Sexual Dysfunction and Crime: Its Evolutionary, Psychological and intellectual elements in human mind.

Introduction

Sexual dysfunctions are characterized by disturbance in sexual desire and in the psycho-physiological changes that characterize the sexual response cycle and cause marked distress and personal difficulty. The paraphilias are characterized by recurrent, intense sexual urges, fantasies or behaviors that involve unusual objects, activities or situations and cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning. Sexual disorders consist of both the sexual dysfunctions and paraphilias.

 The link between sexual disorders and crime has been widely discussed from a range of perspectives, especially when it comes to paraphilias. Therefore, certain paraphilias or paraphilic fantasies can involve illegal acts. Assuming that a person who commits a sex crime must be diagnosed with a paraphilia reflects the wrong idea that the disorder by itself is sufficient to engage in criminal conduct.

The importance of this issue and its repercussions in the forensic psychiatric context justify this review. The researcher  investigates on sexual disorders and crime by searching for the terms sex offence, sex offender and rape combined with the terms sexual disorder and paraphilia and highlights the relevance of this theme that included clinical and forensic issues regarding both victim and offender, such as associated psycho-pathologies, the repercussions for victims' health, diagnostic concerns and treatment of offenders. Because of the large range of subjects, the researcher decided to focus on the aggressor. . Evolutionary psychology has explanations for gender differences in aggressiveness. Males can increase their reproductive success by polygyny which will lead the competition with other males over females.

 Review of Literature

The improvement of  the investigation cannot be accomplished by any single agency ,therefore needs a review of a number of studies. Sex differences in crime are differences between men and women as the perpetrators and victims of the crime. Such studies may belong to fields such as criminology or sociobiology which attempts to demonstrate a causal relationship between biological factors, in this case sex, and human behaviors, etc. Despite the difficulty to interpret them, crime statistics may provide a way to investigate such a relationship, whose possible existence would be interesting from a gender differences perspective. An observable difference in crime rates between men and women might be due to social and cultural factors. In 2011, the United States Department of Justice compiled homicide statistics in the United States between 1980 and 2008.That study showed that Males committed the vast majority of homicides in the United States at that time, representing 90% of the total number of offenders. Young adult black males had the highest homicide offending rate compared to offenders in other racial and sex categories. White females of all ages had the lowest offending rates of any racial or age groups. The overall offending rates for both males and females have declined since 1990.Of children under age 5 killed by a parent, the rate for biological fathers was only slightly higher than for biological mothers. However, of children under 5 killed by someone other than their parent, 80% were killed by males. According to a Canadian Public Health Agency report, the rate of violent crime doubled among male youth during the late 1980s and 1990s, while it almost tripled among female youth. It rose for the latter from 2.2 per 1,000 in 1988 to a peak of 5.6 per 1,000 in 1996, and began to decline in 1999. Some researchers have suggested that the increase on crime statistics could be partly explained by the stricter approach to schoolyard fights and bullying, leading to a criminalization of behaviors now defined as "assault" behaviors (while they were simply negatively perceived before). The increase in the proportion of female violent crime would thus be explained more by a change in law enforcement policies than by effective behavior of the population itself. According to the report aforementioned, "Evidence suggests that aggressive and violent behavior in children is linked to family and social factors, such as social and financial deprivation; harsh and inconsistent parenting; parents’ marital problems; family violence, whether between parents, by parents toward children or between siblings; poor parental mental health; physical and sexual abuse; and alcoholism, drug dependency or other substance misuse by parents or other family members.". Some researchers have suggested that females are not necessarily less aggressive, but that they tend to show their aggression in more covert and less physical ways e.g., Passive-aggressive behavior Additionally, some data shows that while men are more likely than women to use physical aggression overall, rates of physical aggression within the context of dating and marriage tend to be similar for men and women, or that women are even more likely to commit domestic violence against a partner. However, such data generally shows that men tend to inflict the greater share of injuries in domestic violence. In addition, "Critics suggest that studies finding about equal rates of violence by women in relationships are misleading because they fail to place the violence in context (Dekeseredy et al. 1997); in other words, there is a difference between someone who uses violence to fight back or defend oneself and someone who initiates an unprovoked assault." According to a large recent study women are between two to three times as likely to be the offender in non-reciprocal partner violence. The study suggests that while women are far more prone to be the sole offender, reciprocal violence where both partners use violence has higher frequency of serious injuries, and that these injuries more often have female victims than male. Surveys also show differences in same-sex habitations. "Researchers agree that women suffer the lion's share of injuries from domestic violence...Women living as partners with other women report lower rates of violence (11 percent) compared to women who live with or were married to men (30 percent)...about 15 percent of men cohabiting with men reported victimization by a male partner. These data suggest that men are engaged in more relationship violence." Considerations of gender in regard to crime have been considered to be largely ignored and pushed aside in criminological and sociological study, until recent years, to the extent of female deviance having been marginalized (Heidensohn, 1995). In the past fifty years of sociological research into crime and deviance sex differences were understood and quite often mentioned within works, such as Merton's theory of anomie, however, they were not critically discussed, and often any mention of female delinquency was only as comparative to males, to explain male behavior’s, or through defining the girl as taking on the role of a boy, namely, conducting their behavior and appearance as that of a 'tomboy' and by rejecting the female role, adopting stereotypical masculine traits. One key reason contended for this lack of attention to females in crime and deviance is due to the view that female crime has almost exclusively been dealt with by men, from policing through to legislators, and that this has continued through into the theoretical approaches, quite often portraying what could be considered as a one-sided view, as Mannheim suggested Feminism and Criminology In Britain (Heidensohn, 1995).However, other contentions have been made as explanations for the invisibility of women in regard to theoretical approaches, such as: females have an '...apparently low level of offending' (Heidensohn, 1995); that they pose less of a social threat than their male counterparts; that their 'delinquencies tend to be of a relatively minor kind' Girls In The Youth Justice System(Heidensohn, 1995), but also due to the fear that including women in research could threaten or undermine theories, as Thrasher and Sutherland feared would happen with their research (Heidensohn, 1995).

 Objectives of the study

To study the evolutionary psychology of  gender differences

 To study  the relationship between sexual disorders and crime,

To study the  clinical and forensic issues regarding both victim and offender.

To study the diagnostic concerns and treatment of the offenders.

Methodology

The data collection covered a variety of dimensions – namely, personal characteristics of the offender(family, experiences of childhood victimization, juvenile delinquency, adult delinquency), characteristics of the criminal event that led to  pre-crime situation and the crime scenario, and characteristics of the crime and the victim – and included a number of psychological tests, including IQ tests. Those computerized IQ test results were used in this study.

Universe of the study

This study deliberately used a limited number of variables, and used a sample of incarcerated sex offenders without distinction as to subtypes. Considering the great heterogeneity of sex offenders the use of a validated and reliable taxonomic system  would have been preferable. Unfortunately, it was impossible to use a typology due to the small number of subjects for which all the information was available for coding. The strategy of including all incarcerated sex offenders were allowed for the inclusion of other subgroups of sex offenders, such as incest and pseudo-incest offenders and marital rapists, thus considerably expanding the sex offender population coverage.

Tools for collecting data

The investigater uses  a validated computerized assessment of intelligence, the Tests d’Aptitudes Informatise´s (TAI) The TAI includes a total of eleven scales measuring various aspects of intelligence: vocabulary, verbal logical reasoning, knowledge, comprehension, arithmetic, mental math computations, object assembly, letter–number sequencing, spatial relationships, perception, and working memory. The TAI is a test to asses important dimensions of intelligence, and it uses similar total (TIQ), verbal (VIQ),and performance (PIQ) indexes.

 Analysis

The subjects in this study consisted of a sample of 411 offenders. The sample was comprised of offenders from the Province of Odisha sentenced to two or more years of incarceration, The subjects’ treatment needs and correctional risk levels were evaluated during a 4- to 6-week procedure. Of the 453 offenders, 341 were sex offenders and 112 were non-sexual violent (NSV) offenders. Ninety-four percent of the total number of sex offenders between 2009 and 2013 agreed to take part in the study. For the 112 randomly selected NSV offenders, only IQ test results were collected from the files. A criminal was considered a sex offender when one of his offenses involved sexual contact with the victim. The offenders considered were all hands-on offenders, which mean that they all had physical contact with their victims. Hands-off offenders such as voyeurs, exhibitionists, and other paraphiliacs were excluded, unless they had committed a sexual aggression. The non-sexual violent offenders in the sample had mainly committed homicide, armed robbery, and assault. At the time of evaluation, the mean age of the sex offenders (36.2 years, S.D.=10.1; range of 17 to 69) was significantly higher than the mean age of the NSV criminals (30.1 years, S.D.=7.3; range of 17 to69). The sex offenders had a lower level of education (t =_4.2) than the NSV offenders (8.2 vs. 9.1 years). Overall, 36.4% of the subjects were married or living common-law and 63.6%were single or widowed. None of the subjects was severely mentally disordered as diagnosed with a psychotic or mood disorder.

The comparison sex offenders with NSV offenders on IQ results, namely, on all eleven scales, as well as on three composite indexes. To test for significant differences between the eleven intelligence subscales and the independent fixed factor of criminal subtype, a multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) was performed. In order to control for the possible confounding effects of other relevant variables, covariates were used to statistically control for the subjects’ age and highest level of schooling completed. Three additional simple analyses of covariance (ANCOVA) were conducted in order to compare sex offenders with NSV criminals on composite VIQ, PIQ, and TIQ scales. The results of the MANCOVA indicated significant. Differences between sex offenders and NSV criminals were mainly attributable to the latter’s higher scores on the vocabulary subscale as well as on the comprehension, arithmetic, mental math computations, object assembly, letter–number sequencing and perception subscales. While sex offenders and NSV criminals showed similar lowVIQ scores with means of 82.2 and 86.6, respectively, The ANCOVA results showed significant differences for PIQ and TIQ scores.

Findings:

 The results from the current study indicate that sex offenders differ from non-sexual violent criminals in terms of IQ. Differences between sex offenders and NSV criminals are particularly significant on total and performance IQ scores. When compared with NSV criminals, sex offenders showed significantly lower results on performance scales. While research on NSV criminals tends toshow mental imbalance (higher performance on non-verbal than on verbal IQ), sex offenders tend toper form poorly on virtually all scales. In past studies, sample selection problems may have led to the idea that sex offenders were mostly comparable to NSV criminals in terms of their performance on IQ tests. But due to several methodological drawbacks found in these studies, one cannot effectively conclude that there are no differences between NSV criminals and sex offenders. Using a sample of comparable offenders and a validated IQ test, the present data provide support for the idea that incarcerated sex offenders may constitute a different group of subjects from NSV criminals, one that is characterized by limited intellectual performance. The study on specific populations confirms the association between sexual disorders and crime, particularly between paraphilias and sexual crimes regarding male offenders. Female offenders are less likely to be diagnosed with a sexual disorder. Some case reports focus on unusual paraphilias and lead us to question the vast possibilities of paraphilic contents and sexual arousal patterns. The variations of paraphilic-associated sexual arousal patterns, unconventional sex behaviors or paraphilic disorders are constantly changing.

Summary:

 Sexual violence is a theme not well understood yet. Because of its nature, researching it can raise many ethical problems. There is no possibility of clinical trials and of case–control studies. Even cohort studies may be problematic in themselves. So, most of the research involves biased samples or case reports, or is merely theoretical. Further research is needed to improve our understanding of the subject, so that preventive and rehabilitative measures can be taken.

Recommendations

The solution to the problem requires a public education campaign stressing the importance in educating the public about acquaintance , passing of laws protecting confidentiality victim’s identity, expanding counseling and advocacy services, providing mandatory HIV testing for indicted defendants, providing free pregnancy counseling and abortions ,providing confidential, free testing for HIV and STD. It will also require ensuring victims have access to needed support services and that they know their privacy will be protected to the extent that is legally possible.

References

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