Psychology Commons^™

Modus Operandi And Target Selection Criteria Of Child Sexual Predators In Protestant Churches, Joshua K. White

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Although there has been much media focusing on child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, in many cases Protestant church leaders who committed child sexual abuse were held to no level of accountability. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the modus operandi of child sexual predators and their target selection criteria in Protestant churches. Hickey’s relational paraphilic attachment theory provided the framework for the study. Fifteen cases from the United States were analyzed using inductive coding to identify six themes: (a) Leaders from Protestant churches who were convicted of sexually abusing minors possessed gross psychological immaturity, …