First Advisor

Keith Kaufman

Date of Publication

Spring 4-11-2019

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Applied Psychology

Department

Psychology

Language

English

Subjects

Teenage sex offenders, Parenting, Child sexual abuse, Caregivers, Criminal methods

DOI

10.15760/etd.6858

Physical Description

1 online resource (x, 189 pages)

Abstract

In this dissertation, I present three manuscripts to investigate the prevention of a range of crimes committed against, and by, youth, using parental monitoring or guardianship. In the first paper, I tested whether the routine activities of juvenile sexual offenders (JSOs) and their victims' caregivers was associated with the JSO being placed into a supervisory role, and whether subgroup differences existed in the use of modus operandi strategies between JSO supervisors and non-supervisors (Chapter II). Findings indicated that parents' need for childcare assistance predicted JSO supervisor status more strongly than perpetrators efforts to get the child alone or disruptions to parents' lives. Furthermore, JSOs acting as a temporary caregiver to the child they abused was associated with more frequent use of modus operandi strategies overall and more frequent use of bribes and enticements to gain their victims' compliance. There were no differences between JSO supervisors and non-supervisors on the threats and coercion modus operandi (MO) subscale, and moderators between JSO supervisor status and strategic grooming strategies were not found to be significantly related. The second paper used a series of MANCOVAs to investigate whether differences in parental monitoring exist between JSOs, Juvenile Delinquent (JDs) nonsexual offenders, and non-offending Juvenile Controls (JCs; Chapter III). Findings suggest that JSOs report lower parental knowledge, parental solicitation, and parental control, compared to JCs, but for certain items, they report higher levels of all three compared to JDs. They also differed from JDs such that they reported lower levels of perceived parental monitoring. Finally, the third study focused on the development of a quantitative scale measuring technology-based parental monitoring (Chapter IV). The resulting measure will help future researchers determine whether parents' engagement with different forms of technology to communicate with their youth leads to differential outcomes for those youth, such as decreased delinquency and victimization. In sum, the first study investigates how JSOs end up in supervisory roles, and how their MO differs from non-supervisors, the second study looks at differences in parental monitoring between JSOs, juvenile non-sexual offenders, and community controls, and the third study described the development of a measure of technology-based parental monitoring. This dissertation is the first to apply both psychological and criminological perspectives to the prevention of youth offending and victimization through monitoring and other related concepts.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/28900

Share

COinS