Sexual Abuse

Treatment programs for people with histories of sexual violence form a critical part of criminal justice service rehabilitation. Completion of these programs is often a precondition of release. Meta-analytic reviews suggest moderate benefit is associated with treatment completion, although effect sizes vary. This study examined whether commencement of open versus closed group programs was associated with treatment completion and recidivism. Participants were 426 adult men who commenced treatment between April 1, 2014, and December 31, 2017. Participants were followed-up until June 30, 2018. Programs varied by type (open versus closed), location (in-custody versus in-community) and intensity (moderate versus high). No significant differences were observed between open and closed programs for treatment completion but men who were treated in-custody were more likely to complete treatment when compared to those men who commenced treatment in the community. No significant differences were observed between open and closed programs for sexual or for any recidivism.

The accuracy of risk assessment tools for Asian populations has received relatively little research attention. This study evaluated one of the most widely used static risk assessment tools - Static-99R - for assessing the likelihood of recidivism among men convicted of a sexual crime in South Korea. Overall, this South Korean sample (N = 8207) appeared to have a higher risk (more paraphilic interests, more sexual/general criminality) than the Static-99R normative samples (who were mostly White individuals from Western countries). Despite the differences, Static-99R was able to discriminate recidivists from nonrecidivists in South Korea, with AUC values similar to that observed in the normative samples (e.g., 0.72 for sexual recidivism). In terms of calibration, the observed sexual recidivism rates of the current sample were higher than the international routine/complete normative samples but lower than the high-risk/high-need normative samples (E/O = 0.75 and 1.26, respectively). Consequently, evaluators in South Korea can have reasonable confidence in the ability of Static-99R to rank individuals according to their relative likelihood of sexual recidivism.

This study seeks to extend research evaluating tools to assess the disclosure of sexually abusive behavior. The subjects were 239 male youth (ages 10–20 years) who were court-ordered to participate in a community-based collaborative intervention for sexual offending that includes outpatient and probationary services. All youth participated in an interview to capture referral incident details about admission, responsibility, empathy, and remorse at intake, during intervention, and at discharge. Intake, treatment, discharge, and recidivism measures were also collected from multiple sources. Latent class analysis identified three classes based on the intake interview: Empathetic Admitters (22%), Unempathetic Admitters (38%), and Unempathetic Deniers (40%). Significant class differences were found on intake (e.g., use of physical force, caregiver denial of youth responsibility), treatment (e.g., any sanctions/violations), and discharge measures (e.g., successful treatment, probation officer ratings), but not in recidivism rates. The findings extend efforts to identify and target different disclosure patterns whose clinical monitoring may support a comprehensive intervention.

The non-consensual sharing of private sexual images (so-called ‘revenge pornography’) has become an increasingly prominent topic in social and legislative discussions about sexual crime but has received relatively little attention within psychological research. Here, we leveraged existing theorizing in the area of sexual offending proclivity to systematically develop and validate a measure of beliefs about this type of offending. There is currently a lack of validated assessment tools in this area, and these are important to better understand the role of offense-supportive cognition in predicting both proclivity of these offenses and judgements of both victims and perpetrators. Using an international community sample (N = 511) we found our ‘Beliefs about Revenge Pornography Questionnaire (BRPQ)’ to be comprised of four underpinning domains: ‘Victims as Promiscuous’, ‘Victim Harm’, ‘Avoiding Vulnerable Behaviors’ and ‘Offense Minimization’. Concurrent validity is demonstrated through relationships with trait empathy, belief in a just world, dark personality traits and rape myth acceptance. Randomly dividing the sample, we also show that the BRPQ was associated with both proclivity (n = 227) and social judgements of this type of offending (n = 232). Implications and future directions are discussed. An open-access preprint is available at https://psyarxiv.com/6qr7t/.