Abstract
The development and validation of sexual offense perpetrator typologies remains a useful endeavor with implications for theory and correctional/clinical practice. Most such typologies—which rely on factors such as the individual’s motivation for offending—have not been validated empirically. The current study utilized a validated sexual violence risk-needs instrument, the Violence Risk Scale—Sexual Offense version (VRS-SO; Wong, Olver, Nicholaichuk, & Gordon [2003, 2017], Regional Psychiatric Centre and University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada), to develop and validate an empirically-derived adult victim sexual offense (AVSO) typology through model-based cluster analysis of dynamic risk-need domains. The study featured two treated samples of men (n = 283 and 169) convicted for contact sexual offenses against adult victims. A three-cluster solution was identified and replicated across the two samples: high antisociality high deviance (HA-HD), high antisociality low deviance (HA-LD), and low antisociality low deviance (LA-LD). External validation analyses demonstrated that HA-HD men had more dense sexual offense histories, were more likely to be diagnosed with a paraphilia, and had the highest rates of sexual recidivism (Sample 2 only). By contrast, the HA-LD men had greater concerns on indexes of nonsexual criminality, particularly high base rates of antisocial personality and substance use disorders, and high rates of general violent recidivism (particularly Sample 1). The findings suggest that the VRS-SO factors may have utility in discriminating between AVSO types to inform sexual offending theory, case formulation, and risk management.
Highlights
Theory and research have well documented that men who commit acts of sexual aggression toward women vary on important psychological, historical, and offence-related dimensions, and that these men can be grouped into different categories or subtypes of perpetrator
External validation analyses demonstrated that high antisociality high deviance (HA-HD) men had more dense sexual offense histories, were more likely to be diagnosed with a paraphilia, and had the highest rates of sexual recidivism (Sample 2 only)
The first sample consisted of 283 men convicted for a sexual of fense against one or more adult/teen victims who participated in the National Sex Offender Program (NaSOP; Yates, Goguen, Nicholaichuk, Williams, & Long, 2000), a Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) sexual offense treatment program offered service wide
Summary
Theory and research have well documented that men who commit acts of sexual aggression toward women vary on important psychological, historical, and offence-related dimensions, and that these men can be grouped into different categories or subtypes of perpetrator. In an attempt to demonstrate the diagnostic insensitivity of classifying individuals convicted of sexual offenses based on a medico-legal classification system (that is, based solely on the type of crime they committed; i.e., adult rape, child sexual abuse), Cohen and colleagues (1969) and Cohen, Garofalo, Boucher, and Seghorn (1971) created a clini cally-derived classification system, which became the forerunner to the Massachusetts Treatment Center (MTC) typologies The focus of this typology was to explain the act of rape through a combination of sexual and aggressive factors. The third revision of the Massachusetts Treatment Center typology (MTC:R3; Knight & Prentky, 1990) consists of four main AVSO types with nine subtypes that differ based on the motivation for the rape (i.e., opportunistic, pervasive anger, sexual, or vindictive) and the individual’s level of social competence. The dynamic factor scores on the VRS-SO were subjected to model-based cluster analysis (MBCA) on a national federal correctional sample of Canadian men convicted for sexual offenses to inform an empirically derived AVSO typology. It is anticipated that there is enough heterogeneity in factor scores that more than one cluster will be obtained and that some of the clusters found will parallel existing typologies
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