CCOSO- pre-conference day

Today, May 12, 2010, was the first (or Pre-) day for the CCOSO conference in San Diego. CCOSO is the California Coalition on Sex Offenders. My advisor mentioned it to me on the last day of real classes in April and I was able to get a ticket/membership and a hotel room. So here I am. 🙂

I won’t bore my readers with the details of my drive south from LA to SD, or the stop off in Oceanside that I made in order to a) visit with my aunt & uncle, b) have dinner w/ the same, and c) avoid traffic. But for the record that all happened. And after arriving at my hotel… there were financial issues- again, won’t bore you (and it is all squared away now), just noting it for my own record.

If anyone knows me, they know that I am not a morning person, so the fact that I had to get up this morning at 630am (and the same throughout the conference) is pretty drastic. Thankfully there’s coffee. There was registration from 730-830, with continental breakfast, so I headed down around 8. Perused the service providers that were represented (lordy… there were like 3! not nearly enough service providers!) and then skimmed the books at the vendor table. Added some of them to my amazon wishlist! And then I ran into Dr. Kennedy (my advisor)- sadly, we did not have a session together today, but it was nice to know someone.

So the first presentation I attended was given by Dr. Carol Atkinson about polygraphy and sex offender treatment, entitled Paraphilias, Obsessions, and Rituals. The beginning of the presentation was about the polygraph tests associated with sex offender treatment. The remainder of the presentation was about a new part of the test series- Sexual History II (paraphilias). Basically, she presented and explained several of the 26 paraphilias that the test can discover/label. There was a lot of great information provided including a couple of book recommendations (to understand zoophilia better, and another that is from the victims POV about sexual sadism). I had a couple little issues with the presentation- namely the use of Wikipedia as a reference, spelling issues, and then the way questions were not directly answered. But one the whole- I took 5 pages of notes- this was a very good and interesting presentation (she also provided us all with the ppt).

I opted to return to my room for lunch (have some snack foods here) and ended up unable to leave due to a massive cramp in my leg/hip. I found out later that I should’ve stuck around downstairs as Dr. Kennedy was going to buy me lunch. Maybe tomorrow 😉

I did make it downstairs for the cocktail party- which did not meet my definition of cocktail party- at which point I did manage to meet up with Dr. Kennedy again and we discussed the different sessions, school, etc. He introduced me to a couple of people and then we parted ways in search of dinner.

Bring on Day One!

~ by elizabeth ann on May 16, 2010.