Victimization in Childhood of Male Sex Offenders: Relationship between Violence Experienced and Subsequent Offenses through Discourse Analysis

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.…”

“…It is possible that frequency and severity vary by subgroup and the resultant error from this omission contributes to the discrepant findings. Additional study of adverse childhood experiences and specific forms of crime could also inform the understanding of criminal specialization to the degree that a specific form of abuse is associated with subsequent offending, as in the case of sexual abuse/sexual assault [17,18,19,20]. …”

“…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.…”

Linking Adverse Childhood Effects and Attachment: A Theory of Etiology for Sexual Offending

“…The specific types of attachment styles of individuals who commit sexual offenses (ISOs) have also been linked to the types of sexual crimes committed and their victim choice (Abbiati et al, 2014; Lyn & Burton, 2004; Smallbone & Dadds, 1998; Ward et al, 1996). For example, preoccupied/anxious adult attachment styles are seen more often in those who molest children versus those who commit rapes (Ward et al, 1996).…”