NCJ Number
137492
Journal
Journal of Child and Youth Care Dated: special issue (Fall 1991) Pages: 53-63
Date Published
1991
Length
11 pages
Annotation
Data on the police disposition of 147 child sexual abuse cases referred to the Alberta Social Services in 1985 were compared with recently published American data. The study focuses on the connections between police disposition and perpetrator characteristics or the nature of the offense.
Abstract
The perpetrator variables considered here included relationship to victim, gender, acknowledgement of the crime, previous history as an abuser, and age at the onset of abusive behavior. The five subvariables related to the sexual offense were location, the primary sexual act, the abused victim, frequency of occurrence, and duration of the abuse. The findings showed no strong bivariate relationships between perpetrator subvariables and disposition. Nonetheless, only half of those perpetrators who admitted to sexual offenses were prosecuted. However, within the occurrence variables, there was a strong relationship between prosecution and frequency of occurrence; in cases where the child sexual abuse occurred more than 10 times, the prosecution rate was 57 percent, but only 13 percent in cases of a single occurrence. The Canadian data were very similar to those from the U.S. 3 tables and 20 references