Customer Reviews

Inside the Mind of Sexual Offenders: Predatory Rapists, Pedophiles, and Criminal Profiles

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a brilliant and fascinating subject matter, however, I could not for the life of me decide how a Ph.D. author could possibly get a book published with so many English spelling and grammar errors that I had to check repeatedly the front cover for the name of the author. I thought perhaps English was not his first language. But a Ph.D? And a name like Dennis Stevens? Well, in any case, there were so many completely unbelievable spelling, grammar, and syntax errors that unfortunately these over-shadowed what may have been a good book. Also, be forewarned: If you CAN get past the errors, this author loves statistics, he does his studies by interviewing actual inmates or felons/criminals themselves, then goes on to say less about the mind of the criminal than the statistics of the crimes they are likely to commit. I usually pass on my books. This one is trash. I gave it two stars because there actually was a paragraph or two that made sense.

This book was full of typos and other mistakes, which made the reading difficult. The author does illuminate some theories, but not fully. He spends a great deal of time bashing the media and other sources for their perpetuation of the rape myths and fears. While I agree that his insights may be valid and certainly share some important views, the book is basically a collection of interviews from convicted sex offenders and their perspective. Most sex offenders will tell you that they rape for sex. Most people often don't realize the true motivation for their behavior. I don't think the offenders interviewed had the insight or the vocabulary to truly describe their experiences and cognitive processes, but their actions certainly reveal how they objectify women and use them to satisfy their own desires. Therefore, the book contains their own accounts in their own words with little commentary from the author on the psychological significance of their statements. Rather, the author spends more time arguing that we should base research on these sources rather than anything else. As a therapist, I didn't find this book particularly enlightening or useful in treating these individuals in therapy. The grammatical errors and misspelled words also made the book difficult to read.

This is a better book than Inside the Criminal Mind, but not as good as the works of Lonnie Athens. Stevens seems to have done his fieldwork by dispatching students with questionnaires to prisons. The result is an insightful guide into the mind of serial rapist with some compelling advice for potential victims based on his findings. The text is hampered by numerous typos (there is more than one reference to people "steeling" for example) and a few glaring grammatical mistakes. He does, at least, rely more on what criminals have told him than on vague statistical studies and he is no dupe. His strength is that he understands the complicated factors that go into making a predator, the difficulty of getting them to change, and the need for better programs to protect the public from the development of such hard core abusers. You will have a better, less slanted insight into how a rapist thinks after you read this book. Stephens, like Lonnie Athens, dares to look at the problem head on, refute the myths and political expediencies of the past, and suggest a program for both government and individual citizens that could go a long way towards reducing the incidence of predatory rape and pedophilia.

This book was a complete waste of money. Even if you can withstand the many typographical and grammatical errors that occur on every page, you cannot get over the fact that the author relies on an incredibly small sample size (only 61 offenders) to draw far-reaching conclusions about his topic. The book seems to be a compilation of several different "studies" he has done, and there is a great deal of repetition throughout. It is an embarrassment that someone with a doctoral degree would produce something of such poor quality. This reads like a first draft of a term paper by a failing high school English student.

As other reviewers have hinted, this book's only redeeming quality is the space the author devotes to the actual words of the offenders. However, I would recommend "Predators" by Anna Salter instead. "Predators" includes much more of the offenders speaking in their own words, and Salter's conclusions are based on a much larger sample size. Salter also makes several important recommendations for parents about how they can be more vigilant and take steps to protect their children.

Stay away from "Inside the Mind of Sexual Offenders."

My goodness, I wish I'd read the previous reviews before I purchased this book. I assume it is self-published (Authors Choice Press?) because no reputable publisher would have allowed it to get through the editing process. But did the author not even read his own draft? I'd like to say I was able to get past the numerous typos and grammatical errors because the substance of the material was so gripping, but it was just impossible. You can barely make it through a paragraph without some glaring error in syntax jumping out at you, and often the mistakes change the entire context of what I THINK the author is trying to communicate. Shame, shame, shame! What a shoddy piece of work from a supposedly well-educated author. P. Hartman delineates some of the more humorous errors in his review, but I don't give the author near the credit or number of stars. Skip this one and just buy Dr. Anna Salter's excellent book, "Predators."

Certainly it's an interesting work, and probably an important work, but gosh I wish the author had employed a copy editor. The book is full of unintentional howlers, probably the result of putting too much faith in voice-recognition software or optical scanning software, and then somebody was asleep at the spellchecker. We find,

--- "...adults can bass in the sun of safety," when the word obviously should be "bask."

--- Use of the word "emerging" when the context clearly calls for "immersing."

--- One dreadful sentence says "His brothers and sisters took refuse with his aunt." No, no, no, it was REFUGE they took. I'm sure of it.

--- "Darin was easily leered into the relationship." Cute, but there's a very strong likelihood that word ought to be LURED.

--- something "saved him from his dome," when I'll bet you a nickel it was supposed to be DOOM.

--- in the instances where the interviewee calls a woman a "hole", I suspect that a more accurate transcription would be 'HO.



My candidate for worst blooper concerns a pedophile blaming his victim, who asked for it by using the "secret fag eye beam." Next, the creep makes the boy promise not to use his "bean" on others. Laughing out loud yet? The rape of a child is not a topic suitable for inadvertent humor. Really, there's no substitute for a pair of eyes with a literate brain backing them up. Attention, all writers who hope to be taken seriously: please get yourself a human proofreader, or run the risk of looking foolish. A reader who is busy gleefully combing through your text for the next inexcusable proof of ignorance, can't give really good attention to your arguments.



And another thing - although the present author is by far not the only one guilty of this. Stevens notes that Edward Gein "danced in the moonlight wearing the face, the hair, the breasts and the vaginas of his victims." First, the grammar police say all his victims did not share just one face. If they had vaginas, plural, then they also had faces, plural. And although the victims did indeed have vaginas, neither Ed nor anyone else has ever danced adorned with any victim's vagina, because a vagina is a negative space; literally, a hole. Even a PhD can't pin a hole onto anything.



On the plus side, I like Stevens's style. Making a strong point, he is apt to begin a sentence with, "Look,..."



I like the un-academic way he puts himself in the book. Of the wrong-headed "don't fight back" advice that has been given to women, he says, "That makes me equally angry as some of these rapists in this study."



Discussing the refinement of earlier research, which led him to rewrite his conclusions about some point, Stevens says "I was wrong." Anybody who can say "I was wrong" is a superior human being.

I bought this book and others for my wife as a learning tool. She reads me excerpts, and oh my God! That is about all I can say.