background: violence against women is a serious social problem and affects mainly young women. this study aimed to evaluate sexual violence against women in campina grande, brazil. methods: a retrospective study with analysis of 886 forensic medical reports of sexual violence from the institute of legal medicine of campina grande, brazil, was conducted between january 2005 and december 2009. so...

This study tested predictions of Gray's Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (RST) in subgroups of sex offenders and male non-offenders using an experimental choice task consisting of a reward and a non-reward phase. In addition, RST-related psychometric measures were used. Both experimental and psychometric data were of interest to determine whether sex offenders could be reliably differentiated f...

An unresolved but clinically important issue in the literature on juvenile delinquency is to what extent juvenile sex offenders resemble non-sex offenders with respect to individual, familial, and environmental characteristics. The current article reviewed published studies (1995-2005) comparing sex offenders with non-sex offenders. The 17 articles meeting the inclusion criteria suggest that di...

Research with violent offenders has consistently shown impaired recognition of other's facial expressions of emotion. However, the extent to which similar problems can be observed among sexual offenders remains unknown. Using a computerized task, we presented sexual and violent offenders, and non-offenders, with male and female expressions of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surpri...

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), defined as exposure to abuse and adverse household events, are prevalent among certain offenders including those who commit intimate partner violence (IPV). However, it is not clear how ACEs relate to criminal propensity among IPV offenders, who have been shown to exhibit less antisociality and institutional violence than other offenders. We compared 99 mal...

This study examined the individual functioning, interpersonal relations, and academic performance of 115 male juveniles who were divided into 5 demographically matched groups (sexual offenders with peer/adult victims, sexual offenders with child victims, violent nonsexual offenders, nonviolent nonsexual offenders, and nondelinquent youths). Parents and youths completed self-report instruments, ...

Even though much of the prior sex offender literature focuses on males, recent research has included females as offenders. Such research, however, has been limited by small sample sizes. Several researchers have proposed typologies of female sex offenders that include both females who act alone (i.e., solo offenders) and females who act with another person (i.e., co-offenders), often a male. Th...

A sample of 505 Internet sex offenders and 526 contact sex offenders were compared on a range of psychological measures relating to offense-supportive beliefs, empathic concern, interpersonal functioning, and emotional management. Internet offenders could be successfully discriminated from contact offenders on 7 out of 15 measures. Contact offenders were found to have significantly more victim ...