Some characteristics of perpetrators of child sexual abuse

Abstract

Besides verification of some previous findings on perpetrators of sexual abuse of children, the purpose of this paper is to introduce new knowledge about the insufficiently researched, abovementioned subject matter in criminology and penology into the corpus of previous knowledge. The paper presents a preliminary communication of the project which was focused on the examination of socio-demographic, criminological and penological characteristics of sexual abusers (N=26) sentenced to imprisonment in 2019. Preliminary results describe the profile of perpetrators: they come from both urban and rural areas, are under the age of 50, are poorly educated, tend to live alone, are prone to alcohol and drug use, and are single recidivists or multirecidivists. The offenders are known to the victim or are in a close relationship and regardless of the offender-victim relationship, these offences most commonly occur in the offender?s or victim?s home. The respective results within the existing body of knowledge should inform and prevent this phenomenon from occurring in the first place as well as to protect potential victims. Hence, much more attention is to be focused on evidence-based knowledge documenting the circumstances of sexual violence and abuse against a child for situational crime prevention purposes. There is a premise that interaction between the potential offender and the environment shapes and leads to criminal behaviour. One of the effective strategies might be to expose the children to self-protection programmes at school and teach them to resist their offender which has the potential to result in unintended negative and serious consequences. In this context, the situational features of crime, taken individually or in interaction with offender characteristics, clearly merit increased attention from scholars and practitioners in the field.