Explanations of Sexual Assault among Violent Delinquents

Abstract

Despite recent attention both to sex offenders and violent delinquents, there is little empirical knowledge on the causes and correlates of juve nile sex offenses. Juvenile sex offenders (N = 34) were identified among a sample of chronic violent offenders (N = 242) from official records and face-to-face interviews. Juvenile sex offenders were 14. 1 percent of the sample. Sex offenders more often lived with their birth parents while violent offenders often lived in single parent families. Sex offenders had fewer nonviolent offenses, but more often had been incarcerated. Sex offenders had lower self-reported delinquency, fewer drug and alcohol problems, and less often were gang members. Their families, their sib lings and friends had less justice system involvement. However, sex offenders more often came from families with spousal violence, child abuse, and child sexual molestation, according to both official and self reports. They appear to be more sexually and socially isolated, less often have girlfriends or report sexual activity, interest or experience. They had stronger beliefs in the law, but fewer internal behavioral controls. Juve nile sex offenders appear to be a "hidden" population, more closely resembling normative populations than delinquent populations on a vari ety of social factors and attitudinal variables. Further research is needed on broader populations of sex offenders to expand and validate these preliminary findings.

Understanding Perpetrators of Nonphysical Sexual Coercion: Characteristics of Those Who Cross the Line

“…Although much of this work has focused on adult perpetrators of child sexual abuse, some studies have found a relationship between child maltreatment experiences and adult rape convictions (Dhawan & Marshall, 1996), aggression towards women (Fagan & Wexler, 1988), and generalized aggression as adults (Widom, 1989(Widom, , 2000, each suggesting that childhood maltreatment may increase an individual's risk for future sexual misconduct. Furthermore, a large-scale study by Malamuth and colleagues (1991) identifi ed childhood maltreatment as a critical distal factor in the development of sexually violent behavior towards women.…”

Pauvreté des liens d’attachement et déficiences dans les rapports intimes chez les agresseurs sexuels

“…On a découvert que les agresseurs sexuels adolescents provenaient généralement de milieux familiaux socialement isolés (Fagan et Wexler, 1988;Fehrenback, Smith, Monastersky et Deisher, 1986), et cette aliénation chez les enfants et les adolescents est le résultat de liens d'attachement pauvres entre parent et enfant (Le Frenière et Sroufe, 1984;Sroufe, 1983). De plus, les agresseurs sexuels adolescents proviennent de familles perturbées où ils ont subi des abus ou été négligés (Awad, Saunders, et Levene, 1984).…”

“…Quelques comptes rendus de recherches étayent l'idée selon laquelle la solitude est commune aux agresseurs sexuels (Awad et al, 1984;Fagan et Wexler, 1988 ;Saunders, Awad et White, 1986;Tingle et al, 1986), mais jusqu'à très récemment, il n'existait pas d'étude systématique des déficiences dans les liens d'intimité chez les agresseurs sexuels. Il existe toutefois maintenant deux rapports récents portant à la fois sur la solitude et sur la défi-cience d'intimité chez ces hommes.…”

Violent Juvenile Sex Offenders Compared with Violent Juvenile Nonsex Offenders: Explorative Findings From the Pittsburgh Youth Study

“…A recurring finding is the presence of a history of sexual and/or physical abuse, which has been demonstrated more frequently in sex offenders than in nonsex offenders (Fagan & Wexler, 1988;Hastings, Anderson, & Hemphill, 1997;Jonson-Reid & Way, 2001;Milloy, 1994). Mixed results have been demonstrated with respect to other characteristics (e.g.…”