ABSTRACT
In their study of men in Scottish prisons who had committed sex crimes involving children, Waterhouse and colleagues (1994) identified a group who had committed brutal crimes of violence against adults and children, often involving sexual assault and violation. These men appeared, in reflection of their own brutal childhoods, to be involved in a series of attacks on conventional society and its morality which involved the most brutal and unforgivable of crimes, the sexual murder or rape of a child. But the motivation of these men did not appear to be overtly sexual: their crimes were those of violations of a morality which had betrayed their own childhoods, and they were as likely to murder a child as they were to rape an adult.
