Violent and Sexual Offenders

Learning Outcomes

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Demonstrate an ability to utilise ideas from social sciences and to understand the value of interdisciplinary approaches.
• Demonstrate organizational and time management skills.
• Demonstrate an ability to think critically and independently and to problem-solve.
• Demonstrate written and verbal skills of comprehension, analysis, interpretation, presentation, and debate.
• Demonstrate research skills, including the ability to identify and gather appropriate library and web-based resources, to analyse them, and to use them to construct a coherent and logical argument.
• Demonstrate an ability to work both independently and constructively with others.

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the contested concept of dangerousness, in criminal law and forensic psychiatry and psychology, its application in criminal justice policy and practice, and its implications for offenders.
• Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of theoretical and empirically derived explanations of the causes of interpersonal violence and of the psychological and social characteristics of people who commit crimes of violence and sexual violence.
• Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the contested concept of offender rehabilitation, theories of desistance from crime, and their related criminal justice policy and practice implications.

The syllabus contains three substantive themes: forensic psychopathology; psychosocial understandings of offending and offenders; and offender rehabilitation.

The module begins by considering the role of mental illness, psychopathy, and personality disorder in the commission of violent and sexual offending, and the use of psychological risk assessment tools, including factors in clinical diagnosis, in the management of these offenders. The causes of interpersonal violence, encompassing psychological explanations, the influence of familial and social

factors, and psychodynamic and feminist theories, are then explored. The module concludes with the study of key ideas in offender rehabilitation and desistance from crime, with particular emphasis on the Sex Offender Treatment Programme.

The module is taught through a combination of 15 lectures and 5 double seminars delivered and facilitated by academic staff, with learning consolidated by students' private study and exam

preparation.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.