Sexual Victimization Histories As a Discriminating Pathway to Youth Sexual Aggression: A Comparative Analysis of Cumulative Family Experiences

Background: Relative to juveniles who commit general delinquency crimes, youth who sexually offend have higher rates of sexual victimization and family violence including greater experiences of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, particularly within the family. Such histories of childhood maltreatment can disrupt a normative developmental life course, and create risk for offending as youth attempt to cope with their victimization experiences. While family factors like attachment may be antecedents to offending, little is known about how sexual victimization compounded by other forms of childhood violence and family risk can be an impetus for sexual offending. With increasing attention paid to adverse childhood experiences in family contexts, a greater understanding of amassed systemic risk is needed. This study sought to understand areas of family risk – such as violence, mental health, substance abuse, and criminality – as developmental pathways to sexual offending. Specifically, the impact of sexual victimization experiences and family risks as discriminating factors between groups of sexual and non-sexual offending youth were explored.

 

Methods: Data were collected from a sample (N=505) of adjudicated male youth sexual offenders (n=355) and non-sexual offenders (n=150) in 7 residential corrections facilities in a Midwestern state. The sample was divided into three groups: (1) sexually victimized youth sexual offenders (SVSO); (2) youth sexual offenders who were not been sexually victimized (NSV); and (3) youth non-sexual offenders who were not been sexually victimized (NSO). Youth were given standardized measures including the Caregiving Styles Questionnaire (CSQ), the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), the inventory of Parental and Peer Attachment (IPPA), and the Self-Report Delinquency measure (SRD). A Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was conducted to test for group differences on dependent variables of abuse, delinquency, and family factors. Given the Levene’s test of equal variance results, Games Howell posthoc test results were used to detect pairwise mean differences between the groups.

Results: The results revealed a statistically significant main effect for youth groups, Wilks’ λ = .709, F (34, 600) = 3.13, p<.001, partial eta squared = .158, with sufficient power to notice the effect at 1.00. Overall, compared with NSV and NSO groups, the SVSO group tended to have statistically significantly greater impairments on most of the independent variables including early experiences of emotional and physical abuse, caregiver interactions, attachment characteristics, and family mental health, substance use and poverty.

Implications: Researching early life experiences as developmental antecedents to youth sexual violence informs how prevention efforts can be targeted specifically towards parenting programs. Perhaps early parenting programs can begin to infuse more relationship or attachment building to improve early discorded or problematic dynamics between children and their caregivers. Capacity building programs can augment existing parenting practices to help parents form lasting connections with their children. These programs should be multi-modal and holistic where they are not only targeting attachments and bonds, but first linking parents to resources and supports to help meet their complex needs including mental health and substance abuse treatments.