Assessing attitudes toward juveniles and adults adjudicated for sexual offenses in Canada: does offender age matter?

ABSTRACT

Over the past several decades, societal responses to juvenile crime has evolved from harsh sentences (including death) to more lenient punishments in congruence with our greater understanding of adolescent development. However, some groups of young offenders, such as those convicted of sexual offenses, appear to have fallen victim to a more punitive zeitgeist, where the mitigating effect of age may be diminished. In a 3  × (2) design, participants were randomly assigned to one of three vignette conditions and completed several measures regarding both juveniles and adults adjudicated for sexual offenses, including attitudes, moral outrage, and recommendations for sentence length and registration. Results indicated that adjudicated juveniles are viewed more favourably than their adult counterparts, although both received relatively long sentences. Further, over 90% of participants endorsed some form of registration for juvenile offenders. Implications for offender reintegration and public policy are discussed below.

KEYWORDS:

• Juvenile offenders
• sexual offender
• attitudes
• punishment
• adolescent sex offenders
• public policy

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Upon preliminary examination, recommended sentence lengths for both groups were positively skewed. To address the issue of nonnormality, a log transformation was conducted. The inclusion of the transformed variables did not modify the results of the present analyses, so the original sentence length values were retained for ease of interpretation.

2 Under the YCJA, youth who have committed first degree murder can receive a maximum sentence of ten years, although no more than six years can be served in a correctional institution. Youth can be tried as adults under special circumstances provided they are at least 14 years of age, which is older than the youth presented in the vignette provided condition.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.