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This erudite and informative book highlights the needs of a particular group of young people who are both damaged and potentially damaging to others. The approach is highly academic, with the early chapters consisting of substantial reviews of the literature on major subject areas such as attachment theory and psychoanalytic thinking as they may be related to juvenile sexual offending. These discussions address important questions such as whether certain attachment styles are associated with sexual compulsivity and the role of early trauma in the development of the future sex offender. Relevant psychodynamic concepts such as malignant narcissism and perversion are examined in detail and considered as possible explanations for the occurrence of sexual assault. There are in these chapters many ideas and connections, backed up by research evidence, that can be useful in understanding the underlying psychopathology of sexual offending. This reader at least was frequently reminded of clinical features of certain cases, but I found myself wishing the author had included a more explicit clinical focus to the book.
A point made repeatedly is that juvenile sexual offenders are far from being a homogenous group. Clinical experience in a service such as the Portman clinic London readily shows how they differ from each other, not only in the severity of their offending behaviour but also in the meaning and significance of the offences, and therefore of the prognostic implications (Woods, 2003). For instance, there are those who may commit a sexual offence as a result of experimentation, emotional deprivation or feelings of inadequacy; individuals with these qualities need to be distinguished from those with what might be thought of as a ‘hard core’ of cynicism or callousness that precludes any concern, whether it be for the victim, or indeed the self who may have suffered harm. In this sense, there is no one ‘internal world’ of the juvenile sex offender; there are massive differ