The sexual lives of sexual offenders: the link between childhood sexual victimization and non-criminal sexual lifestyles between types of offenders

Abstract

The aim of the current study was to address a largely overlooked aspect of the lives of sexual offenders, that is, their non-criminal sexual lifestyles. Traditionally, clinical research on these men has had a strong focus on their development of deviant sexuality and its causes and relationship with sexual offending. Beyond this specific developmental pathway, however, minimal research has examined the development and correlates of their non-criminal sexual lifestyles to provide an analogous picture of how they develop sexually. The current study examined sexual victimization experiences in childhood and the non-criminal sexual lifestyles in adulthood of 546 incarcerated sexual offenders. Hierarchical linear regression analyses were performed to examine the link between childhood sexual victimization and adult sexual lifestyles. Next, multinomial logistic regression analyses were performed to determine the nature of this relationship between different types of sexual offenders. The results indicated that while childhood sexual victimization was related to aspects of non-criminal sexual lifestyles, this relationship differed for types of offenders, providing alternative insight into the sexual lifestyles of these men.

Keywords:

• sexual offenders
• sexual assault
• sexual offender types
• sexual lifestyles
• childhood sexual victimization

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their sincere thanks to Professor Jean Proulx for providing access to the data used to conduct the study and Dr. Patrick Lussier for his comments on a previous version of the manuscript. A previous version of this manuscript was also presented at the 63rd annual American Society of Criminology conference in Washington, DC, in 2011. Finally, we also express our thanks to the editor and anonymous reviewers for the extremely constructive and thoughtful comments.

Notes

1. One offender had a male victim.

2. When the age at first sexual abuse and last sexual abuse were the same, the value was replaced by 0.5 instead of 0 to capture the presence of abuse.

3. Five of the variables had more than 5% missing data. Frequency of monthly masturbation (14.8%), age at first sexual partner (13.0%), age at first masturbation (7.1%), frequency of weekly sex (6.8%), and age at first sexual contact (6.6%). Listwise deletion of cases with missing data resulted in 369 valid cases. The missing value analysis suggested these data were missing at random (MAR). Expectation Maximization was used to estimate and impute missing values. The analyses for the current study were carried out using the sample based on listwise deletion of cases (n=369), and then on the sample containing the imputed data (n=542). These procedures yielded the same results in the subsequent statistical analyses.

4. A log transformation was performed on the variable duration of sexual abuse for statistical analyses. Three quarters of the sample reported either no abuse or duration of abuse that lasted one year or less.

5. In the current study, the odds ratio for sexual abuse in childhood between sexual offenders who victimized children compared to those who victimized women was 0.37 (95% CI=0.24–0.56). This can be compared to the weighted average odds ratio of 0.51, (95% CI=0.35–0.74) over 15 studies in the meta-analysis of Jespersen et al. (2009).