SEX OFFENDERS: JUVENILE CRIMINALITY
All studies of juvenile criminality are handicapped by the policy of law-enforcement agencies to protect juveniles by not recording their troubles or by disguising the nature of the trouble through some vague all-inclusive term. Therefore all juvenile records err on the conservative side. Employing our usual definition that adult life begins with the sixteenth birthday, the following juvenile data refer to events prior to that age.
Nearly one quarter of the prison group had juvenile criminal records. Only two offender groups exceed this figure and only two more approximate it; otherwise the sex offenders have only 7 to 14 per cent with records of juvenile crime. Two of the three aggressor groups had percentages essentially equaling or surpassing the 24 per cent figure of the prison group.1 They and the peepers seem the only sex offenders prone to juvenile court trouble.
The seriousness of the juvenile criminality, in the eyes of the community, may be measured by the percentage of boys who were committed to a juvenile institution for a period of six months or more. We again see the same picture that was presented by juvenile criminality as a whole: the prison group, with 16 per cent, is exceeded by the same two sex-offender groups and roughly equaled by two others. By and large, half to two thirds of the boys with juvenile records were commit ted for six months or more, but there are three exceptions to this generalization. Four fifths or more of the offenders vs. adults, the homosexual offenders vs. minors, and the homosexual offenders vs. adults had six-month-plus commitments. These groups are not notable for adult criminality; in fact the heterosexual offenders vs. adults had the smallest number of felony convictions per capita of any group.
Juvenile convictions for a sex offense range from none to nearly one fifth. The 2 per cent figure of the prison group is exceeded by about half of the sex-offender groups, but of these only four had more than 6 per cent who had committed juvenile sex offenses. These are the aggressors vs. minors (18 per cent), the homosexual offenders vs. children (10 per cent), the homosexual offenders vs. minors (7 per cent), and the peepers (11 per cent) ,2
The kinds of juvenile sex offenses have a direct relevance to the sex offenses committed by these individuals as adults. The heterosexual offenders, even as boys, had their juvenile sex offenses involve females. An even clearer relationship exists among the homosexual offenders. Of the ten males among the homosexual offenders vs. children who committed juvenile sex offenses, nine committed homosexual offenses. Among the homosexual offenders vs. minors, ten had juvenile sex offenses of which eight were homosexual, and among the homosexual offenders vs. adults the proportion is three out of four. Half the peepers and exhibitionists were committed as boys for peeping and exhibition respectively. The heterosexual aggressors lack this relationship between the type of juvenile and adult sex offense.
In all but three groups the percentage with nonsexual juvenile convictions outweighs by a wide margin the percentage with sexual convictions. These three exceptional groups are the homosexual offenders vs. children and minors, and the heterosexual offenders vs. children: here the juvenile sex-offense figures are more than half those of the juvenile nonsex-offense percentages.
*342\161\2*
