Are Juveniles Who Have Committed Sexual Offenses the Same Everywhere? Psychometric Properties of the Juvenile Sex Offender Assessment Protocol-II in a Portuguese Youth Sample

Community intervention programs for sex offenders: A systematic review

Sexual violence is a phenomenon that negatively impacts the victims' physical and psychological health and well-being. Sex offenders tend not to take responsibility for their actions, have difficulties in emotion regulation and impulse control, paraphilias or other disorders, so they are a difficult group to treat. In addition, the available psychological treatment programs tend to have inconsistent and, sometimes, undesirable results. This systematic review aimed to analyse the recidivism rates of sex offenders treated in community settings. According to the PRISMA guidelines, a systematic search in three databases, EBSCOhost, PubMed, and Web of Science, and a manual search was performed. A total of 319 empirical studies using quantitative methodologies were identified, 27 of which were selected for full-text analysis. In the end, 15 studies were included, published between 1996 and 2020. The objectives, intervention approach, instruments used, and the main results and conclusions were extracted from each study. The studies explored different types of sex offenders, such as: violent sex offenders (e.g., rapists), child abusers, and child abusers with pedophilia (and/or other paraphilias). Results showed that most of the programs had a cognitive-behavioral approach (n = 13). Overall, the interventions appear to be effective in reducing recidivism rates, and some of them led to improvements in other outcomes, such as cognitive distortions, accepting responsibility, victim awareness and empathy, emotional regulation, and offense supportive attitudes. Limitations and implications for future studies were discussed.

Abusive Sexting in Adolescence: Prevalence and Characteristics of Abusers and Victims

Sexting has been defined as sending, receiving, or forwarding sexually explicit messages, images, or photos to others through digital platforms, and can assume more consensual or more abusive and violent forms. This study aims to explore the prevalence of abusive sexting in Portuguese adolescents and the psychological characteristics of sexting abusers in terms of emotional and behavioral problems, potential markers of psychopathy, childhood trauma and maltreatment, and different forms of aggression. A cross-sectional study was conducted with 4,281 participants, aged 12-20 years (2,264 girls and 2,017 boys), of whom 204 (4.8%) engaged in abusive sexting behaviors and 182 (4.3%) self-identified as being a non-consensual sexting victim. Abusive sexting was more common among boys and middle adolescents, and abusive sexting victims were more likely to be children of single-parent families. Engaging in abusive sexting and being a victim of abusive sexting were also related to behavioral and emotional problems, callousness, experiences of neglect and abuse in childhood, and various forms of aggression. Implications for future research and intervention are discussed.

Factor structure of the J-SOAP-II among Black and White male youth: A confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis

The Juvenile Sex Offender Assessment Protocol-II (J-SOAP-II) is a tool used to aid clinicians in assessing the sexual and criminal reoffense risk of male youths who have committed a sex offense. Despite its popularity, the factor structure has not been thoroughly assessed. The present study used confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to test the factor structure of the four subscales of the J-SOAP-II in a group of youths aged 12-18 who were confined for sexual offenses (N = 909), and whether the fit is affected by youth race. The results showed a poor fit to the data. An ad-hoc goal was added, to propose a new factor structure using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on one half of the data, and CFA on the second half of the data. The EFA identified three-factors: Sexual Offending and Victimization History, Risk for General Delinquency, and Antisocial Beliefs and Attitudes. This three-factor model, provided an improved, but not good, fit, indicating that further modifications to the J-SOAP-II are required to meaningfully capture risk-relevant latent constructs.