Published In
Journal of Sexual Aggression
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2019
Subjects
Caregivers, Teenage sex offenders -- Family relationships -- Psychological aspects
Abstract
Research that attempts to understand why young people commit sex crimes points to an array of family factors that may uniquely contribute to sexual offending over general juvenile delinquency. This study examines the potentially moderating role of disrupted caregiving in the relationship between offending and caregiver-child relationship quality. Two distinct moderators were tested: gender of caregiver and biological relationship between caregiver and child. Results indicate that juvenile sexual offenders have particularly poor relationships with their primary caregivers compared to incarcerated non-sexual offenders and community controls. Furthermore, sexual offenders with male caregivers were found to have lower relationship quality scores than sexual offenders with female caregivers. In contrast, sexual offenders raised by non-biological caregivers reported better relationship quality than did offenders raised by their biological parents. These findings suggest opportunities for early intervention, before caregiving is disrupted.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.1080/13552600.2019.1618933
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/28990
Citation Details
Sitney, M. H., & Kaufman, K. L. (2019). The impact of disrupted caregiving for juvenile sexual offenders. Journal of Sexual Aggression, 1-14.
Description
© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.