Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA.
Sex Abuse. 2010 Jun;22(2):172-90. doi: 10.1177/1079063210366270. Epub 2010 Apr 20.
Victim age is commonly used in the classification of juvenile sexual offenders (JSOs). However, the results of studies comparing JSOs who offend peers (peer offenders) with those who offend children (child molesters) are variable and inconclusive. Reasons for this variability include the lack of attention to JSOs who offend both children and peers (mixed offenders) and the variability across studies in the classification criteria used to assign JSOs to subgroups. Some studies use victim age, others use offender-victim age discrepancies, and still others use a combination of victim age and age discrepancies to classify JSOs. These variations may result in samples of JSOs that are not comparable across studies. The primary purpose of the present research was to examine the strength of the relationship between JSO subgroup membership (child, peer, and mixed offenders) and personal, criminal history, and offense history variables using several different classification methods commonly used in JSO research. Patterns of relationships between subgroup membership and the dependent variables were then compared across the classification methods to determine whether changes in classification criteria changed the pattern of results. The results indicated that the pattern of relationships between subgroups and the dependent variables changed little when classification criteria varied. Consequently, variation in classification criteria is unlikely to be contributing to the inconsistencies of the findings when comparing victim age based subgroups of JSOs.
受害者年龄通常用于青少年性犯罪者（JSO）的分类。然而，比较针对同龄人（同龄人犯罪者）和儿童（恋童癖者）犯罪的 JSO 研究结果存在差异且不确定。造成这种差异的原因包括对同时针对儿童和同龄人的 JSO（混合犯罪者）缺乏关注，以及研究中用于将 JSO 分配到子组的分类标准存在差异。一些研究使用受害者年龄，其他研究使用犯罪者-受害者年龄差异，还有一些研究则使用受害者年龄和年龄差异的组合来对 JSO 进行分类。这些差异可能导致不同研究中的 JSO 样本不可比。本研究的主要目的是使用几种常用于 JSO 研究的分类方法，研究 JSO 亚组（儿童、同龄人、混合犯罪者）成员与个人、犯罪史和犯罪史变量之间的关系强度。然后比较分类方法之间的亚组成员与因变量之间的关系模式，以确定分类标准的变化是否会改变结果模式。结果表明，当分类标准发生变化时，亚组与因变量之间的关系模式变化不大。因此，当比较基于受害者年龄的 JSO 亚组时，分类标准的差异不太可能导致研究结果不一致。
