Aggression and Social Anxiety Are Associated with Sexual Offending Against Children

Abstract

The 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.