ABSTRACT
This chapter describes an analytic structure for examining how adolescent male sexual offenders target, engage, and control their abuse victims. Operant constructs of stimulus-response and response-response are used to examine the way sexual-abuse patterns may be established and maintained. The chapter proposes a structure for investigating the patterns of attraction, expectation, and perpetration of sexual abuse. Sexual offenders report great care in selecting individuals they consider controllable and whose physical and behavioral characteristics arouse sexual feelings. Adult sexual offenders report that they have often used sexual behavior, including sexual aggression, to manage anxiety. Stress, anxiety, and other unpleasant emotional conditions have frequently been suggested as eliciting stimuli for aggressive acts. Target selection, with its subsequent increases in sexual arousal, also increases the individuals expectation of later contact and sexual success with the selected target. The sexual satiation just achieved lowers the abuser's interest in sexuality generally and in sexual aggression specifically.
