Customer Reviews

Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices

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Forensic and Medico-legal ... is a solid compendium of topics and not-so-updated research about sexual crimes and practices. It has enough information as an introduction to this complex topics but, at times, it just go very superficially in the explanation. Never the less, the book has interesting references (when they are accurate) for such a broad scope.

My main concern is about some misleading references. I usually rely extensively in them to corroborate the information and for further research, so, I believe, this could be a serious issue if you want to expand your knowledge in the area. In particular (and in a first lecture) I found:

I) In Chapter 5, about fetishism, in the "Leather and Latex" sub-section there is a reference to number 41 -page 125-, but when searching the references it jumps from 40 to 42, the 41 reference is not listed!

II) In Chapter 5 -Fetishism-, there are 62 references listed in the reference part -page 124-125-, but in the text itself, there are 47! Even more, the references in the text do not match with the references in the reference section. For example: reference 31, in the text, refers to "Scorolli and associates" -page 118-, but in the reference section, 31 is "Beach FA". The reference with Scorolli is listed with number 26. Also note that reference 46 is exactly the same as reference 26!!! No different page. Maybe is duplicated?

I think that the first mismatch is in reference 10, which in the text says: "His Psychopathia sexualis [10]" -page 111-, but in the references number 10 is from "Da Silva", which, I think is never used. The correct reference would be, in this case, Krafft-Ebing.

After this point, the references are mismatched one position, this is: reference 11 in text, is reference 12 in the reference section, an so on. Never the less, at some point there are references that does not appear in the text.

III) In Chapter 9 -Frotteurism- there is also mismatched references. In the references section there are 35, but in the text just 28. For example, reference 9, 10 (Freund, Scher and Hucker), 11 (Simpson), 12 (Hurley) -page 186- and 13 (Chan et al.) -page 188-, are references 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 in the reference section, respectively. I think that the first mismatched reference is number 3 -page 183-, in the text, which is number 5 in the references.

Another insignificant point -which did NOT influence my rating-, the typos:
IV) In Chapter 12, Sexual Harassment, page 276, "Historical Perspectives", it says: "However, despite these early cases, the issue of sexual harassment really began occupying a general consciousness in the 1060's when ..." Maybe is the 1960's?

V) In Chapter 16, Transsexualism, page 349, Table 16.2, "Transgenders and Transsexual Vocabulary", in the "Psychosexual Inversion", the reference 32 is not superindexed, it is in plain text.

NOTICE: my edition of the book is from 2009 by Taylor & Francis Group. Maybe in fresher editions everything is OK.

NOTICE II: the editor of the book, after sending her mails, wrote to me the reference in point [I], which is: DeRiver JP. Crime and the sexual psychopath. Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, IL,1958, page 41. (Thank you!).

I would recommend the book as an introductory book (hoping that for future editions fix the references!). But for a more robust work I do recommend the Eric W. Hickey's books (although the legal aspect is not so strong as in Aggrawal).

Is a solid work, the result of great effort.