Customer Reviews

Unspeakable Acts: Why Men Sexually Abuse Children

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

As a social worker, I have to deal with men who sexually abuse children - and try to help them. This book helped me to understand such men WITHOUT excusing their acts. I am now able to talk to these men and work with them much better. There is little in the literature about sexual perps and the stuff is usually about the effects on the victims. This book accepts the victims, however, focuses on the men.

Right after I was caught for molesting one of my young children, I bought this book to learn who the hell I am and a little bit about how I got into that narrow-minded hell-hole of child sexual interest and action. This book REALLY opened my eyes, and gave hugely rewarding insights into myself (not ones I expected to find!). The author writes clinically and compassionately, and offers superb suggestions at the end on how our criminal justice system could do an awful lot better with family offenders. I've since plead guilty and was sentenced to jail time, treatment, and many years of probation. This book helped me understand myself as an offender, the impact on the child, and the range of conventional and possible public responses to punish and treat this terrible offense. I highly recommend it for troubled offenders who WANT insight into this mindset, as well as for loving spouses and close relatives that want to better understand and support the offender. The writing is good.

I was a student of Pryor's his first year at TU (and for several years thereafter) and this was a required read for us. This book is unique in the sense that Pryor studied offenders and not the victims (and he does it without being sympathetic to the offenders too). I believe he was one of the first social researchers to do this. The book is relatively detailed, but it's not boring. That surprised me considering how most sociological reseach reads. If you're interested in sexual deviance, specifically pedophilia, read this book because it looks at a completely different perspective than most research on the topic does.

Although the explicit nature of Unspeakable Acts was oftentimes difficult to read, I made myself finish. I'm glad I did. I read the book just after my husband went to jail for fondling our daughter. Getting a glimpse of the mentality and motives of other sexual abusers helped me to finally understand --- and ultimately forgive --- my husband. Standing beside him through the legal process and in dealing with mental health professionals for both him and our daughter has been a difficult task for me, but one I've chosen to take on. I appreciate the candid content of Unspeakable Acts as it helped me to better understand the atrocity we call sexual abuse. I highly recommend the book, and encourage future readers not to put it down when the reading gets tough!

I received this book only yesterday and I am half way through reading it the writer does challenge convential wisdom of lock them up and throw the key away he questions the approach to the flog and hang them brigade.If you read it objectively there is information on how to identify abuse, listening to your children dealing with your own disgust facing the issues of child abuse. He does not excuse what they have done but he reasons why they have done it,he challenges the lying deception of paedophilies who deluded themselves of the child initiating sexual contact with an adult,he shows the child as a person in their own right not to be abused.This book should be standard text for all who work with offenders and children.

I read this book for a paper in my psychology class and this book is like no other on child sexual abuse. This is a real candid look into the abusers' mind, told by the abusers themselves. The stories go into enough detail to understand what the abuser was thinking at the time, while not going into too much detail making the book extremely disturbing to read. If you are into psychology, sociology, or just want to know what makes these men do these Unspeakable Acts, this is a great book to read.

Courageous enough to even ask the offenders - what is without doubt a great advance in research - I missed (more) informations about which influences in childhood have had not allowed to set the appropriate boundaries or lowered them to the state which allowed the mans to overlook or even not to recognize the boundary crossing. There is a lot more to do in this field, but I fear there are too less people able and willing to do this work (and duty to society).

I was one of Douglas Pryor's students, and I had to read the book for a class assignment. The best book I've read so far, it's easy to read, and full of interesting case studies. I highly recomend this book for everyone interested in sexual abuse.

It is regretable that mindless mass media level reactors have the need to srtrike out thoughtlessly at a scholar's efforts and thereby reduce an excellent book's ratings-- in the process creating doubt in the minds of people who might need to acquaint themselves with this work and its findinds (I notice, to my great surprise, that a significant number of people rated these "one star" review as helpful???).

Of those two very negative reviews, one seemed to be looking more for some kind of lurid and sensationalistic page-turner novel, and the other a brimstone and fire "from on high" Puritamical condemnation of child molesters. Long ago, a philosopher once said, "Noting human is alien to me," and this must be the motto of clinicians working with people whose unfortunate life course causes them to crave experiences that seek satisfaction at the expense of others. But if what one needs is to play the balme game, then we don't have to seek ever more effective treatment approaches: We can just keep turning to the "chain them to the walls and throw away the keys" methods that seem to be coming so much in vogue these days among so many state legislatures.

However, before we go too far in sharpening the knives of blood lust vegenfulness, let me remind you that America discovered child abuse as a mass cotatge industry for the most part durind the Reagan administration. This was the time when we made fashionable our hysteria regarding all the weird things supposedly happening to children from the world filled with hordes of Satas-ritualists and kiddie-porners that seemed to be JUST EVERYWHERE. Yet, interestingly, during that same decade where we became so supposedly concerned about children being maltreated, the number of children that slipped under the poverty line quietly and unremarkately increased by 25%.

Hence, it is not only the research/treatment intervention methods of the Puritanists we need to question, but possibly the motives that drive and illuminate their involvement in the movement to keep children safe from predators. These people also make their supposed concernn for victims a bit confusing-- given that a considerable segment of the child molestor population were first victims of abuse themselves.

My point is that this book seeks straight forward understanding of the phenomenoon of child predation, and of the men caught up in this sad and ugly business-- the same sort of undertsanding that is not clouded by pointless judgmentalism that is used by social scientists to understanding the often equally cruel world of everyday children and adolescents. Of special interest here if the author's social behaviorist/symbolic interactionist perspective. He is trying to elucidate the way the perpetrator's sense of meaning is organized to produce such problematic behavior as child miolestation.

Of course this sort of thing might be very much lacking in passion for MacCarthists who for some time have been without communists to kick around anymore, and who have not graduated to the new boogey man (terrorists). MY SUGGESTION: read the book carefully and on its own terms, then do the same with other books on the subject. And if it requires work to do this, remember that even child molesters are worthy of this effort on your part-- that is, if your goal to to have them be your patients rather than your Island of the Damned inmates.

Unspeakable Acts answered all of the questions that have haunted me for years. It is a wonderful resource for families of pediophiles. Much is written about victims and it is difficult to find information about the abusers. My thanks to the author.