What were they thinking? An exploration of child sexual offenders’ beliefs using a lexical decision task

Abstract

Cognitive distortions have been afforded a key role in the offending behaviour of child sexual offenders. While the mechanisms underlying cognitive distortions are not fully understood, they are generally thought to reflect entrenched beliefs that distinguish child sexual offenders from other individuals. We investigated this hypothesis using a robust experimental technique called the lexical decision task. Child sexual offenders, offender controls, and non-offender controls completed a lexical decision task in which they responded to words that completed sentences in either an offence-supportive or nonoffence-supportive manner. Contrary to predictions, child sexual offenders did not respond faster to words that were consistent with offence-supportive beliefs, relative to controls. However, they did show accelerated recognition for word stems supporting external locus of control beliefs. These results highlight the need to use cognitive experimental methods to study child sexual offenders’ beliefs, and the importance of investigating potential alternative drivers of cognitive distortions.     

E-Governance Approaches at the Local Level: A Case Study in Best Practice

In the fall of 2009, the city of Prague set out to conduct a critical analysis of its overall performance by closely examining the performance of the city's districts. In conjunction with the E-Governance Institute at Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, and the Public Technology Institute in Washington D.C., a quantitative survey of all 22 administrative districts' e-governance and online presence was conducted. Guided by the survey results, qualitative case studies of the top five performing districts were carried out in January 2010. The underlying goal of this research project is to further improve e-governance in Prague and foster a greater understanding of successful digital government initiatives. The findings of the survey and the case studies are presented, and key findings in the case studies are highlighted.     

RUSSIA AND CHINA: AN AXIS OF INSECURITY

The juxtaposition of a declining power with a rising power has a number of historical parallels e.g. the Ottoman Empire, the UK/US relationship. This article examines the decline of Russia and the rise of China, countries whose links go back some 400 years. They share many attitudes to the rest of the world, but the bilateral relationship has to accommodate China's vertiginous economic growth and the growing hydrocarbon dependence of Russia's economy, as well as the interests of both countries in the Russian Far East and Central Asia. For the moment both sides seem prepared to make the effort needed to sustain the relationship, but there must be doubts about the sustainability of this essentially benign scenario in the longer term.     

Nolan,councillors and planning

This article focuses on the role of councillors in planning. The views of the Nolan Committee, which were expressed in their third report, are set into the context of other reports, published during the 1990s, about the way councillors exercised their planning responsibilities. Two contrasting views of the planning system as a quasi‐judicial process and as an administrative/representative process are highlighted. The article concludes that the Nolan report is significant because it reasserts the representative role of councillors in contrast to the professional planning view that councillors should perform a quasi‐judicial role.     

Punishment or therapy? The ethics of sexual offending treatment

Abstract

The claim that sex offender treatment is a form of punishment and as such cannot be covered by traditional ethical codes is a controversial one. It challenges the ethical basis of current practice and compels clinicians to rethink the work they do with sex offenders. In this paper I comment on Bill Glaser's defence of that idea in a challenging and timely paper and David Prescott and Jill Leveson's rejection of his claims. First, I consider briefly the nature of both punishment and treatment and outline Glaser's argument and Prescott and Levenson's rejoinder. I then investigate what a comprehensive argument for either position should look like and finish with a few comments on each paper.     

Reviews

Postmodern Revisionings of the Political Anna Yeatman, Routledge London and New York 1994

An Introduction to Semiotics Thomas A. Sebeok, Pinter London 1994

The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance Rolf Wiggershaus translated by Michael Robertson, Polity Press Cambridge 1994

An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics Suzanne Eggins, Pinter London 1994     

Regulated restlessness: museums,liberal government and the historical sciences

The ways citizen participation and democracy are changing are poorly understood due to the dominance of theories inherited from the eioghteenth centruy: Democratic citizenship can be better understood if critical reflection is re-oriented around the games of concrete freedom here and now as recommended by Hannah Arendt, Ludwing Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault and Quentin Skinner. This orientation brings to light two distrinctive types of citizen freedom in the present: diverse forms of citizen participation and diverse practices of governance in which citizens participate.     

Time for a change: applying the good lives model of rehabilitation to a high-risk violent offender

In this article we operationalise the theoretical concepts of the Good Lives Model (GLM) of offender rehabilitation by providing a step-by-step framework for assessment, formulation, treatment planning, and monitoring with a high-risk violent offender residing in the community. The case study illustrates how the GLM can be applied to complement and enhance traditional Risk-Management interventions and shows how the GLM's clinical relevance extends from sex offending to broader offending typologies.