Assessing Juvenile Sexual Offenders' Risk for Reoffending

The purpose of this research was to investigate how best to identify juvenile sexual offenders who are likely to reoffend. The juvenile justice records of 112 male juvenile sexual offenders were examined. Information obtained during evaluation at a specialized, community-based program was compared with records of subsequent sexual and nonsexual reoffending. Certain characteristics of the referral offense and aspects of the offender's clinical presentation were found to be reliably related to reoffending; on several dimensions the nonsexual reoffenders differed markedly from the sexual reoffenders. Multivariate analyses were performed to identify the combination of predictor variables that best discriminated reoffense groups.