Child pornography possession/receipt offenders: developing a forensic profile

Abstract

Child pornography possession/receipt offenders are a controversial offender group due to mixed and occasionally divergent evidence about their risk profile, offending history and psychopathology. Using a population of male offenders who ever perpetrated a sexual offense from a federal jurisdiction in the central United States, the current study developed an exploratory post hoc empirical profile of these offenders. The profile has some success in the validation component of our study and showed significant associations with self-reported sexual abuse of child victims ages 3–12 years, but non-significant associations to adolescent and adult victims. It significantly linked to the conceptually expected victim group and the significant statistical effect withstood controls for generally robust indicators of antisocial conduct including antisocial personality disorder, arrest onset, total adverse childhood experiences, age and race. We view the findings as exploratory and encourage additional empirical study of this important offender group.

Key words:

• child pornography
• forensic science
• paraphilic disorder
• sex offender
• violence

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

The views reflected in this study do not necessarily represent those of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Probation and Pretrial Services Office or the Federal Judiciary.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)

Ethical standards

Declaration of conflicts of interest

Michael J. Elbert has declared no conflicts of interest

Alan J. Drury has declared no conflicts of interest

Matt DeLisi has declared no conflicts of interest

Ethical approval

The article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

Notes

1 The substitution hypothesis asserts that some offenders substitute the use of pornography to satisfy their sexual interests, but do not engage in actual offending. Although a plausible hypothesis, prior research indicates it is rare. A study of a police sample and clinical sample of sexual offenders reported that just 6% of offenders in both samples reported that they consumed child pornography as a substitute for contact offending (Seto et al., 2010).

2 This is in contrast to research on sexual recidivism where Seto and Eke (2015) developed the Child Pornography Offender Risk Tool (CPORT).

3 Numerous studies indicate that paraphilic disorders are positively associated with not only sexual offending but also non-sexual forms of crime (e.g. Abel et al., 1988; Babchishin et al., 2015; DeLisi et al., 2017; Smallbone & Wortley, 2004; Woodworth et al., 2013) and/or that paraphilic disorders are a significant developmental step in the etiology of sexual offending (Abel et al., 1988; Cale et al., 2014; Lee et al., 2002).

4 Pornography addiction is not a paraphilic disorder per se, but was included in the offender’s psychiatric and psychological documents and thus used in the present study. Moreover, we included it because it is consistent with the DSM–5 advisement on paraphilic disorders, namely that it ‘causes stress or impairment to the individual or a paraphilia whose satisfaction has entailed personal harm, or risk of harm, to others’ (American Psychiatric Association, 2013, pp. 685–686). Nevertheless, there are competing scholarly views about pornography addiction as a paraphilic disorder (see, Duffy et al., 2016; Grubbs et al., 2015; Kafka, 1997; Kafka & Hennen, 2003; Seto et al., 2006).

5 We included this covariate on population heterogeneity grounds to account for propensity to engage in sexual offending. It is important to recognize that despite the axiom of prior offending being among the best predictors of future offending, a variety of studies have shown that discontinuity best describes sexual offending from adolescence through adulthood (e.g. Beaudry-Cyr et al., 2017; Lussier & Blokland, 2014; Lussier et al., 2016; Zimring et al., 2009) except among a small subset of repeat offenders.

6 The seminal Felitti et al. (1998) ACE Questionnaire contained seven ACE indicators based on data collected at Wave I of the ACE Study, and emotional neglect, physical neglect and parental separation/divorce were added at the second wave of data collection. The 10 content areas used in the current study are the conventional indicators of adverse childhood experiences.