Social workers' attributions for sexual offending: Implications for practice and training

Abstract

In this study, the reasons why qualified social workers and social work students think men sexually offend against children are examined. Participants were asked to give reasons for these behaviours and to rate them using Benson's Attributional Scale across four dimensions; stability, internality, controllability and globality. The results suggested that the students saw the reasons for sexual abuse as significantly less controllable than did the social workers. Similarly, the students reported the reasons to be less internal than did the social workers in the sample. There were no significant differences between the students and social workers with respect to the stability and globality dimensions. There were no significant gender differences with respect to the causality dimensions, however, there was a significant interaction between gender and experience status, student or qualified, for the locus dimension. Experienced male participants saw sexual abuse as being less internal than non-experienced males, and experienced females rated reasons in the opposite direction, reporting higher internal scores than did non-experienced females. The training and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.