ABSTRACT
Among its many negative consequences, sexual victimisation has been shown to have links to juvenile offending behaviour, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, and negative mental health outcomes. While there is reason to expect a high degree of continuity in sexual victimisation across the life course, little is known about these experiences among an offender population. This chapter explores these issues using data from a larger study examining violence across the life course for adults serving community corrections orders (i.e. non-custodial) in Queensland, Australia. We find high levels of sexual victimisation in this group compared with community samples, especially among women, and a high degree of continuity from childhood to adulthood, especially for penetrative sexual victimisation. Logistic regression analyses controlling for a range of individual and lifestyle factors showed that child sexual abuse directly affected the risk of adult sexual victimisation; the relationship was not mediated through alcohol problems and relationships, although these and related factors, including drug abuse, remained salient predictors of sexual victimisation in their own right. The major 147implications for prevention are to reduce the incidence of childhood sexual victimisation and to address the mental health and lifestyle factors that increase the risks of re-victimisation as an adult.
