Profiling parental child sex abuse

Profiling parental child sex abuse
Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice no. 465

Jane Goodman-Delahunty
ISSN 1836-2206
Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, January 2014

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Foreword | Public policy initiatives to redress parental child sexual offenders have been hindered by the absence of an offending profile that characterises this core group of intrafamilial offenders. Drawing on data from a sample of 213 offenders, this study augments knowledge about sex offender typologies by identifying ten key descriptive features of parental offenders.

The findings revealed that parental sex offenders have a distinctive profile unlike that of other child sexual offenders and are more criminally versatile than presupposed. This may provide useful information to support clinical practice and preventive interventions aimed at increasing offender desistance and reducing threats to the safety and welfare of young children and their families.

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Parental sex abusers buck standard paedophile profile: study


TIM PALMER: New Australian research has found parents who sexually abuse their children don't fit the typical profile of other paedophiles.

About 40 per cent of the offenders in the study had been abused as children themselves and biological fathers were found to be almost as likely to commit the abuse as a step-father.

The report's author, Professor Jane Goodman-Delahunty from Charles Sturt University, spoke to Samantha Donovan.

JANE GOODMAN-DELAHUNTY: Most of those individuals are actually in a stable marriage or adult relationship, approximately 86 per cent, you know, and so they're people who have had a history of intimate relationships with an adult, which distinguishes them from what many people might think of as a paedophile or typical child sexual offender.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: And of the 200 or so offenders you looked at, were they often step-fathers or men in de facto relationships who were abusing children in the family or were men just as likely to abuse their biological children?

JANE GOODMAN-DELAHUNTY: They were very close - 45 per cent were biological fathers and 55 per cent of the sample were step-fathers, foster fathers, de facto spouses.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: Was that a surprising finding?

JANE GOODMAN-DELAHUNTY: I think it probably is because I think the presumption has been that it’s far more weighted in the direction of non-biological parents.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: And had the offenders been abused as children themselves?

JANE GOODMAN-DELAHUNTY: A smaller percentage than I think has been presumed. So it wouldn't be a situation where you would say that there is clearly, you know, a cycle of if you're a victim of abuse yourself, you're going to become a perpetrator because the majority of this group had not actually reported that victimisation.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: What did you find motivated these people who were primarily men abusing children within their own family?

JANE GOODMAN-DELAHUNTY: Motivation is quite tricky to assess but it was probably what you would call more opportunistic, situational kind of offending. They have other criminal motivations. In other words they weren't strictly sex offenders, they were more generalist offenders, because more than half of them actually when we looked at their background had a prior criminal record for a non-sexual offence.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: How does that differ from the usual profile of other paedophiles?

JANE GOODMAN-DELAHUNTY: There's been a lot of research that has focused extensively on thinking that sexual offenders don't necessarily do other kinds of offending, particularly when it is interfamalial or offending within the family. So this was really new information about the likelihood that these individuals also have other kinds of criminal proclivity.

SAMANTHA DONOVAN: Who were they choosing as their victims primarily?

JANE GOODMAN-DELAHUNTY: The victim was usually a single victim. In other words they don't necessarily offend against other members in the family or other people's children so the risk to others is low but most of the victims were young female children with an average age of eight years.

These were not one-off events but mostly the abuse had gone on for years, with multiple incidents before it was reported. The average duration was three and a half years and most of the victims had in fact been seriously abused, had experienced penetration, and so I think that's a great motivation to try to address this issue with more attention.

TIM PALMER: Professor Jane Goodman-Delahunty speaking with Samantha Donovan.

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