I Don't Treat Sex Offenses. I Treat What Comes Before Them.

On human behavior, accountability, and the difficult work of preventing harm.

Significant behavior rarely comes from one isolated cause. Many smaller streams—history, beliefs, loneliness, sexuality, secrecy, opportunity, coping, relationships—can converge into something much larger.  An offense rarely begins at the place where we finally see it. Treatment works upstream, understanding the smaller currents that converged along the way.

Every so often, someone discovers that part of my work as a therapist involves treating people who have committed sexual offenses. The discovery usually produces a moment of curiosity, sometimes discomfort, and almost inevitably a question: "Can people who have done those kinds of things really change?"

It's a fair question, although I suspect what people are really asking is something more troubling. Can someone who has committed a serious sexual offense ever be trusted not to do it again? And perhaps more importantly, how can we know? Over my lengthy career as a therapist, including many years working in forensic treatment and evaluation, I have learned to be cautious about easy answers, particularly when the consequences of being wrong may fall upon someone who never had a say in the matter.

My answer sometimes surprises people.

I don't treat sex offenses. I treat what comes before them.

That may sound like one of those clever distinctions therapists make before explaining what they really mean. But I mean it quite literally. By the time someone arrives in my office, the offense has already occurred. I cannot return to Tuesday night three years ago, interrupt a decision, remove an opportunity, restore a violated boundary, or undo the harm someone has caused. I cannot give back a childhood, restore someone's sense of safety, or make a traumatic memory disappear simply because the person responsible has completed treatment.

If I could, I would have chosen a considerably easier profession.

What I can do is try to understand how someone arrived at that Tuesday night in the first place. Not merely what happened in the hours before the offense, but what had been developing for months, sometimes years. What did the person believe about himself and other people? What had he learned about intimacy, sexuality, entitlement, and boundaries? What did he do when he felt lonely, rejected, humiliated, or angry? What had he been telling himself that gradually made something unacceptable begin to seem permissible?

And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all: At what point did he begin giving himself permission to do what he knew he should not do?

An Offense Has a History

Consider a hypothetical man who tells me that his offense occurred during a particularly difficult period in his marriage. He was lonely, drinking too much, and feeling rejected. He describes what happened as a terrible mistake, something entirely out of character. He insists he would never have done it under ordinary circumstances.

Perhaps some of that is true. But I am interested in what he means by out of character. After all, he did do it. Whatever else we may say about his behavior, it was something he became capable of doing. The question is not whether his loneliness or drinking made him offend. Millions of people experience those things without sexually harming anyone. The question is how those circumstances interacted with his particular beliefs, desires, opportunities, and decisions.

So we begin looking more carefully. When did he first recognize that his sexual thoughts or behavior were moving in a troubling direction? What did he do with that recognition? Did he seek help, or did he begin finding ways to reassure himself that nothing was seriously wrong? Were there smaller boundaries he crossed before the larger one? Did he gradually become more comfortable keeping secrets? Did he begin interpreting his loneliness as justification for taking something that was not his to take?

These questions are not intended to excuse him. Quite the opposite. They require him to take responsibility for more than the final act. They require him to examine the decisions, rationalizations, and missed opportunities to change course that preceded it.

We tend to think of serious wrongdoing as a dramatic departure from ordinary life, something that happens when a person suddenly becomes someone else. Sometimes harmful behavior is impulsive, and sometimes it is carefully planned. But frequently, when we look backward, we discover a series of smaller decisions that made the next decision easier. What once seemed unthinkable gradually became negotiable, and what became negotiable eventually became permissible.

I have come to think that one of the more dangerous sentences a person can tell himself is, It's not that big a deal.

Not because every small compromise leads to catastrophe. Most don't. But because human beings possess a remarkable capacity to become comfortable with things that once made them uncomfortable. We can gradually adjust our beliefs to accommodate our behavior, rather than changing our behavior to reflect our beliefs. We can become remarkably skilled at finding explanations that protect the way we prefer to see ourselves.

Psychologists have several names for these processes. Most people simply recognize them as the ways we sometimes manage to fool ourselves.

Understanding Is Not Excusing

Here is where forensic treatment becomes both psychologically interesting and morally demanding. It requires us to hold two truths together, something human beings seem to find considerably more difficult than holding one at a time. Behavior comes from somewhere, and people remain responsible for what they do.

Much of psychology is devoted to understanding why people think, feel, and behave as they do. We study how people become anxious, depressed, fearful, obsessive, avoidant, controlling, compassionate, resilient, and almost everything else human beings manage to become. We recognize that behavior develops within a complicated interplay of personal history, relationships, beliefs, circumstances, and choices. Yet when behavior becomes sufficiently harmful, particularly when it involves sexual offending, our willingness to understand it sometimes gives way to the fear that explaining it somehow diminishes responsibility.

But explanation is not exoneration.

A painful childhood may help us understand how someone developed certain beliefs about relationships. It does not make the person he harmed responsible for those experiences. Alcohol may have lowered inhibitions, but alcohol does not possess hands. Loneliness may help explain why someone desperately wanted intimacy; it does not give him the right to take intimacy from someone else.

And while some people who sexually offend have histories of trauma, attachment difficulties, or significant emotional problems, others do not. Some engage in carefully planned and deliberate exploitation. Some have developed persistent sexual interests that require specialized assessment and management. Some hold deeply entrenched attitudes of entitlement or disregard for others. There is no single psychological explanation that neatly accounts for everyone who commits a sexual offense.

Nor should there be. Human beings have been inconsiderate enough not to arrange themselves into categories that make my profession particularly easy.

Understanding someone's history is not an invitation to sympathize away his responsibility. It is an attempt to understand how that responsibility was exercised, avoided, rationalized, or gradually abandoned. And unless we understand that process, we may be left with little more than condemnation of the past and a promise that it will not happen again.

Neither tells us enough about how to prevent the next offense.

There Is Another Person in This Story

There is something important about forensic treatment that can get lost when we spend too much time discussing the person who committed the offense. Someone else was harmed. That person may be a child whose understanding of safety and trust has been profoundly disrupted, an adult whose boundaries were violated, or someone who must now live with consequences they never chose.

The person harmed is not simply part of the offender's history. Their experience matters independently of whatever progress the person who offended may eventually make.

I have worked long enough in this field to recognize how easily treatment can become centered on the person sitting in front of us. We discuss his childhood, his emotional needs, his relationships, his distorted thinking, and his struggles with self-regulation. These are legitimate clinical concerns, but they must never become so absorbing that we lose sight of why the treatment is necessary in the first place.

The purpose of treatment is not merely to help someone feel better about himself. It is to reduce the likelihood that someone else will be harmed.

That requires more than compassion, although compassion has its place. It requires careful assessment, accountability, appropriate supervision, attention to victim safety, and a willingness to recognize when someone remains dangerous despite participating in treatment. A person may be articulate, cooperative, and genuinely remorseful while continuing to present significant risk. Likewise, completing a treatment program does not automatically establish that someone is safe, trustworthy, or entitled to renewed access to people they have harmed.

The needs of the person who offended do not take precedence over the safety of others. Forgiveness, reconciliation, and restored relationships cannot be demanded as evidence of treatment success. Those who have been harmed retain the right to their own boundaries, decisions, and recovery, regardless of how much the person responsible may have changed.

I think we do a disservice to everyone involved when we treat compassion and accountability as opposites. The more seriously we take the humanity of the person who offended, the more seriously we must take his capacity to make choices and his responsibility for their consequences. And the more seriously we take the suffering of those harmed, the more important it becomes to understand and prevent the conditions under which further harm might occur.

The Ordinary Things Are Sometimes the Most Revealing

People expect me to ask about sexual fantasies in forensic treatment. They are sometimes more surprised when I ask about boredom. Or loneliness. Or friendships. Or what happens when somebody tells them no. Or how they respond when they feel humiliated, rejected, powerless, or disappointed. I may want to know what happens after an argument, late at night, after several days of isolation, or when secrecy begins to feel more comfortable than honesty.

These questions can seem several miles away from sexual offending. Sometimes they aren't.

A person who cannot tolerate rejection may not appear to have a sexual problem until rejection and sexuality meet. Someone who uses fantasy to manage loneliness may function reasonably well until isolation, sexual preoccupation, and opportunity begin traveling together. Another person may have learned early in life that power is more reliable than vulnerability, or that other people's boundaries matter less than his own desires.

None of these experiences inevitably produces sexual offending. Plenty of lonely, impulsive, traumatized, sexually frustrated, or emotionally isolated people never violate another person's sexual boundaries. That distinction is essential. We are not searching for a universal explanation for offending. We are trying to understand why these particular factors, in this particular person, became part of this particular pathway.

Sometimes the pathway includes the internet, which has made it possible for secrecy, fantasy, sexual interests, and opportunity to intersect with extraordinary ease. Technology did not invent human desire or self-deception. It simply provided an environment in which certain patterns could be developed, reinforced, and concealed with relatively little effort.

The important question is not whether a person experienced loneliness, anger, sexual frustration, or some other difficulty. It is what he learned to do with those experiences, what he came to believe they justified, and whether he developed patterns that increased the likelihood of harming someone.

In other words, the problem is seldom just the feeling. It is what happens next.

Knowing Better Is Not the Same as Doing Better

One of the more frustrating discoveries in psychotherapy is that understanding why we do something does not necessarily mean we will stop doing it. A person can describe his childhood beautifully, explain his attachment difficulties with impressive sophistication, and recite every item on his safety plan while continuing to make the same destructive decisions.

Insight is valuable, but insight without behavioral change can become little more than an articulate description of a continuing problem.

This is why structured problem-solving occupies such an important place in my work. Rather than allowing a familiar sequence of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to carry someone toward a predictable outcome, we teach people to recognize the actual problem, slow down their response, consider alternatives, anticipate consequences, and make decisions that protect both themselves and others.

Sometimes that means learning to tolerate rejection without turning it into grievance. Sometimes it means recognizing sexual preoccupation before it becomes increasingly difficult to interrupt. Sometimes it means questioning an entitled belief, disclosing a developing problem, accepting external restrictions, or avoiding circumstances in which another person might be placed at risk.

And sometimes it means acknowledging that a particular sexual interest, pattern of behavior, or limitation in self-regulation may require ongoing management rather than assuming it has simply disappeared.

The objective is not to produce someone who can explain his offense more convincingly. It is to help him develop the capacity and willingness to make different decisions, particularly when doing so is uncomfortable, inconvenient, or contrary to what he wants in the moment.

This is where I often return to a simple observation: Motivation follows behavior. We sometimes wait to become different people before we begin acting differently, when in fact our repeated choices are part of how we become who we are.

It has never been merely a matter of trying harder. Often, it is a matter of learning to try differently.

Of course, treatment does not eliminate the need for supervision, restrictions, or other safeguards when they are indicated. Public safety cannot depend entirely upon a person's intentions or his account of his own progress. Genuine change must be demonstrated over time, through behavior, honesty, responsible choices, and a willingness to accept accountability even when nobody is offering praise for it.

A Person Needs Somewhere Else to Go

Forensic treatment has historically been very good at identifying what needs to stop. And rightly so. Sexual offending must stop. Harmful sexual behavior, secrecy, manipulation, boundary violations, and the attitudes that support them must be addressed directly.

But I have also become increasingly interested in what may never have developed in the first place.

Healthy intimacy. Meaningful relationships. The ability to manage disappointment without becoming resentful. The capacity to solve problems rather than escape them. A sense of responsibility to other people. A life containing enough purpose, connection, honesty, and ordinary satisfaction that destructive patterns no longer serve the same function.

These are sometimes called protective factors, but that phrase can make them sound like accessories added after the serious work of treatment has been completed. They are not decorative. When they are genuinely developed and supported by responsible behavior, they can become part of the architecture of safety.

A person needs more than a list of things he must never do again. Eventually, he needs somewhere else to go.

That does not mean every person who has offended can safely return to every relationship, environment, or activity. Some restrictions may remain necessary for years, perhaps indefinitely. Nor does building a meaningful life somehow compensate for the harm already caused. The past is not a debt that can be erased by becoming a better person.

But a responsible future still matters. It matters to the person who offended, to those who care about him, and especially to the people who might otherwise become his victims.

What Are We Really Trying to Change?

I began with the question people occasionally ask me: Can people who have committed sexual offenses really change?

I believe meaningful change is possible for some people, and I have seen people make substantial changes in how they understand themselves, manage their behavior, and accept responsibility for their lives. But I have also seen how easily people can mistake good intentions for change, remorse for accountability, and compliance for genuine self-regulation. No responsible therapist can promise that treatment will eliminate every possibility of future harm.

Perhaps the more useful question is not simply whether someone can change, but what would constitute convincing evidence that change is occurring.

For me, that evidence is found less in what someone says about his past than in how he lives in the present. Does he recognize his own patterns? Can he acknowledge a problem before someone else discovers it? Does he respect boundaries even when he dislikes them? Does he accept responsibility without searching for someone else to blame? Can he tolerate uncomfortable feelings without allowing them to justify harmful behavior? Does he make decisions that protect other people, including when those decisions cost him something?

And does he understand that becoming more responsible does not entitle him to forgiveness, trust, or reconciliation from those he has harmed?

These are difficult questions, but they bring us closer to what successful treatment actually means. It is not the erasure of history, the disappearance of every troubling thought, or the promise that someone will never again make a harmful decision. It is the demonstrated development of safer patterns of living, supported by appropriate safeguards, that reduce the likelihood of future harm.

There is also a larger question here, one that reaches beyond forensic treatment and into the ordinary business of being human. How much of who we become is shaped by what has happened to us, and how much by what we repeatedly choose to do? At what point do our explanations become excuses? When does a habit become part of our character? And if our choices have helped shape who we are, can different choices gradually help shape who we become?

I don't think those questions belong exclusively to people who have committed sexual offenses. They are human questions, although the consequences of answering them poorly are not remotely the same for everyone.

We are all influenced by our histories, relationships, beliefs, and experiences. We are also responsible, within the limits of our capacities and circumstances, for what we do with them. Understanding where our behavior comes from can help us recognize where change is possible, but understanding alone is never the same as change.

So when I say I don't treat sex offenses, I am not suggesting that the offense is unimportant. Quite the opposite. Its seriousness is precisely why I spend so much time trying to understand what preceded it.

I cannot change what someone has already done. I can help them recognize what led there, take responsibility for it, and learn to make different choices before someone else is harmed.

And perhaps that is the most important distinction of all. The purpose of understanding the past is not to make it more acceptable. It is to make the future safer.

I think this version has a stronger moral foundation than the previous draft without becoming a public defense of forensic treatment. In particular, the section "There Is Another Person in This Story" changes the reader's experience. It makes clear that your curiosity about the person who offended is ultimately in service of responsibility and preventing further harm, not minimizing the suffering of victims.

I also deliberately kept the hypothetical case rather than presenting a recognizable clinical story, and avoided suggesting that loneliness, trauma, pornography, or attachment problems inevitably lead to offending.

The sentence I would most want readers to remember is this:

"The purpose of understanding the past is not to make it more acceptable. It is to make the future safer."

It captures the central argument, the ethical obligation of your work, and your broader philosophy that understanding human behavior matters most when it helps people live differently.

© 2026 Thomas Kurtz. All rights reserved.

Published by Thomas Kurtz Counseling, LLC.

OLDER VERSION 

What I Treat If I Don't Treat Sex Offenses

Antecedents, Causes, and What Treatment Is Actually Trying to Change

Every so often, someone discovers that part of my work as a therapist involves treating people who have committed sexual offenses. The discovery usually produces a moment of curiosity, sometimes discomfort, and almost inevitably a question: "Can people who have done those kinds of things really be treated?"

It's a fair question, although I suspect what people are really asking is whether someone who has committed a serious sexual offense can ever be trusted not to do it again. Over my lengthy career as a therapist, including many years working in forensic treatment and evaluation, I have learned that the answer is considerably more complicated than a simple yes or no. It depends, in part, on what we mean by treatment, what we consider success, and what we believe actually needs to change.

My answer sometimes surprises people.

I don't treat sex offenses. I treat the antecedents to sexual offending.

At first, that may sound like a distinction without much difference, or perhaps one of those clever things therapists say before explaining what they really mean. But I mean it quite literally. By the time someone arrives in my office, the offense has already occurred. No amount of therapy can change what happened. I cannot go back to Tuesday night three years ago, interrupt a decision, remove an opportunity, restore a violated boundary, or undo the harm someone has caused. If I could, I would have chosen a considerably easier profession.

But that raises another question, and perhaps a more important one: What do we mean by successful treatment? If success means erasing the offense, removing every troubling thought, or guaranteeing that someone will never offend again, then no treatment can meet that standard. Human behavior doesn't come with guarantees, and therapy cannot undo history. But if success means helping someone understand the circumstances, beliefs, emotional needs, thinking patterns, and decisions that contributed to their offending, and then learning to recognize and respond differently to those conditions, we have something meaningful to work with.

Successful treatment involves more than simply getting someone to promise they won't do it again. It requires accountability without excuses, an understanding of the harm caused, the development of empathy, and the willingness to examine patterns that may be uncomfortable or even shameful to acknowledge. It means learning to identify risk before it becomes behavior, developing healthier ways to manage emotional and sexual needs, respecting boundaries, and practicing the kind of deliberate problem-solving that interrupts destructive cycles before they gather momentum.

There is also an important distinction between not offending and learning to live differently. Someone may avoid reoffending because supervision is strict, opportunities are limited, or consequences are frightening. Those safeguards matter, but they are not the same as developing the internal capacity to make responsible choices when nobody is watching. Successful treatment aims to build that capacity while recognizing that external accountability and appropriate safeguards may remain necessary.

Ultimately, I don't measure success by whether someone becomes a different person in some grand or dramatic sense. I look for evidence that they are learning to make different choices, take responsibility for their behavior, recognize the needs and rights of others, and build a life in which sexual offending is neither necessary nor acceptable. Reduced risk matters, of course, but so does the development of a healthier, more responsible way of living. The past cannot be changed, but the patterns that contributed to it can be understood, interrupted, and replaced.

That is what I mean when I say I treat the antecedents to sexual offending.

But what are antecedents?  

When I talk about antecedents, I mean the conditions, experiences, beliefs, emotions, and behavioral patterns that precede an offense and help explain how someone arrived at the point of offending. Some are immediate, such as a particular emotional state, an opportunity, or a decision made in the moment. Others have been developing for years, sometimes long before the person ever considered committing a sexual offense. Understanding these antecedents does not excuse the behavior, nor does it suggest that everyone who experiences similar difficulties will offend. It simply recognizes that serious behavior rarely occurs without a history or a context.

Antecedents can include difficulties with emotional regulation, loneliness, resentment, sexual preoccupation, impulsivity, distorted beliefs about relationships or consent, poor boundaries, and the use of sexual behavior to manage uncomfortable emotions. They may also involve attachment difficulties, unresolved trauma, intimacy deficits, secrecy, entitlement, or a longstanding habit of avoiding problems rather than solving them. Sometimes the contributing factors are less dramatic than we might expect. A person may have spent years developing patterns of rationalization, minimizing consequences, blaming others, or gradually allowing themselves to cross boundaries they once considered unacceptable.

This is where cognitive behavioral therapy, attachment theory, family systems, and other approaches become particularly useful. We examine the relationship between what a person thinks, what they feel, and what they do. We explore the beliefs they have developed about themselves and others, the ways they manage emotional distress, and the relationship patterns they repeatedly recreate. We also look carefully at the decisions that move someone closer to offending, including the smaller decisions that may initially appear harmless but gradually increase opportunity, secrecy, or risk.

One of the most important parts of treatment is teaching structured problem-solving as an alternative to these behavioral cycles. Rather than reacting automatically to loneliness, frustration, sexual arousal, or perceived rejection, a person learns to identify the actual problem, consider possible responses, anticipate consequences, and make choices consistent with their responsibilities and values. This requires practice, not merely insight. Understanding why something happened is useful, but understanding alone does not necessarily change what someone will do the next time similar circumstances arise.

Of course, antecedents are not identical for everyone. Some people have significant histories of trauma; others do not. Some struggle with impulsivity, while others engage in deliberate, planned behavior. Some have difficulties with intimacy, while others maintain relationships yet hold beliefs that permit them to exploit or disregard others. Effective treatment requires an individualized assessment rather than assuming that everyone who commits a sexual offense has the same psychological problems or needs the same interventions.

And this brings me back to the distinction I began with. I cannot treat an offense that has already occurred, but I can work with the person who committed it, the factors that contributed to it, and the choices that may determine what happens next. The objective is not simply to help someone understand their past. It is to help them develop the awareness, skills, accountability, and habits necessary to prevent further harm and live more responsibly in the future.

An Offense Has a History

We naturally focus on an offense because it is the most visible part of the story. Police reports describe it. Courts adjudicate it. Evaluators reconstruct it. Treatment providers eventually ask people to describe it in uncomfortable detail, while the person who was harmed may continue living with consequences long after everyone else has finished writing reports about what happened.

But clinically, an offense is often the end of a much longer sentence.? Something came before it. Usually many things did.

This is where the word antecedent becomes useful. It simply means something that comes before something else and helps us understand what happened next. Human behavior rarely appears out of nowhere, although after something terrible happens we are often tempted to describe it as though it did.

Suppose a man sexually offends after drinking heavily. Alcohol may matter, but saying he was drinking doesn't tell us very much. Why was he drinking? Was alcohol routinely connected with sexual behavior? Did intoxication weaken inhibitions that were already struggling? What did he believe about the person he eventually harmed? Had he crossed smaller boundaries before crossing the larger one? Was there sexual preoccupation, resentment, entitlement, loneliness, or fantasy already present? Had he begun arranging circumstances in which he could later tell himself he had simply “lost control”?

The closer we look, the less an offense resembles a lightning strike. It begins to look more like a pathway. And pathways are important because they have more than one place where a person can turn.

Human Beings Refuse to Be That Simple

People understandably want to know what causes sexual offending. I wish there were a satisfying answer. If there were one cause, my job would be much easier. Find the cause, treat it, and send everybody home. Unfortunately , human beings have been inconsiderate enough not to arrange themselves that neatly.

Sexual offending is better understood as the possible outcome of many interacting factors. Developmental experiences can matter. Sexual learning and particular sexual interests can matter. Problems with intimacy, emotional regulation, impulsivity, entitlement, antisocial attitudes, opportunity, culture, relationships, and self-regulation can all matter. For one person, several of these may be central. For another, some may hardly matter at all.

And this creates an important problem with the word cause. Plenty of lonely people never sexually harm anyone. Most people who were abused as children do not grow up to abuse children. Millions of people use pornography without committing a sexual offense. People can drink too much, have terrible marriages, unusual sexual thoughts, painful childhoods, attachment problems, anger, depression, social awkwardness, or spectacularly poor judgment and still respect another person's sexual boundaries.

So when I ask about someone's history, I am not looking for the explanation that makes responsibility disappear. I am trying to understand why these particular factors, in this particular person, developed into this particular pathway.

That is a much harder question. It is also a much more useful one.

Explanation Is Not Exoneration

Forensic treatment requires us to hold two truths together, something human beings seem to find considerably more difficult than holding one at a time. The first is that behavior comes from somewhere. The second is that people remain responsible for what they do. These truths are not contradictory, although we sometimes treat them as if they were. Much of psychology is devoted to understanding why people think, feel, and behave as they do. We study how people become anxious, depressed, fearful, obsessive, avoidant, controlling, compassionate, resilient, and almost everything else human beings manage to become. We recognize that behavior develops within a complicated interplay of personal history, relationships, beliefs, circumstances, and choices. Yet when behavior becomes sufficiently harmful, particularly when it involves sexual offending, our willingness to understand it sometimes gives way to the fear that explaining it somehow diminishes responsibility.

But there is a considerable difference between understanding what contributed to someone's behavior and relieving them of responsibility for it. Explanation is not exoneration. In fact, understanding the circumstances and decisions that contributed to harmful behavior may be one of the most important ways we hold someone accountable, because it requires them to examine not only what they did, but how they came to permit themselves to do it. And unless we understand that process, we are left hoping that remorse, punishment, or the fear of consequences will somehow accomplish what understanding and deliberate behavioral change are meant to address.

A painful childhood may help explain something about how a person developed. It does not make the person who was harmed responsible for what happened. Pornography may have reinforced a sexual pattern, but pornography did not make the decision. Alcohol may have lowered inhibition, but alcohol does not possess hands. Loneliness may help us understand why someone desperately wanted intimacy; it does not give anyone the right to take intimacy from somebody else.

We ought to be capable of saying both things without weakening either of them: this came from somewhere, and you are responsible for what you did with it.

In fact, I would argue that understanding causation makes responsibility more useful, not less. If we refuse to understand how harmful behavior develops because we are afraid understanding might excuse it, we are left condemning something we have made ourselves less capable of preventing.

Some Things Begin a Long Way Back

Not everything that contributes to a sexual offense develops in the days or weeks preceding it. In fact, many of the patterns that eventually contribute to offending have been taking shape for years, sometimes beginning long before sexual behavior becomes part of the picture. Our beliefs about ourselves and others, our understanding of relationships, the ways we manage uncomfortable emotions, and the habits we develop for getting our needs met are seldom formed overnight. They emerge gradually through experience, observation, relationships, and the conclusions we draw about how the world works. Over time, some of these patterns become so familiar that we scarcely recognize them as patterns at all. They simply become the way we think, respond, and behave. And while these experiences do not inevitably lead to sexual offending, they may help us understand the vulnerabilities and distorted beliefs that eventually become part of someone's pathway to an offense.

A person may grow up learning very little about mutual intimacy. He may learn that vulnerability is dangerous, sex proves worth, power substitutes for closeness, other people exist primarily to meet his needs, or uncomfortable emotions should be escaped as quickly as possible. Another person may develop increasingly problematic sexual interests through years of fantasy and rehearsal. Someone else may gradually retreat from relationships until much of his emotional and sexual life exists privately, where very few people are close enough to notice what is developing.

We sometimes call these distal factors, meaning simply that they are farther away from the behavior itself. They can help explain how someone became vulnerable to a particular pathway without explaining why an offense occurred on a particular day.

That distinction matters. Knowing where a road began is not the same thing as knowing why someone stayed on it.

Then Life Moves Closer to the Offense

Other antecedents occur much nearer to the behavior. An argument, intoxication, sexual frustration, an escalating fantasy, access to a potential victim, a period of intense sexual preoccupation, loneliness late at night, anger after rejection, or a sudden opportunity may become important when they intersect with vulnerabilities that were already present.

Then there are the thoughts that make the next decision easier: Nobody will know. This isn't really hurting anybody. I've already gone this far. I deserve this. It isn't as bad as what other people do.

None of these factors carries equal weight for every person, which is one reason I have never been particularly fond of treating people as diagnostic categories with shoes.

One person's pathway may be dominated by sexual preoccupation. Another person's may involve entitlement and hostility. Someone else may repeatedly retreat from intimacy into fantasy, while another has antisocial characteristics extending well beyond sexuality. One person may have developed a highly specific problematic sexual interest, while another has relatively few enduring risk factors but made an appalling sequence of decisions under a particular set of circumstances.

The legal category may be the same.

The human pathway rarely is.

The Ordinary Things Are Sometimes More Interesting

People expect me to ask about sexual fantasies in forensic treatment. They are sometimes more surprised when I ask about boredom.

Or loneliness. Or friendships. Or what happens when somebody tells them no. Or how they respond when they feel humiliated, rejected, powerless, or disappointed. I may want to know what happens after an argument, at two in the morning, after several days of isolation, or when pornography stops being satisfying and novelty begins doing more of the work.

These things can seem several miles away from sexual offending. Sometimes they aren't.

A person who cannot tolerate rejection may not appear to have a sexual problem until rejection and sexuality meet. Someone who uses fantasy to regulate loneliness may function reasonably well until isolation, fantasy, sexual preoccupation, and opportunity begin traveling together. A person who habitually keeps secrets may live an otherwise ordinary life until secrecy provides somewhere for problematic sexual behavior to grow without interruption.

This is one of the uncomfortable things about antecedents. The individual ingredients can look surprisingly ordinary.

The recipe may not be.

Then We Put the Internet in Everyone's Pocket

Technology did not invent problematic sexual interests, loneliness, fantasy, entitlement, impulsivity, or secrecy. It simply gave them somewhere remarkably efficient to meet.

A person can now move from boredom to pornography, from pornography to increasingly specific material, from material to fantasy, and from fantasy to anonymous communication without leaving a chair. Someone who once depended upon geography, business hours, social contact, or sheer inconvenience for external limits now carries almost unlimited access in a pocket.

The internet did not cause sexual offending any more than alcohol or loneliness does. But it changed the environment in which many antecedents operate. It shortened distances, removed friction, increased privacy, expanded access, and made it possible for patterns that once required considerable effort to be rehearsed repeatedly and privately.

Sometimes technology becomes the offense environment itself. At other times it is simply where the pathway has been quietly getting stronger.

Either way, pretending it is incidental would be rather like studying fish while refusing to discuss water.

Treatment Has to Find Something We Can Actually Change

Understanding someone's history can be fascinating. It can also become clinically useless if we stop there.

I cannot change someone's childhood. I cannot change his age when an offense occurred or erase his criminal history. I cannot provide a different family twenty years after he needed one. These things may help us understand how a pathway developed, but therapy has not yet discovered time travel.

Treatment becomes useful when we begin identifying the things that are both relevant and changeable.

Can someone recognize sexual preoccupation earlier instead of waiting until it has become difficult to interrupt? Can he recognize entitlement while it still sounds like an argument in his head rather than after it has become behavior? Can he develop genuine intimacy instead of asking fantasy to do the work of relationships? Can he tolerate rejection, manage anger without turning it into grievance, recognize an escalating sexual pattern, respect boundaries, become less impulsive, and tell the truth while a problem is still small enough to look unimpressive?

And perhaps most importantly, can he build a life containing enough connection, responsibility, meaning, healthy sexuality, honesty, and ordinary pleasure that the old pathway no longer has quite the same appeal?

Now we are treating something.

Sometimes the Missing Thing Matters as Much as the Dangerous Thing

Forensic treatment has historically been very good at identifying deficits. What is wrong? What increases risk? What needs to stop?

Those remain necessary questions, but they are not sufficient. Sometimes I am equally interested in what never developed.

A healthy relationship. Meaningful work. Empathy. Sexual knowledge. The ability to solve problems or tolerate distress. Friends who would notice when someone begins disappearing. A satisfying adult sexual relationship. A reason to tell the truth when secrecy would be easier. A sense that one's life is going somewhere worth protecting.

We often call these protective factors, but the phrase can make them sound like accessories added after the serious work of treatment is finished. They are not decorative. They can become part of the architecture of safety.

A person needs more than a list of things he must never do again. Eventually he needs somewhere else to go.

That is a larger idea than risk management. It suggests that safety sometimes grows not merely because dangerous things become weaker, but because healthier things become stronger.

The Pathway Is Personal

Two people can commit superficially similar offenses for remarkably different reasons. If I treat the offense rather than the person and his antecedents, I risk giving both people essentially the same treatment because the criminal justice system happened to give their behavior the same name.

Good assessment asks something more personal: What would have to change in this particular person's life for another offense to become less likely?

That question sends us backward before it allows us to move forward. We examine developmental history, relationships, sexuality, attitudes, coping, opportunity, self-regulation, secrecy, technology, substance use, emotional functioning, lifestyle, and the circumstances surrounding the offense. Not because everything we discover caused it, and certainly not because everything we discover requires treatment.

We are trying to find the pieces that actually belong to this person's puzzle.

Then treatment turns around.

The purpose of understanding the past is not to remain there. It is to recognize the pathway early enough that the person can choose another direction when familiar roads begin appearing again.

© 2026 Thomas Kurtz. All rights reserved.

Published by Thomas Kurtz Counseling, LLC.