Practitioners helping adult survivors of child sexual abuse need to be aware of the thought processes of offenders. The premise of Anna Salter's major book is that those who do not recognize an internalized perpetrator when they hear one will often be frustrated by the tenacity of the survivor's self blame. Primarily oriented towards treating adult survivors, this invaluable book will also be useful for treating sex offenders. It includes discussion of crucial issues such as: what clinicians who treat survivors need to know about sex offenders; the different ways sadistic and nonsadistic offenders think and the resulting different `footprints' they leave in the heads of survivors; how trauma affects survivors' world-views;

What Do We Know about Sex Offenders and What Does it Mean?

What do we know about sex offenders and what does it mean?

Compulsivity and Repetitiveness

If the widespread sexual assault of children and adult women has historically been, in Rush's words, “the best kept secret” (Herman, 1981; Rush, 1980; Summit, 1988)—so well-kept that some have termed it a “shared negative hallucination” (Goodwin, 1985a, p. 14; Summit, 1988)—then surely the second largest societal blind spot has been the compulsiveness and repetitiveness of the sexual offender. Certainly sex offenders themselves have little reason to emphasize the intransigence of their behavior. Legal sanctions and societal disapproval have virtually guaranteed that sexual offenders accused of child molestation or rape either deny the offense altogether or admit to the minimum ...

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