Covariates of the Severity of Aggression in Sexual Crimes: Psychopathy and Borderline Characteristics.

Whereas risk assessment literature on sexual offending has primarily focused on prediction of subsequent sexual crimes, and not the severity of those crimes, the first aim of the present study was to identify variables that predict the amount of damage to victims in sexual crimes compared with those that predict general aggressiveness. The second aim was to ascertain whether adding emotional instability measurements, as in borderline personality disorder (BPD), would add incremental variance to that captured by the facets of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). Trained raters assessed on the PCL-R, BPD, and measures of severity of sexual and nonsexual violence 302 adults who had sexually offended. PCL-R's Antisociality and two externalizing BPD factors (one from the standard and one from the alternative criteria) were significant predictors of violence both in sexual and nonsexual crimes. In contrast, deficits in the PCL-R's Affective facet (2) predicted victim damage in sexual contexts only, whereas the Lifestyle Impulsivity facet (3) of the PCL-R predicted violence in nonsexual contexts only. These findings suggest that adding measures of emotional dysregulation to commonly used instruments like the PCL-R, which assesses callousness and antisociality, may be beneficial for predicting violence.

Testing an etiological model for male juvenile sexual offending against females.

Research on the origin of sexual aggression has identified several important contributing factors: (a) early abuse (physical and sexual), (b) personality/behavioral traits (callousness and unemotionality, antisocial behavior/impulsivity, and hypersexuality), and (c) attitudinal/cognitive variables (negative masculinity, hostility toward women, misogynistic fantasies). We developed and tested an etiological model of sexual coercion on adult samples of sexual offenders and community controls. The model proposes three major causal pathways to sexual coercion. Using data gathered from a computerized interview, we employed this same model to predict sexually coercive behavior in a sample of 218 juvenile sexual offenders. The cross- sample consistency of the model provides support for a unified theory of sexual aggression against women.

The developmental antecedents of sexual coercion against women: testing alternative hypotheses with structural equation modeling.

A unified model of the origin of sexual aggression against women on both adult and juvenile sexual offender samples has been developed and successfully tested. This model proposed three major causal paths to sexual coercion against women. In the first path, physical and verbal abuse was hypothesized to produce callousness and lack of emotionality, which disinhibited sexual drive and sexual fantasies. These in turn disinhibited hostile sexual fantasies, and led to sexual coercion. In the second causal path, sexual abuse contributed directly to the disinhibition of sexual drive and sexual fantasies, which through hostile sexual fantasies led to sexual coercion. The third path operated through early antisocial behavior, including aggressive acts. It developed as a result of both physical/verbal abuse and callousness/lack of emotion. It in turn directly affected sexual coercion and worked indirectly through the hostile sexual fantasies path. In the present study, the anonymous responses of a group of 168 blue-collar, community males to an inventory (the Multidimensional Assessment of Sex and Aggression) were used in a structural equation model to test the validity of this model. Moreover, this model was pitted against (Malamuth's (1998)) two-path model. Whereas the three-path model had an excellent fit with the data (CFI =.951, RMSEA =.047), the two-path model fit less well (CFI =.857, RMSEA =.079). These results indicate the superiority of the three-path model and suggest that it constitutes a solid, empirically disconfirmable heuristic for the etiology of sexual coercion against women.