Poly-victimization among Adolescents Adjudicated for Illegal Sexual Behavior: A Latent Class Analysis

ABSTRACT

Justice-involved youth are characterized by higher rates of victimization compared to non-justice-involved youth. Prior research has elucidated the importance of examining cumulative trauma rather than one type of victimization in isolation. The sexually abused-sexual abuser hypothesis has been proposed to explain the pathway from cumulative trauma to offending, accordingly it is critical to examine poly-victimization in adolescents adjudicated for illegal sexual behavior (AISB). The current study aims to investigate categories of poly-victimized AISB through a person-centered analytic approach and compare to a sample of detained general population adolescents. Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) identified a two-class solution for AISB, revealing a low poly-victimization subtype (8.85 victimizations) and a high poly-victimization subtype (15.86 victimizations and scores in the clinical range on a measure of trauma-related symptoms). Considerations for prevention of the abuse-to-prison pipeline are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Delinquency
• incarcerated youth
• juvenile justice
• juvenile offenders
• latent class analysis
• maltreatment
• poly-victimization
• trauma
• abuse-to-prison pipeline

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a public-public partnership provided by the Alabama Department of Youth Services to John T. Rapp, PhD, Department of Psychological Sciences, Auburn University as Principal Investigator. The contents of this manuscript are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of Auburn University or the Alabama Department of Youth Services.

Disclosure of interest

Authors declare that they have no conflicts to report.

Ethical standards and informed consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation [institutional and national] and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. All participants provided their informed consent to be included in the study, in addition to institutional consent by the DYS facility.