The sexual lives of sexual offenders: the link between childhood sexual victimization and non-criminal sexual lifestyles between types of offenders

Abstract

The aim of the current study was to address a largely overlooked aspect of the lives of sexual offenders, that is, their non-criminal sexual lifestyles. Traditionally, clinical research on these men has had a strong focus on their development of deviant sexuality and its causes and relationship with sexual offending. Beyond this specific developmental pathway, however, minimal research has examined the development and correlates of their non-criminal sexual lifestyles to provide an analogous picture of how they develop sexually. The current study examined sexual victimization experiences in childhood and the non-criminal sexual lifestyles in adulthood of 546 incarcerated sexual offenders. Hierarchical linear regression analyses were performed to examine the link between childhood sexual victimization and adult sexual lifestyles. Next, multinomial logistic regression analyses were performed to determine the nature of this relationship between different types of sexual offenders. The results indicated that while childhood sexual victimization was related to aspects of non-criminal sexual lifestyles, this relationship differed for types of offenders, providing alternative insight into the sexual lifestyles of these men.