Factors related to recidivism among juvenile sexual offenders

This recidivism study retrospectively examined the juvenile court case records of 170 first-time juvenile sexual offenders in a 5-year observation period. Cox regression, a model of event history analysis, was used to test hypotheses and to build multivariate competing risk models predictive of criminal recidivism. The multivariate analyses found that nonsexual offense recidivism was significantly (p < .01) associated with (a) prior nonsexual offenses and (b) failure to complete treatment. Sexual offense recidivism was significantly associated with larger numbers of female victims, but results were inconclusive due to the small size (n = 13) of the sexual reoffending sample.