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Assessments of juvenile sexual offenders that are intended to aid in dispositional decisions occur at a multitude of decision points within the juvenile justice system. Despite the ubiquity of decisions that include considerations of risk, relatively little empirical work has been done on the development and validation of a risk assessment procedure for these young offenders. In this article, we discuss our initial efforts in developing and validating an actuarial risk assessment protocol for juvenile sex offenders using a sample of 96 adolescents that had been admitted, treated, and discharged from the Joseph J. Peters Institute. We conclude with a critical discussion of problems associated with evaluating risk in this population, and of deficiencies and revision requirements in the present protocol.

Considerable evidence has amassed in studies of both nonoffender and offender samples that demonstrates both that sexual aggression is determined by a multiplicity of variables and that convicted sexual offenders are markedly heterogeneous (Knight, Rosenberg, & Schneider, 1985; Malamuth, 1986). Attempts both to identify sexually coercive men in normal samples and to assess etiology, concurrent adaptation, treatment efficacy, and recidivism for convicted sexually aggressive offenders have also suggested that the critical determining components of sexual aggression interact in complex ways. The purpose of this article is to survey both the offender and nonoffender sexual aggression research for evidence about which dimensions should be included in multivariate models that attempt to discriminate rapists from nonrapists, to identify subgroups among rapists, or to enhance the efficiency of dispositional decisions about these offenders.

Although descriptive studies have demonstrated that child molesters are heterogeneous on numerous variables (Knight, Rosenberg, & Schneider, 1985), no classification systems have been constructed that divide child molesters into reliable, cohesive subgroups. This critical gap in our knowledge hampers the efficacy of clinical decisions about the treatment, management, and disposition of these offenders. The child molester typology presented here has been developed to fulfill the need for a clearly operationalized, reliable, valid system to address the problem of the manifest diversity of these offenders. This typology is the product of a research program that has integrated both deductive/rational and inductive/empirical strategies for generating and testing taxonomic systems (Knight, 1988; Knight & Prentky, in press). We present here the criteria for applying this system and the interrater reliability coefficients for assigning a sample of committed offenders to these proposed types.