And Other Sex Offenders, Rapists, Pedophiles

The title of this invaluable book speaks for itself and it most certainly provides important insights and powerful lessons about protecting oneself and one's children from getting into the reach of the deadly predators in our world. Not only it gives great insights, but it would strongly help one to not to fall into the "trap."

I've enjoyed the author's writing style and she did a wonderful job on describing how the predators operate, which helps us to prepare any eventually and avoid ourselves and our children to become victims.

I do believe that we should educate ourselves about the evil in our world, despite of what we think. Knowing about the danger and being aware of such danger can help one to be better protected.

Both Salter's book and Gavin De Becker's The Gift of Fear : Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence are great books for one to be educated about the predators and killers and about protecting oneself from them. Gaining knowledge from these books and more can certainly protect us.

Highly recommended.

This direct, authoritative, and arresting book is the best I've read about sex crimes. It gives the invaluable insights promised about protecting yourselves and your children, but it's more than that: Reading it can be very useful for victims. Most victims, even when they know intellectually that what happened wasn't their fault, look at the healing process from their own perspective: "Why did this happen to me? Why was I picked?"
The real question is, "Why did someone do this?" Understanding how abusers, rapists, and sadists think and plan and what they think about their victims is perhaps the only way to forever dispel the notion that the crime centered on the victim. One of the most startling revelations is that rapists are surprised that their victims expect them to recognize them in court: "Why would she think I'd know her?" The book also does a lot to dispel the irritating myth that abuse victims turn into abusers.
If you want the truth--with no dogma, pontification, or unsupported speculation--read this book.

This book propagates what's already frequently portrayed in the media, an "us versus them" mentality in regards to sex offenders. To extrapolate, this is to say that sex offenders are monsters, somehow fundamentally different from everyone else. The author seems to sugar coat her experiences with this mentality. When she comes across sex offenders that seem "normal" or "nice", she chalks it up as their ruse to gain access to children or to otherwise take sexual advantage of people. Sorry, but life's not that simple, and it's potentially harmful to continue to promote this view. She sounds convincing though which is why I grant this book a 3 stars.

Dr. Salter received a Masters degree in Child Study and a Ph.D in Psychology and Public Practice, and she has been building her expertise in child abuse since the 1970s. She makes her position clear in the: "Victims were the result, not the cause, of the problem." What, if anything, can be done about offenders? To determine an answer, Dr. Salter interviewed offenders and developed educational films from those sessions.

Denial is the refusal to acknowledge the existence or severity of unpleasant external realities or internal thoughts and feelings. [...]Society denies the cruelties of predators in our communities, while also denying the effects of sex abuse on victims. The remedy for denial is information, and the knowledge of what it takes to keep our children safe. Dr. Salter's book offers the awareness needed to prevent the perpetuation of sex offenses in our neighborhoods. The reader is not asked to understand predators but to identify them.

A premise of the book is in the phrases "No opportunity. No abuse." Dr. Salters states that it is the parent's responsibility to "avoid situations where sexual abuse is possible." She urges parents to supervise their children during community activities. This presumes that a child has caring parents who take the time to determine what sexual abuse is and when abuse is possible. It's possible that a child does not have such a parent. Therefore, it is up to the community to be wise about the manipulations of a predator.

Predators is divided into eleven chapters, with a full Index, Bibliography, and Notes that offer specific information to lay people and academics alike. Delving into the predators' consciousness and lack of conscience via Dr. Salters interviews is no easy task. However, she urges us to know what they look for so that we can protect ourselves and our children.

Gavin de Becker articulates the purpose of this book very well in the summation of his foreword: "Predators gives parents and educators the best kind of defense against sexual offenders: wisdom". It only serves its purpose if the readers take its contents to heart. It was written to create a more conscientious audience. For the general population to simply know more about the issues raised within is a step in the right direction. This book provides knowledge and insight into many groups, including rapists, sadists, pedophiles and psychopaths. She also touches upon concepts like trauma and the techniques predators use to deceive and authorities use to detect deception. Salter has included excerpts from interviews with victims, assailants, inmates, and predators of all walks of life so that readers can get "insight and advice [...] from the `horse's mouth'"
Salter stressed generally becoming more knowledgeable about the realities of life and our surroundings. She cited researcher Melvin Lerner's book The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion whose work supported her idea that as a society, we think too highly of the world in which we live. She challenges us to remove the rose-colored glasses and look at our societies, cultures, and lives for what they are so that we can begin to deal with some of their faults.
This book is mostly a collection of pieces of information, statements and truths that many of us, on a regular basis, refuse to face. "One in three girls and one in six boys will have sexual contact with an adult."
Most people find it easier to look away or even deny that it exists, but Salter sheds light on what many others attempt to bury. The factual evidence is very difficult to dispute. Salter very effectively presents her points through facts and figures, opinions and examinations. She cites many books, colleagues and studies in an effort to provide readers with the information needed to make informed decisions about the types of people that they allow access to their lives, their homes, and their children. The extent of her research is evident when consulting her 14-page bibliography.
Salter achieves her purpose in this book. She presents her findings creating a slew of facts for opponents to try to challenge. While she does not necessarily make it easier to identify predators, Salter makes us more sensitive to the facts, so that we can address our realities on our own terms. An excerpt from her introduction:
This is not a book with complete and comfortable answers. It will not finish with a checklist for identifying a sex offender.... But if I do my job right, reading this book will make it harder for sex offenders to get access to you or your children.
So that there is no confusion later, Salter attempts to define the problem/s in the first chapter. This is to no avail, because when reading back through the chapter, I find no thesis, only tear-jerking testimonials. Through the body of the book she offers elucidation for readers previously unexposed to the ranks of psychopaths and pedophiles, and in her summation she offers a course of action: suspect any and all.
This book may be difficult for some of the readers in its target audience. Because her research was so extensive, many parts of the book employ very technical language that would prove more useful to her colleagues than it would be to someone outside of the field of psychology. Though she makes a conscious attempt to use laymen's terms in the explanations of difficult topics, her efforts may be in vain; in any case they were almost wasted on me.

Overall good book with useful information. The portion that addresses deflection vs detection appears to be the most likely useful portion of the book. The book is relatively raw, written for lay population, useful. Good tool for parents using the deflection strategies. this book will make you cringe and want to withdraw from society, these are accounts for illustration and real, not to be understated or overstated, the info just "is."

This book is essential for ALL people to read, especially parents and those in the 'helping professions'. It will help clarify dangerous misconceptions and myths about sexual abusers that can actually serve to allow abusers to keep abusing. This book may be (or seem) written for a professional audience but the content is so powerful, and the knowledge gained so necessary, that the general public will benefit from the understanding and insight they will gain. I believe the most important contributions this book makes is in providing protection for potential victims by demonstrating who abusers may be and how they may gain access to children, and by helping us to realize that abusers are the people we most often trust and that we should believe victims when they come to us for help. When it comes to pedophiles, it is the very fact that we trust them that makes our children available to them.

This book is disturbing, but to understand the real threat of sexual abusers, we need to be disturbed. We musn't be comfortable in our ignorance, our lives and our childrens' lives depend on it.

Once I began reading this book Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders : Who They Are, How They Operate, and How We Can Protect Ourselves and Our Children I could not put it down. The insight Anna Salter provided regarding all types of predators in our society was fascinating and educational, even to a seasoned criminal investigator with experience working with sex offenders and other serious felons. I would recommend this book to EVERY PARENT, and anyone else who wants to protect themselves from the criminals among us. Ms. Salter obviously put a whole career into this book. I will be giving this book to all my friends and family so they can benefit from it the way I feel I have.

This book is quite interesting.

From disgusting horny Catholic priets who attacks little boys to gym coaches.. Salter discusses what every parent need to know to keep their child safe.

A book every person should read.

Anna Salter's book should be required reading for every parent and individual who works with sexual offenders. The book truely gives the reader what it promises in the title- ways to protect ourselves and our children.

Terrible book of myth making proportions concerned foremost with demonizing all sex offenders by highlighting the worst case scenarios borne out of biased ideology and hatred but sold to the public as legitimate science. In have seen Salter lecture and misrepresent or lie unabashedly with disregard for the empirical evidence, truth, and with charlatan scholarship. Read it only to find out what scumbags can sell their ideology as science.

Perhaps the most interesting detail concerning this book is that the author is a fiction writer of murder and crime stories. Unfortunately, her taste for sensationalism trumps logic, scientific method and academic discourse.

While no parent including myself would wish to see their children harmed in any way, this book reduces all childhood sexual encounters to being dangerous in the extreme. It avoids the crucial questions surrounding the debate on childhood sexuality and what is truly harmful to children, with the exception of the very rare instances of rape or violence.

Therefore this book gets one star, and I would refer anyone who is intelligent, educated and interested in expanding their knowledge of the subject to Judith Levine's work in "Harmful to Minors."

I would also hope some of the professionals who have reviewed this book would be open minded enough to consider alternate, more academic sources of information.

Never knowingly under-sensationalized, this polemical tract is only for those who like their 'facts' to be served up in the form of tabloid headlines. (The paradox contained in its title might be the first clue.)

A happily unacademic work, Salter's 'methodology' consists of selecting the most melodramatic examples of stories gathered from her years of employment within prisons, and then somehow extrapolating these questionable anecdotes to society in general.

Her message is clearly enunciated: fear and ignorance should be our guides in approaching life. Which, unfortunately, is also likely to be the alluring nature of this book, and its tendency for mass-appeal; it repeats the same comforting fairy-tales that we so desperately *want* to believe in; that mythical world of monsters and demons, princesses and knights. These fables may be comforting, and we may relish their uncomplicated familiarity, but to pretend - and under the guise of authoritative academia - that they are anything other than tools for manipulation would be unconscionable.

More positively, mention must be made of the author's genuinely impressive ability not to allow her storyline to be clouded by anything resembling intellectual insight. Salter is not alone, of course, in cherry-picking those 'sources' that support her adaptation of the story, although the transparent straw-man approach to the work of genuine scholars still has the power to startle.

For those readers who honestly wish to avoid an hysterical abreaction (and who appreciate that while fairy-tales may be enchanting, what we actually need are *new* approaches), then Kincaid's Erotic Innocence and Levine's Harmful to Minors should absolutely be their first port of call.

Just the title of this very biased book tells you how ridiculous the content is. Salter is obviously an opportunist who uses fear over facts. The truth is most sex offenders do not re-offend according to legitimate sources (as opposed to media sensationalism). Plenty of offenders have committed non-violent offenses too such as urinating on street corners, public nudity, sexting (sending nude photos over a cellphone), and other petty non-rape crimes. Some of these "sex" offenders are children themselves who only experimented in their parents homes because they didn't know better. Once you know the real story, it's shocking. Politicians and the media are the ones who feed on this hysteria because they know fear sells and keep in mind the corporate media is LEGALLY allowed to lie. The power of big business is just about limitless in this day and age!
Indeed, there are some on the registry who are dangerous people, but today they are a minority and you must ask yourself this - if our government is so concerned about our safety, why do they let out truly dangerous people to begin with? In my view the registy is a sick joke, a profit-driven lie. If we would keep real predators in prison, we wouldn't need a registry now would we? Meanwhile, thousands of non-violent men, women, and children are victimized by these broad and over-punishing laws which strip away every civil liberty you can imagine (no matter how law-abiding the former offender is), all in the name of greed and power.
If you ask me, authors like Salter need to be prosecuted for committing major fraud and slanderment. I used to think minds like hers ended in Nazi Germany long ago, but apparently these diabolic minds are still with us.

Her name should be Ann Asalter instead of Anna Salter, because reading this book was an assault on my intelligence! This book is a little old, but even so there are far better books on the subject, like Harmful to Minors by Judith LevineHarmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, The Trauma MythThe Trauma Myth: The Truth About the Sexual Abuse of Children--and its Aftermath, and Once Fallen by Derek Logue Once Fallen. Of course, if you're only source of information is tabloid sensationalism and Nancy Grace and are a paranoid helicopter parent, then this book is for you. Much like her other works, this work is a fiction novel.