Friends of the Forensic Science Club, this week we present the paper “Sex offending among adolescents and young men with history of psychiatric inpatient care in adolescence” by Kaltiala, R., Holttinen, T. and Ellonen, N. (2022), in which authors carry out a follow study that lasted 30 years about cases of men and male adolescents what were in psychiatric centers, to know whether they commit any kind of crime when they left the treatment, focusing on sexual crimes.
There are discrepancies during adolescence between physical maturation, cognitive maturation and emotional maturation, and this is something that can increase the risk of young people to take part, for example, in sexual encounters that are not safe or healthy. In extreme cases, even non-consensual sexual encounters can appear.
All this can be related to internalizing and also externalizing mental disorders. In fact, being part of a non-consensual sexual activity, as authors mention, would be an important risk factor for mental disorders. Being the perpetrator of this type of crimes can also be related to developmental problems.
In addition to the risk factors that exist for delinquency in general, young sex offenders often have a history of being subjected to sexual abuse, atypical sexual interests, social isolation, and some form of psychopathology.
Some psychiatric and developmental conditions have been associated in young people and adults with a higher probability of committing sexual crimes. For example, severe behavioral disorders, development of an antisocial personality, and even in some cases (although not the majority) autism spectrum disorders and mental retardation.
Up to two thirds of young sex offenders meet diagnostic criteria for some mental disorders.
Many serious mental disorders are related to sexuality and must be considered, since they can distort normative development towards a consensual and satisfactory sexuality, such as anhedonia, impulse control deficits, social anxiety or perception and communication problems. This can be particularly damaging in adolescence, when young people are dealing with critical development in many and varied areas of their lives.
Authors have different objectives in this work. For example, knowing how often young men entering psychiatric care acquire a criminal record for sexual offenses in the first 10 years after discharge, if they actually commit any. Knowing which of the diagnoses carries the highest risk of subsequent sexual offenses is also one of their goals.
On the other hand, as the study involves a following of the cases for 30 years, they wonder what are the differences between the young people admitted in the 1980s, 1990s and the 2000s.
To do this, they acquired a sample of 6,749 adolescents between 13 and 17 years old who were admitted, between 1980 and 2010, to undergo their first psychiatric treatment.
Subsequent criminal records were retrieved from public records in Finland, the context of the study. They contained data about the sentences imposed, sentences pardoned, and charges dismissed by the trial courts.
Only 103 of all patients had committed sexual offenses during the follow-up, which is a very low number (1.5%). Thus, criminal conviction for sexual offenses committed by adolescents within 10 years of discharge from a psychiatric facility is extremely rare.
The acquisition of a criminal record for sexual offenses was equally common among those who entered psychiatry in early adolescence (13-14 years) and those who entered psychiatry in later adolescence (15-17 years).
Criminal records for sexual offenses were more common among those with primary diagnoses of substance abuse and personality disorders. It was less common among those young people with mood disorders.
In addition, having a criminal record for nonsexual violence prior to admission to the psychiatric facility was associated with a higher risk of committing those same crimes after admission.
Patients admitted for the first time with diagnoses related to schizophrenia, have a low risk of committing subsequent crimes, both sexual and non-sexual, also applying to non-violent crimes.
However, despite everything mentioned above, it is important to say that sexual crimes after the stay in the psychiatric center were more common among young people admitted to the centers in the last decade.
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