Psychopathy In Offenders

Improved Essays
V. Summary of The Article. In this 2014 article, “Interpersonal and Affective Traits of Psychopathy in Child Sexual Abusers: Evidence from a Pilot Study Sample of Italian Offenders”, by Adriano Schimmenti, Alessia Passanisi, and Vincenzo Caretti, analyzes evidence from a study of inmates in Italy, all of whom were convicted of violent crimes. They were interested in seeing if those inmates convicted of child sex abuse (CSA) has a higher rating of psychopathic behavior than those inmates not convicted of CSA. They knew that the features of psychopathic behavior were characterized by Hare & Neumann (2008, as cited in Schimmenti et al., 2014) as a constellation of interpersonal, affective, and behavioral characteristics such as grandiosity, …show more content…
“It is a rating scale that uses a semistructured interview, case history information, collateral information, and predetermines scoring criteria to rate 20 items on a 3-point scale according to the extent they apply to a given individual” (Schimmenti et al., p.855). This is clinical measure they used to assess the psychopathic rating of the study participants. In this specific study, they used a combination of semistructures interviews and review of detailed collateral information, such as criminal records and psychiatric records, to obtain the PCL-R …show more content…
The results of this study can help give a more precise way to study this subject in the future, as they can look over what worked and what didn’t work for this study, and use that as a starting block to continue the research farther. Like the author, I also think the results from this study can be used to help create a better awareness of the personality traits and tactics used by child sexual offenders. This could be used to teach children how potential abusers may interact with them, helping to prevent more children from being victimized. Along with the author, I think this study could also be used to help shape rehabilitation programs for child sexual abusers. If the programs can focus more on the problem behaviors, I think this would create a more effective program. Like the author mentioned, I believe one of the problems with this study is the lack of generalizability. You cannot rule out social, personal, or racial differences that could create a difference in the results. Given the fact that all the participants were Caucasian, it is unlikely to be generalizable to people with different racial backgrounds as

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