Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Click here to sign up for SAGE Journal Email Alerts today!

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Ward, T.
Right arrow Articles by Hudson, S. M.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Ward, T.
Right arrow Articles by Hudson, S. M.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Sexual Offenders' Implicit Planning: A Conceptual Model

Tony Ward

Department of Criminology, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria 3052, Australia, t.ward{at}criminology.unimelb.edu.au

Stephen M. Hudson

University of Canterbury

In recent years empirical research, clinical observation, and theoretical models about sexual offending have emphasized the importance of problem solving and decision making throughout different phases in the offense chain. This work suggests that sometimes offense planning is explicit, systematic, and analytical, while at other times it appears to be implicit and intuitive. The latter style of decision making has been called seemingly unimportant decisions. We attempt to provide an explanation of offenders' implicit decision making and suggest two social cognitive mechanisms capable of generating these types of decisions. We believe that implicit decision making in offenders has the appearance of automaticity, that is, decision making that is implicit, fast, relatively autonomous, frequently associated with a lack of control, effortless, and occurring without conscious awareness. Drawing from diverse theoretical sources, we hypothesize that these types of decisions are generated by underlying automatic goal dependent action plans. More specifically, we suggest that there are at least two types of automatic goal dependent plans evident in offenders' decision making: offense scripts and mental simulations. We draw implications for generating future hypotheses and provide suggestions for future research.

Key Words: cognitive distortions • seemingly unimportant decisions • implicit planning • sexual offenders.

Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, Vol. 12, No. 3, 189-202 (2000)
DOI: 10.1177/107906320001200303
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?