ABILITY TO EMPATHISE AND MASCULINITY LEVELS: COMPARING MALE ADOLESCENT SEX OFFENDERS WITH A NORMATIVE SAMPLE OF NON‐OFFENDING ADOLESCENTS

Abstract

This exploratory study compares the empathic ability and hypermasculinity levels of 44 male adolescent sex offenders and 57 non‐offending adolescent males, as measured by an adapted version of Hanson and Scott's Empathy for Women Test, i.e. the Empathy for Girls Test, and an adolescent version of Mosher and Sirkin's Hypermasculinity Inventory. These measures were found to have satisfactory psychometric properties.

There were no statistically significant differences in terms of the total Hypermasculinity Inventory score between the offending and non‐offending sample. Two of the sub‐scales (callous sexual attitudes towards females and adversarial attitudes towards females and sexual minorities) were statistically significant in the hypothesised direction. This suggested important qualitative differences between the masculine attitudes of adolescent sex offenders and non‐offending adolescents, rather than differences between their levels of masculinity per se.

The Empathy for Girls Test yielded statistically significant differences between the two groups as regards their total scores and sub‐scale scores, indicative of both an overall empathy deficit, in addition to specific empathy difficulties. Correlation results demonstrated an association between empathic ability and hypermasculinity amongst the non‐offenders when compared with the offenders. Findings are discussed in terms of the difficulties of researching this topic, future directions for research and possible emphasis for intervention with offenders.

Keywords:

• Adolescent Sex Offenders
• Hypermasculinity
• Empathy

Notes

¹Measures available from the third author.