Abstract
Moral development in humans is extremely important, determining the quality of a person’s conduct. In forensic and criminological practice, the moral developmental stage is viewed as one of the factors involved in socio-criminal behavior. In assessing recidivism risk, especially that of young sex offenders, the determination of the moral developmental stage of the offender is essential because, being a dynamic factor, that may change over time, it may play a role in deciding sentencing. Actually, the determination of the stage/level of any offender’s moral development is so important for the delivery of a just verdict and sentence that it should be mandatory.
Young sex offenders share with older ones empathy deficits toward their victims, and their social perspective and role-taking are considered to be poor, but still they do not show the full criminal thinking pattern described in offenders in general by Yochelson and Samenow (1977). They do not yet have the typical criminal cognitive style, even though they behave irresponsibly and show lack of self-control. They are immature, and their antisocial behavioral immaturity may be due to their underlying brain immaturity due to a lack of myelinization (see, for example, Restak & Grubin, 2001). That is one of the reasons why they may eventually change as their brain matures. That is important for the players in a court of law to know when determining an offender’s recidivism risk.
There are many structured tests that are used to elicit the capacity for sociomoral reasoning of both young and old offenders. They can be considered the progeny of the earlier studies of Piaget (1932/1965), Kohlberg (1984), and Selman (1980), and they include, among others, the Defining Issue Test (DIT; Rest, 1975), the Moral Judgment Interview (MJI; Colby & Kohlberg, 1987), the Sociomoral Reflection Measure–Short Form (SRM-SF; Gibbs, Basinger, & Fuller, 1992), and the Basic Empathy Scale (BES; Jolliffe & Farrington, 2006). All of these tests may be helpful in the assessment of the moral capacity of young sex offenders. Generally, the scores of these young offenders are at Level 1, Stages 1 or 2 (preconventional reasoning). In clinical practice, the assessment of moral social reasoning is frequently done during the diagnostic clinical interview. However, structural tests no doubt can aid in the detection of hidden antisocial tendencies, which may lead to future crime as, for example, the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 2003) does for the detection of psychopathic features. It is reported that structural assessment tests are more accurate and therefore more valid than the clinical interview. However, it must be remembered that a properly conducted clinical interview focuses on the uniqueness of the offender’s personality, the nuances of his character, his unchecked spontaneity, the observation of his body’s unspoken language, and the possibility to immediately confront the offender about the veracity of his statements.
In this issue of the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, Eveline van Vugt and colleagues present a challenging article that deals with the moral development of young sex offenders and the use of structured and unstructured assessments in its valuation. It is well written, its methodology is clear and concise, and the authors’ discussion of the problem at hand is interesting and reveals a well-researched paper. However, their findings are quite surprising. There is no concurrence between the scores of structured and unstructured assessments of moral development in the cases they studied. More precisely, the clinical interview does not reflect what the structural interview does. The authors, in discussing their findings, question their clinical assessments, their possible unfamiliarity with the unstructured instruments, and also the personal characteristics of their clients at the basis of their results. Regarding the latter, the words of Emma Palmer (2003), referring to psychopaths—and sex offenders belong to that group—may be enlightening and explanatory for the findings of van Vugt et al.: “It is possible that psychopaths are fully aware of what is the morally ‘right’ thing to do and are also able to reason appropriately about this if they make the effort to do so” (p. 120). In other words, it is possible that the responses given by the study participants in the clinical interviews conducted were insincere or inaccurate. That could explain the discrepancies between the two types of interview results. van Vugt and colleagues rightly conclude that the unstructured testing (the clinical interview) shoud be, nevertheless, the primary type in any assessment of the sociomoral reasoning and recidivism risk of young sex offenders. However, it should be correlated by any additional information available, especially structured test results.