Explanations of Sexual Assault among Violent Delinquents

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.