Offensives with high grade of social repercusion: psychosocial characterization of sex delinquents

Abstract

A review of the theory has revealed the way in which research has dealt mainly. with four topics: psychological consequences and sequelae of sexual offenses, perceptions and social cognition in relation to sexual offenses, sequelae of sexual assault, and therapeutical interventións. However, there is a subject which has not been studied very much: characteristics of sexual delinquents, specially from the point of view of their lives in prison. In order to, precisely, obtain some information about this matter, the present investigation was carried out, with the hypothesis that subjects imprisoned for sexual offenses would not differ from those who had committed other kind of crimes, specifically those violating property rights or public health, two of the most frequent offenses. The sample was composed of 1250 subjects, all of them inmates of diverse representative Spanish prisons, Results obtained allow the identification of six variables that clearly determine a specificity for the group of inmates convicted of rape: high rates of psychopathological disturbance, of unstable personality, of marginality and of difficulty to establish stable relationships, unusual sentence breaching and recurrence.