Women Charged with Sexual Offenses

By Pamela S. Buchanan, Psy.D. and Linda M. Grounds, Ph.D. Research regarding sex offenders has increased significantly in recent years, but the vast majority of the literature focuses on understanding the characteristics, risk factors, and effective treatment methods of male sex offenders, while almost completely ignoring women charged with sexual offenses. In fact, before 1986 […]

Childhood Abuse and Revictimization of Adult Women

The experience of abuse is a pervasive problem within the United States. A 2006 study conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services found that 1 million children in the United States experience abuse and/or neglect each year. Data collected by the National Institute of Justice along with the Centers for Disease Control and […]

New Data Analysis on Sample of 30 Women Charged with Embezzlement

We have continued the data analysis on our current sample of women who were charged with embezzlement, now including 30 women charged with fraudulently taking money that ranged in amount from a low of $3,000 to a high of $850,000. Eighteen women in our sample were charged in state court and twelve in federal court […]

Historical/Intergenerational Trauma and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Trauma that affects entire cultural groups

Historical trauma, also called intergenerational trauma, is conceptualized as a “collective complex trauma inflicted on a group of people who share a specific group identity or affiliation – ethnicity, nationality, and religious affiliation. Essentially, intergenerational trauma refers to the impact that historical traumas continue to have on subsequent generations of a given population. For American […]

Forensic Psychological Evaluations of Women who Embezzle

When compared to the extensive psychological study of criminal behavior in general, there is comparatively little psychological research on white collar crime, which includes such non-violent crimes as fraud, insider trading and embezzlement. Although increased public attention is being paid to wide-scale corporate malfeasance (e.g., the savings and loan crisis, the Enron scandal and Goldman […]

Problem Gambling and Women who Embezzle.

Women in the United States are developing problem gambling, which sometimes reaches the level of Pathological Gambling, a diagnosable mental disorder at rapidly increasing rates. Recent research efforts have increased the understanding of the psychology of problem gambling, including the roles played by depression and anxiety, personality variables, cognitions and biological factors. According to Toneatto […]