ABSTRACT
The findings of the study corroborate other studies that show that among juvenile sex offenders, rapists with peer-aged or older victims are the most psychopathic group of offenders. Attachment capacity, when used in conjunction with a measure of psychopathy and empirical correlates of the internal world, can assist differential diagnosis, provide rich insights into offender motivation, direction for treatment, and early intervention for juvenile sex offenders. Adult child sex molesters are known to be hard to engage in therapy and their ambivalence and/or avoidance creates considerable therapeutic challenges for the therapist. The data clearly implicate differential developmental trajectories to sexual offending, while providing evidence in favour of a general developmental model of offending behaviour. Moreover, the research findings support the general profile in the literature of the disparate and somewhat contradictory nature of personality features, behavioural characteristics, and the clinical presentation of juvenile sex offenders, which suggests multiple causation of juvenile sex offending.
