Abstract

VENTURA ALVAREZ, M.  and  PRESENTACION BLASCO, J.A.. Repeat sex offender and psychopathic changes: An incidental relationship. Cuad. med. forense [online]. 2003, n.32, pp.35-41. ISSN 1988-611X.

Repeat sex offenders are often taken for psychopaths, partly due to the increasing popularity of the term. A repeat sex offender is one who has had one or more victims at different times; a psychopath is a type of personality imbalance which displays a lasting pattern of socially irresponsible behaviors that disdain the rights of others. The present paper presents a case of a serial rapist stopped promptly due to police cooperation. Upon viewing his modus operandi we consider him among those that Nicholas Groth denominates "power reassurance" rapist and through his clinical and psychometrical study we did not obtain any facts that induced us to think that we were dealing with a psychopath. We revised both the profiles of the psychopath and of the repeat sex offender. We coincided with Marshall in the difficulty of characterising the personality of the sexual delinquent and we extracted studies such as those of Quinsey and Malcolm, who find, respectively at 30% and 7,5% of psychopathies among prisoners who were sex offenders. We would stress the not so close relation between psychopathy and this criminal mode. Many of the North-American studies have limited themselves to establishing classifiable behavior patterns in function with victimology, motives or behavior evidence; this is very useful for the lines of police investigation but not very revealing for forensic psychiatrist. Perhaps a clear personality pattern behind the conduct of a rapist does not exist, but we regret the limited scientific output concerning this.

Keywords : Repeat offender; Sexual delinquence; Psychopathy; Forensic Psychiatry.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )