Psychopathy And Digital Sexual Abuse
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Please be advised that the following program contains audio content that may be graphic and potentially triggering for some listeners. This content may include descriptions or sounds that some may find disturbing. Listener discretion is strongly advised. This is The Last Show with David Cooper.
is it possible that certain personality traits could predict who's most likely to invade somebody's privacy for a sexual crime well there's a new study that says yes the findings pretty uncomfortable and we're gonna dive in here with dr dean fido a forensic psychology professor at the university of derby in the uk dean welcome to the program
What is the link between psychopathy and digital sexual abuse?
Hey, David. Thanks for having me.
Before we get into the results here, the term upskirting, kind of uncomfortable. Can you walk me through what it is from like a psychological point of view? Maybe not legally, but as a behavior, like what's happening when somebody does that?
Yeah, of course. So it's a very gendered term. Typically, females are the individuals who are wearing skirts. And in the UK, especially, we're trying to get rid of that term. And I'll tell you a bit why that now. What the behavior is, is when individuals use cameras or recording equipment to take pictures or images. of genitalia underneath somebody's clothing. So you might have also heard of the term down-blousing, which is looking from the top of an individual. And it doesn't just have to be female victims, it can be male victims or any type of gendered victim.
So what made you and your co-authors interested in studying this form of like image-based sexual abuse, as opposed to maybe some other digital kind of crimes?
Yeah, of course. So we run a team whereby we're interested in all different types of image-based sexual abuse. So you may have heard of the term revenge pornography, deepfake sexual abuse, which is more in the media, currently cyber flashing. I'm sure your listeners might be okay with some of those terms associated with that. And upskirting was one of the terms which wasn't receiving much psychological-based intervention or assessment. And so we wanted to be one of the first individuals, the first groups, to actually explore that through a psychological lens.
So the headline from your research, your findings, is there's this strong link for people who perform this kind of abuse to psychopathy.
Yes.
Walk me through that. What are some of these psychopathic traits that make someone more willing to commit these acts?
Yeah, of course. I'm really glad you said the phrase psychopathic traits. So when we think of psychopathy, we instantly go to murderers, serial killers, your Ted Bundys. But when we refer to psychopathic traits, what we're looking at is how individuals can be callous. They might lack empathy. They might be really manipulative. They might be sadistic in nature. They might have quite high narcissistic personality traits. And it's the amalgamation of these traits which spur people to behave both physically and, as we've shown in online spaces, in sexually deviant manners.
Now, is there a difference based on how you're judged in terms of the harm, like the harm caused by this act, whether the victim is a man or a woman?
Yeah, so we developed a vignette, which is a scenario-based examination whereby we had individuals at a spa setting. So to get around that gendered term of wearing a skirt, we had the individuals in spa robes, and we asked our participants to imagine what these individuals would be like lying, in a spa setting, and they had the ability almost to look up their dressing gowns and take images should they wish. This was all kind of a metaphorical perspective. And what we found is that individuals who were male victims, our participants felt that there was a lot less harm, a lot more blame, and certainly a lot less criminality associated with these individuals being victims.
What do you make of that? I would say both types of victim, male, female, are kind of being hurt in the same way. It's kind of surprising that there's this gap.
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