Implicit cognitive distortions and sexual offending. Sexual Abuse: A

This work develops and tests the semantic-motivation hypothesis of sexual offend-ers ’ implicit cognitions. This hypothesis posits that sexual offenders ’ cognitive distortions emerge at the interface between implicit motivation and cognition. The semantic-motivation hypothesis is used to guide the development of 3 im-plicit association tests (IATs). These IATs were used to test for the existence of 3 expected child sexual offender implicit cognitive distortions in child sexual of-fenders ("children as sexual beings, " "uncontrollability of sexuality, " and "sexual entitlement-bias"). Results showed that child sexual offenders had larger IAT ef-fects than did mainstream offenders and male and female nonoffenders for the "children as sexual beings " and the "uncontrollability of sexuality " implicit the-ories. Child sexual offenders also had a larger IAT effect than male and female nonoffenders for the "sexual entitlement-bias " implicit theory. Implications for the semantic-motivation hypothesis are discussed