonsexual offenders (violent and nonviolent) recruited on a voluntary basis from the federal and provincial offender population. A structured, semi-clinical interview methodology, the Adult Attachment Interview (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1996) was administered and the corresponding coding protocol (Main & Goldwyn, 1998) was utilized. The Child Identification Scale—Revised (Wilson, 1999) was used as a measure of emotional congruence with children. Results indicated that the majority of sexual offenders had an insecure state-of-mind regarding attachment. This was a marked difference from normative samples. Although insecurity of attachment was common to all groups of offenders and, therefore, likely to be a general vulnerability factor, there were important differences between groups in regard to the type of insecurity. Most notable were the child molesters, who were much more likely to be Preoccupied in their state-of-mind regarding attachment. Rapists, violent offenders, and, to a lesser degree, incest offenders were more likely to have a Dismissing state-of-mind. Although still most likely to be Dismissing, nonviolent offenders were more likely than the other groups to have a Secure state-of-mind regarding attachment. Abusive and disruptive childhood environments were common to all offender groups. There was no relationship between state-of-mind regarding attachment and emotional congruence with children. From a clinical perspective, this study demonstrates the importance of assessing state-of-mind regarding attachment, as treatment goals are likely to vary as a function of this factor.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".