Dissociation and memory for perpetration among convicted sex offenders

Sex abusers' denial of their offenses poses serious problems for their victims, treatment providers, and researchers. Abusers deny their offenses for many reasons, including avoiding responsibility. It is possible that some abusers do not recall their offenses because of intoxication, head injury, or dissociative symptoms that affect their ability to encode or retrieve information. Self-reports of dissociation during childhood victimization, during the perpetration of victimizing acts, and in everyday life were examined in a sample of 17 convicted sex offenders. Half of the participants reported some forgetting of instances when they had sexually abused another person. Forgetting perpetration was related to both dissociation at the time of the offense and dissociation in everyday life. Dissociating while the participants themselves were being physically or sexually abused as children was related to both dissociation during later perpetration and everyday dissociation as an adult. The results support continued research and clinical work to determine the frequency of dissociative symptoms and amnesia among sex abusers.