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Comparison of Rapists and Sexual Murderers on Demographic and Selected Psychometric Measures

NCJ Number
219090
Journal
International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology Volume: 51 Issue: 3 Dated: June 2007 Pages: 298-312
Author(s)
Caroline J. Oliver; Anthony R. Beech; Dawn Fisher; Richard Beckett
Date Published
June 2007
Length
15 pages
Annotation
This comparison of 58 sexual murderers and 112 rapists who were about to undergo treatment in prison focused on characteristics of background, personality, offense, and victim.
Abstract
The study found that sexual murderers were less likely than rapists to have been in an intimate relationship prior to their offense, which might support previous findings that sexual murderers are more socially isolated than rapists. The victims of the sexual murderers tended to be older, but this does not mean that they targeted older people for attacks. It might be that older victims of sexually aggressive men were more likely to die from injuries suffered than were younger victims, which then turned a rapist into a sexual murderer. Still, there is clearly a subcategory of offenders who intentionally kill their victims, such as the sadistic murderer described by Brittain (1970). Brittain's profile of the sadistic sexual murderer, however, does not fit all sexual murderers. In the current study, rapists tended to be more open about their problems and scored higher on scales that measured historical deviance (nonsexual), paranoid suspicion, and resentment. Also, rapists reported lower self-esteem than sexual murderers. The authors note, however, that some personality differences may be due to differing periods of time in prison and adjustments to prison life rather than to stable personality traits. Study participants were drawn from 55 sex offender treatment programs operating at 7 prisons in England between 1998 and 2002. Information was obtained through a combination of interviews and case-file analysis. The sample did not include psychopaths, since inmates with this diagnosis were generally excluded from prison treatment programs. Assessment instruments were used to measure verbal intelligence, perceptions of parents' behaviors toward them in childhood, sexual deviance, enduring personality characteristics, and antisocial personality characteristics. 4 tables, 3 notes, and 27 references

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