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Abstract Although the links between self-esteem and sex offending are well documented, outstanding deficits remain about their generalisability to different sex offender populations. In the present study, data is presented on 690 offenders admitted to Grendon therapeutic prison on the Culture Free Self-Esteem Inventory (Battle, 1992). Self-esteem was found to be significantly lower than non-custodial norms for all types of offenders admitted to Grendon. However, as a group, sex offenders did not differ significantly from the Grendon norms suggesting that low self-esteem was a general characteristic of Grendon inmates rather than limited to sex offenders. The results also identified a difference between child molesters and rapists, with the former having lower personal self-esteem. Sex offenders who offended against males had lower self-esteem than those who offended against females. Sex offenders with a current conviction for child molestation had lower self esteem than those with only previous convictions for this offence. A low negative correlation was found between self-esteem and number of previous convictions but self-esteem was not significantly related to time in therapy, indicating that it has little value in predicting response to treatment in terms of length of stay in therapeutic communities.
Shine et al. (Tue,) studied this question.