Does Childhood Sexual Abuse Victimization Translate Into Juvenile Sexual Offending? New Evidence

Abstract

The cycle of violence thesis posits that early exposure to maltreatment increases the likelihood of later maladaptive and antisocial behaviors. Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) specifically has been shown to increase the likelihood of sexual offending, although less is known about its linkages to other forms of crime. Based on data from 2,520 incarcerated male juvenile offenders from a large southern state, hierarchical logistic regression models suggested that CSA increased the likelihood of later sexual offending nearly sixfold (467% increase). However, CSA was associated with an 83% reduced likelihood of homicide offending and 68% reduced likelihood of serious person/property offending. These findings suggest further support for the cycle of violence where CSA promotes sexual offending but novel findings regarding the linkages between CSA and other forms of crime.

Adverse Childhood Experiences, Commitment Offense, and Race/Ethnicity: Are the Effects Crime-, Race-, and Ethnicity-Specific?

“…Adverse childhood experiences have been shown to have long-term effects on behavioral functioning and have recently been utilized by criminologists as a conceptual framework to understand antisocial development [6,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]. Using a large sample of 2520 serious male juvenile delinquents, the current study examined whether there were differential effects on crime based on the number of adverse childhood experiences that a ward experienced, whether these effects varied across race and ethnic groups, and whether the adverse childhood experiences’ association with offending depended on the commitment offense type.…”

“…Additional research is needed to examine how and to what degree adverse childhood experiences are associated with variance in specific forms of serious crime, including homicide and aggravated robbery. Moreover, while there is considerable evidence that sexual abuse victimization can be a distal predictor of subsequent sexual offending [17,18,19,20,21], much less is known about how poverty, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and other deprivations are linked to other forms of violence.…”

“…For instance, Boduszek and colleagues [15] found that male prisoners in Poland who had been exposed to family violence were approximately six times more likely to perpetrate a homicide than offenders who lacked violence exposure. In terms of sexual violence, a host of investigators have found that assorted adverse childhood experiences, particularly childhood sexual abuse victimization, were associated with an increased likelihood of perpetrating sexual crimes during adolescence or adulthood [16,17,18,19,20,21]. The evidence is clear that adverse childhood experiences increase the liability for externalizing symptoms and diverse forms of antisocial conduct.…”

Training the next generation of psychotraumatologists: COllaborative Network for Training and EXcellence in psychoTraumatology (CONTEXT)

“…While not all people who are maltreated as children become violent perpetrators in later life, experiencing abuse has been identified as a risk factor for criminality (Ardino, 2012; DeLisi, Kosloski, Vaughn, Caudill, & Trulson, 2014). Using a randomly selected sample of case file data ( n  = 120,000) from the PBNI, project 9 will examine associations between early trauma, mental health problems, and violent offending.…”

Psychosocial Correlates of Attitudes Toward Male Sexual Violence in a Sample of Financial Crime, Property Crime, General Violent, and Homicide Offenders

“…Support is offered by way of research that found a relationship between experiences of childhood maltreatment and violent offending (Fox, Perez, Cass, Baglivio, & Epps, 2015), rape convictions (Dhawan & Marshall, 1996), violent sexual offending (Widom & Ames, 1994), and general IPV (Ireland & Smith, 2009) in adulthood. Child sexual abuse has been revealed to be predictive of verbal and physical sexual coercion (Gámez-Guadix, Straus, & Hershberger, 2011;Lyndon, White, & Kadlec, 2007) as well as sexual assault perpetration (DeLisi, Kosloski, Vaughn, Caudill, & Trulson, 2014;Loh & Gidycz, 2006). Directly exploring the relationship between childhood exposure to violence and rape myth acceptance (RMA), recent research indicated such exposure has a significant positive effect upon attitudes towards rape, shown to be associated with proclivity for sexual violence (Debowska, Boduszek, Dhingra, Kola, & Meller-Prunska, 2015).…”