Parents warned there is no typical profile of a child-sex offender

PARENTS are being urged to be hyper-vigilant of those in their inner circle because there is no such thing as a “typical profile” of a child-sex offender.

And, troublingly, experts who study the minds of pedophiles have found their deviant behaviour isn’t always driven by sexual pleasure – in many cases, it is revenge.

Forensic psychologist Dr Karen Owen said every pedophile or sex offender she had met was different.

“Our task is trying to establish exactly what led them down that path,” she said. “For some, there’s about 20 per cent whose primary arousal is to children and it is about sexual gratification.”

Dr Owen, the former manager of Corrections Victoria’s sex offender programs who now consults to the Department of Justice, is one of a number of forensic psychologists featured in the second episode of News Corp’s Predatory podcast.

The eight-part series, hosted by actor Madeleine West and former

NSW Police detective Gary Jubelin, aims to provide a road map for parents and victims, in an all-to-often shunned subject area. Queensland University of Technology criminologist Dr Kelly Richards, who has studied some of the nation’s most repulsive child-sex offenders, said she was constantly “baffled” by the reasons given for their behaviour.

“I think we assume that people do this because they are sexually attracted to children,” she said. “But when you ask perpetrators, they say extraordinary things. They’re saying, ‘I did this to get back at my ex-wife’, or ‘I did this to get back at my mother-inlaw’, (or) ‘I enjoyed the risktaking’, (and) ‘I got a real buzz out of doing something really deviant’. I mean, just extraordinary and baffling explanations.” One case involved a man who subjected his stepdaughter to abuse “because she wasn’t sort of the perfect little feminine girl”.

“It’s ghastly, there’s no other way of explaining it,” said Dr Richards, who has embarked on a $1m four-year study looking at motivations of child-sex abusers that she hopes will save kids from abuse. Dr Owen said there were other reasons behind the offending, though – men who had trouble forming relationships, or were avoiding their own personal problems. “They’ve managed to create these distortions about how, you know, it’s not hurting the kids and they really enjoy the sexual contact and all of those kinds of things,” Dr Owen said.

Forensic psychologist Dr Sarah Yule said of biggest concern to parents was that there was not a typical profile of a child-sex offender.

“You can’t spot them by looking at them, but there can be certain grooming behaviours that they engage in, when they’re kind of testing the waters, when they’re first trying to target a victim,” Dr Yule said in the podcast.

She said child-sex offenders often lurked under the radar because of continued naivety that someone close to a person’s family or friendship group could be capable of it – which meant “addressing some of those myths and broadening people’s understanding”.

Forensic psychologist Dr Katie Seidler said she found child-sex offenders polite and compliant, but defensive, because many suffered shame and guilt for what they had done. “The best word to describe them is ‘pathetic’; they’re pathetic people,” she said.

“At the core of what drives sexual-offending behaviour is attachment and intimacy problems; it’s not sexual deviance. For some, it is obviously, but the main driver is attachment intimacy problems.

“They’re not nasty. The rapist in jail can be a bit misogynist and nasty and not particularly pleasant to deal with. But on the whole, compared to other groups, they’re actually quite pleasant, quite compliant, and accommodating.”