Customer Reviews

Sexually Aggressive Children: Coming To Understand Them

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I spent the last year and a half as a prosecutor in the juvenile division of my office. During that time, I found that one of the greatest Gordian Knots we faced was that of how to deal with sexual offenders, particularly the preadolescents. Inspired by an 8 year old that we could not figure out what to do with, I decided to embark on the writing of an article for my local bar journal on this topic, and hopefully learn more about this for my future benefit in dealing with more of these children.

I trimmed the scope of my research down to preadolescent sexual offenders, and read as much of the institutional research as I could find. Based on footnotes in some of that research, I found this book. I read it from cover to cover and found it very informative. It covers the main issues regarding these chilren including why they might do it and what can be done with them, mostly from a psychological persepctive. I was pleased to see the amount of time this book spent on the family perspective and what should be done and how the family should be involved with any case plans regarding these children. The legal perspective is touched on, but not much, which is understandable as this is a psychological text. However, many of the lessons of this book translate easily into practice.

At the very least, this book helped me round out the research on my article. At its best, it offered me insight into these children which I would have never had without looking into the topic or Araji's book. As an activist prosecutor who wanted to help these children out as much as I wanted my convictions, I learned much from this book which would help me in dealing with future cases.

Araji cautions us that much of the research is preliminary. I hope that research on this issue continues and that Araji can someday follow up with another book as excellent as this one.

This book was extremely helpful to me on a research paper. It gives an extensive amount of information in order for the reader to understand this population (demographics, theories, trends, etc.). I checked it out at the library and then decided I should buy it to have as a reference material for work with future clients.