The Adult Offending Outcomes of Adolescents Who Have Perpetrated a Sex Offense: Is Sexual Offending in Adolescence Indicative of Things to Come?

• Author: Stéphanie Chouinard-Thivierge,Patrick Lussier,Yanick Charette
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/15412040221123529
• Published date: 01 January 2023
• Date: 01 January 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice

2023, Vol. 21(1) 3–26

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/15412040221123529

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The Adult Offending Outcomes

of Adolescents Who Have

Perpetrated a Sex Offense: Is

Sexual Offending in

Adolescence Indicative of

Things to Come?

St´

ephanie Chouinard-Thivierge

1

, Patrick Lussier

1,2,3

, and

Yanick Charette

1,2

Abstract

Being adjudicated for a sex offense carries signif‌icant social, legal, and penal implications that are

almost unparalleled and adolescents are no exception to this differential treatment by the justice

system. This highlights the relevance of providing criminal career information concerning future

offending among adolescents who have a record for a sex offense as they age and become adults.

Based on prospective longitudinal data collected from a sample of male adolescents enrolled in the

Pathways to Desistance study (n= 1170), negative binomial regression models are conducted to

investigate the relationship between having a juvenile record for a sex offense and the frequency of

general offending in early adulthood (i.e., 18 years old and over). Results show that adolescents

who have perpetrated a sex offense have signif‌icantly lower levels of involvement in offending

during early adulthood, whether based on off‌icial or self-reported data. Findings are discussed in

terms of policy and theoretical implications.

Keywords

sex offending, adolescence, early adulthood outcomes, criminal career, prospective longitudinal

study

Being adjudicated for a sex offense carries signif‌icant social,legal, and penal implications that

are almost unparalleled and adolescents are no exception to this differential treatment by the

1

School of Social Work and Criminology, Universit´

e Laval, Qu´

ebec, Canada

2

Centre international de Criminologie Compar´

ee (CICC), Qu´

ebec, Canada

3

Centre de Recherche Universitaire sur Les Jeunes et Les Familles (CRUJeF), Qu´

ebec, Canada

Corresponding Author:

St´

ephanie Chouinard-Thivierge, School of Social Work and Criminology, Universit´

e Laval, Pavillon Charles-De-

Koninck, 1030, av. des Sciences-Humaines, Qu´

ebec, QC G1V 0A6, Canada.

Email: stephanie.chouinard-thivierge.1@ulaval.ca

justice system (Letourneau, 2021). For some decades now, adolescents who have perpetrated a

sex offense (APSO) are subjected to punitive measures derived from the criminal justice

system’s response toward adult sex offending in the United States (e.g., sex offender regis-

tration and notif‌ication (SORN) laws), which is in stark contrast with the previous orientation

from the juvenile justice system that considered their developmental features (Zimring, 2004).

Studies showed that being convicted of a sex offense is associatedwith negative consequences

later in life (e.g., diff‌iculties related to work and education; Kruttschnitt et al., 2000;

Tewksbury, 2005) that can create barriers to the desistance process (G¨

obbels et al., 2012).

Given the adult-like measures toward sex offending in adolescence and their impact on of-

fending, providing more information concerning the continuity of offending behavior over

time among APSO represents an important aspect toward a better understanding of the po-

tential impact of being off‌icially labelled by the juvenile justice system for a sex offense.

However, few criminal career studies investigated the continuity of generaloffending from one

developmental period to another among APSO who may be subjected to these measures from

the juvenile justice system. Research on the criminal careers of justice-involved adolescents

with an APSO status has been slow to emerge (e.g., Butler & Seto, 2002;van Wijk et al., 2007;

Zimring et al., 2007), but it has gained momentum in recent years (e.g., Carpentier & Proulx,

2011;Fanniff et al., 2017;Lussier & Blokland, 2014;Lussier et al., 2012;McCuish et al.,

2015). The focus of prior research has been to examine the continuity of sexual offending

between adolescence and adulthood (e.g., Reingle, 2012;Zimring et al., 2007;2009). While

this focus is important, other research has also shown that the offending behavior of these

justice-involved adolescents is not limited to sexual offending (see Caldwell, 2010) and extents

to other nonsexual antisocial and criminal behaviors (e.g., Cale et al., 2016;Lussier et al., 2012;

McCuish et al., 2015;vanWijketal.,2007).

This raises the question as to whether the issue of continuity with this offending subgroup

should be broadened to examine the continuity of offending more generally speaking. Recent

research has been focused on testing the continuity assumption of sexual offending (Lussier &

Blokland, 2014;Zimring et al., 2009) but this focus might have come with a cost –i.e., we still

don’t know much about continuity in criminal behavior in early adulthood for APSO. For

example, recently, Reale et al. (2020) using Canadian data, showed that a history of sex of-

fending in adolescence was not related to differential adult offending outcomes further stressing

the importance of broadening the study of continuity for this offending subgroup. Most of these

studies are conducted outside the United States (e.g., Cale et al., 2016;Lussier et al., 2012;

McCuish et al., 2016;Piquero, Farrington, et al., 2012;Reale et al., 2020;van den Berg et al.,

2017) where the legal response to APSO is quite different and more directly aligned with youth

justice principles that promotes rehabilitation and reintegration objectives. Furthermore,

American studies examining criminal career patterns have been conducted on retrospective data

(Letourneau et al., 2009) or on older samples before the shift from the justice system toward an

adult-like response to sexual offending (e.g., Zimring et al., 2009). More recent studies did not

distinguish offending between adolescence and adulthood, blurring the lines as to the extent of

the continuity of offending across this important developmental transition (e.g., Fanniff et al.,

2017). Therefore, it remains relevant to further investigate to what extent having an off‌icial

record for sex offense during adolescence within the current sociolegal context in the United

States can inform about the continuity of general offending at a later developmental period, that

is when these adolescents age and become adults. For this purpose, the current study relies on a

strategy rooted in the criminal career approach (Blumstein et al., 1986;DeLisi & Piquero, 2011;

Piquero, 2008) to examine if having a record for a sex offense in adolescence informs about the

continuity of offending in early adulthood.

4Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice 21(1)