Aggression and Social Anxiety Are Associated with Sexual Offending Against Children

Thijs Kanters,Ruud H J Hornsveld,Kevin L Nunes,Almar J Zwets,Nicole M L Buck,Peter Muris,Hjalmar J C Van Marle

doi:10.1080/14999013.2016.1193073

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe current study examined a number of risk factors that are thought to be related to sexual offending. More specifically, we investigated differences in self-reported aggression, anger, hostility, social anxiety, and social skills between child sexual abusers (n = 28), rapists (n = 36), and nonsexual violent offenders (n = 59) who were detained under hospital order. In addition, differences between inpatient (n = 28) and outpatient child sexual abusers (n = 61) on the pertinent constructs were evaluated. Consistent with our expectations, we found that child sexual abusers reported themselves as lower on the aggression-related measures and higher on social anxiety than nonsexual violent offenders. In contrast with our hypotheses, however, the results also indicated that the inpatient child sexual abusers reported lower levels of aggression, anger, hostility, and social anxiety than the outpatient child sexual abusers. The observed differences between child sexual abusers, rapists, and nonsexual violent offenders are generally consistent with theories about the etiology of sexual abuse. The differences between the inpatient and outpatient child sexual abusers were not in the expected direction, but may be due to a number of methodological limitations of this research.

Highlights

Sexual offending is a widespread international problem
Social incompetence and intimacy deficits are common among child sexual abusers (e.g., Geer, Estupinan, & Manguno-Mire, 2000; Overholser & Beck, 1986; Seidman et al, 1994), there is no evidence that social skills deficits predict sexual recidivism
We compared whether the child sexual abusers differed from the rapists in terms of risk of sexual recidivism, as measured by the Sexual Violence Risk–20 (SVR-20)

Summary

Introduction

Sexual offending is a widespread international problem. Meta-analyses have indicated that the international prevalence rate of child sexual abuse is approximately 20% (Pereda, Guilera, Forns, & Gomez-Benito, 2009a, 2009b). An account that has attracted considerable research attention is the pathways model (Ward & Siegert, 2002), which describes four sets of psychological mechanisms (i.e., pathways) that are thought to play a causal role in sexual offending against children: (1) antisocial cognitions; (2) deviant sexual scripts; (3) intimacy and social skill deficits; and (4) emotional dysregulation According to this model, child sexual abuse can be initiated by all these factors, the influence of each factor may vary for each individual case. The current study further explored risk factors related to sexual offending against children For this purpose, we examined differences between child sexual abusers, rapists, and non-sexual violent offenders on various selfreport questionnaires measuring aggression, hostility, and anger (Hanson & Morton-Bourgon, 2004, 2009; Ward, Hudson, & Marshall, 1996), interpersonal anxiety, and social skills deficits (Hoyer, Kunst, & Schmidt, 2001; Segal & Marshall, 1985). Since antisocial orientation/lifestyle instabilities are consistently correlated with sexual recidivism (Hanson & Bussiere, 1998; Hanson & Morton-Bourgon, 2005), it was hypothesized that the inpatients would report more antisocial behavior, anger, aggression, and hostility than the outpatients

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Conclusion