The Role of Moral Emotions in the Onset and Progression of Child Sexual Offending

Abstract

This thesis investigates the role of moral emotions in child sexual assault. Despite an extensive literature on moral emotions among non-offending populations, there has been little investigation of the role of shame, guilt and pride in the onset and maintenance of child sexual assault. Current theories have generally paid little attention to moral emotions, instead relying on the concept of low self-control/self-regulation to help explain some aspects of this phenomenon. The empirical data on child sexual assault has consistently found that extrafamilial offenders, offenders against boys and younger offenders are more likely to reoffend. The major theories of child sexual assault provide a degree of explanation for the age effect, but do not provide a satisfactory explanation of the findings related to extrafamilial offenders and offenders against boys. This thesis argues that incorporating moral emotions into the existing theories will provide a much more satisfactory explanation of child sexual assault than the explanations yielded from self-control/self-regulation theory. A crucial distinction between self-control/self-regulation theories and an explanation based on moral emotions is that the former presumes a deficit (either ongoing or transient) in the offender, whereas the latter is encapsulated within a motivational balance model, which views the outcome as a result of an interplay between a number of competing motivations. This provides a much more satisfactory explanation for the amount of offending by people who “have” high self-control, while simultaneously helping explain the repetitive nature of chronic offenders.