Abstract:
This follow-up study surveyed social, psychiatric and offence characteristics in relation to later criminal development of juvenile sexual offenders. This is a study which compared directly with the same methology juvenile and adult sexual offenders with respect to their personality, developmental and social data. The study design was based on a data inquiry of all juvenile sexual offenders who were assessed by a forensic psychiatric expert in the Facility of Paediatric and Juvenile Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Tübingen due to a criminal procedure betweeen 1985 and 1996. Recidivism was analyzed using unrestriced informations from the federal criminal records of all subjects. The result give evidence, that some facors 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 juvenile sexual offenders in comparison to adult ones. Moreover, juvenile and adult offenders differ significantly in their personality traits and psychiatric diagnoses.