Abstract:
This follow-up study surveyed social, psychiatric and offence characteristics in relation to the later criminal development of sexual offenders. This is the first study which compared directly with the same methodology adult and adolescent sexual delinquents with respect to their personality, developmental and social data. The study design was based on a data inquiry of all sexual offenders who were assessed by a forensic psychiatric expert in the Psychiatric Department of the University of Tübingen, Germany due to a criminal procedure between 1992 and 1995. Recidivism was analyzed using unrestricted informations from the federal criminal records of all subjects. The results give evidence, that some factors are associated with higher recidivism rates, that the relapse rates with a new sexual offence– in contrast to what one might have expected –is nearly twice as high in adolescent sex offenders in comparison to adult ones. Moreover, adolescent and adult offenders differ significantly in their personality traits and psychiatric diagnoses.