Social cognition in violent and sexual offending: an overview

The main aim of this review is to provide a broad overview of social–cognitive theory and research applied to violent and sexual offending behaviour. The review suggests that there is some variation in the adoption of social–cognitive theory and methods to differing offending behaviours. The violent offending literature, for example, has many examples of novel social–cognitive research methods used to examine the cognitions of highly aggressive men while the child sexual offending literature has very few examples of such social–cognitive techniques. The advantages of adopting a social–cognitive perspective to differing offending behaviours is examined and discussed alongside suggestions for future research in the social–cognitive domain.