Victim ranking among sex offenders

Abstract

A previous exploratory study of the Child Molester Empathy Measure (CMEM) focused on the difference between offenders’ normal level of general empathy and the way in which a sample of Dutch offenders viewed their own victims. The authors found that, regardless of their level of general victim empathy, all offenders thought that their own victims were better off than the unknown victims of sexual offences. In order to study this ranking phenomenon more closely, the authors replicated the study procedure with Dutch and Australian offenders. The authors rated each offender's responses for three child victims on the CMEM on an n-dimensional column vector and compared these data with their answers to the same questions related to two adult victims. The results are presented in this paper.

Keywords:

• Sex-offenders
• empathy
• victim-script
• social–emotional regulation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank W. van Melle en D. Schultheiss for the first data collection and M. Koorenhof for the second data collection.