Understanding cognitive, affective, and intimacy deficits in sexual offenders: A developmental perspective

Factors, such as intimacy deficits, problems empathizing with victims, and cognitive distortions, have all been associated with the genesis of sexual abuse. Importantly, they all point to a lack of awareness of other peoples' beliefs, desires, perspectives, and needs. We argue that sexual offenders' problems in these domains cart be viewed as partially arising from deficit s in one central mechanism: the ability to infer mental states. Following a review of the above three areas we discuss the developmental literature on children's theory of mind and develop a model informed by this work. We ap ply this model to sexual offenders and discuss its research and clinical im plications. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.