Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2001 Phallometric Assessments Designed to Detect Arousal to Children: The Responses of Rapists and Child Molesters Jan Looman 1,3 and W. L. Marshall 2 The phallometric responses of child molesters and rapists were assessed using two assessments of sexual arousal to children. Groups responded to both audiotaped depictions of sexual activity with children and to a set of slides of nude adults and children. Analyses revealed that the audiotaped child sexual violence assessment was as effective as the slide assessment in discriminating child molesters from rapists. It was also found that rapists displayed some degree of deviant response to both stimulus sets. KEY WORDS: rapists; phallometric assessment; sexual offending. INTRODUCTION Audiotaped assessments of deviant sexual preferences in child molesters have become increasingly popular in recent years due, in part, to ethical issues related to the use of nude pictures of children in sexual preference assessments (see Laws, 1996, for a discussion of these issues). Although the ability of slide assessments to discriminate child molesters from nonsexual offenders as well as rapists is well established (see for example, Malcolm, Andrews, & Quinsey, 1993), there has been little research examining the ability of audio assessments to discriminate rapists from child molesters. Such discrimination is necessary to determine whether or not the assessment is truly detecting a sexual preference for children, or simply a more generalized sexual deviance. 1 Regional Treatment Centre, Correctional Service of Canada, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. 2 Department of Psychology, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6. 3 To whom correspondence should be addressed at Regional Treatment Centre, Correctional Service of Canada, 555 King Street West, P.O. Box 22, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 4V7. 3 1079-0632/01/0100-0003$19.50/0 C  2001 Plenum Publishing Corporation