ABSTRACT
Until approximately 20 years ago, adolescents who committed sex offenses received little attention in the research literature. Their behavior was often explained as normal experimentation, and the focus of investigation of deviant sexual behavior was on adult sexual offenders. However, crime reports and surveys have indicated that adolescents are responsible for about 20 percent of rapes and 30 to 50 percent of cases of child sexual abuse (Davis and Leitenberg, 1987; Groth and Loredo, 1981). Current estimates suggest that more than 70,000 boys and 110,000 girls are victims of adolescent sex offenders each year (Ryan and Lane, 1997). Such estimates may be conservative because of the reluctance to report adolescent offenders (Kempton and Forehand, 1992). Thus, the phenomenon of adolescents and children as perpetrators of sex offenders against younger children has become increasingly recognized (Cashwell and Caruso, 1997; Straus, 1994).
