SEX OFFENDERS: FAMILY AND GENERAL BACKGROUND

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In terms of their social and economic status, the parents of the sex offenders occupy a low position in society. A low status is typical of people in prison, and the bulk of our sample of sex offenders had been imprisoned at one time or another. However, it is surprising to find that, on the whole, the sex offenders’ parents occupied a lower socioeconomic position than did the parents of our prison and control groups.

We routinely questioned each person interviewed about the economic status of his parents when he was aged fourteen to seventeen, and our impression is that there was not much change in it over the years: what was true when he was fourteen to seventeen was, generally speaking, also true when he was younger. On the basis of the answers, the parents were assigned to categories ranging from “extremely poor” up to “rich.” Since in this particular study there was virtually no one whose parents were wealthy, we need not concern ourselves with any economic category above “upper middle class.”

Far more of the sex offenders reported their parents as being “extremely poor,” “poor,” and “moderately poor” than did members of the prison and control groups. Conversely, they reported the lowest percentages in the categories “lower-middle,” “middle,” and “upper-middle.”

In addition to this generalization—that of the prison, control, and sex-offender groups the parents of the last were the poorest—one can note three other phenomena. First, the incest offenders seem to have come from the more financially deprived homes. Second, there is remarkable similarity in the parental economic status of the prison and control groups. Third, the homosexual offenders’ parents were financially better off than most. The reason for and the consequences of the relatively low financial status of the sex offenders’ parents are unknown. However, our data indicate that financial deprivation does not significantly correlate with sexual deprivation.

Aside from money, educational achievement plays a strong role in determining social status, but our data on this point are weakened by many instances in which the information was not obtained. Using only the cases where the father’s (or surrogate father’s) education is known, we find the control group and most of the sex offenders essentially the same: about two thirds to three quarters had fathers with grammar school education, parents of one fifth had some high school, and one tenth had some college education. The fathers of the prison group were somewhat better educated: slightly over half had not gone beyond grade school, one quarter had gone into high school, and nearly one fifth had gone into or beyond the first year of college. The similarity of the control group and the sex offenders is reasonably certain since the proportion of cases in which the father’s education was not recorded is about the same for each group. However, information concerning the father’s education is lacking in over half of the prison-group case histories; hence the findings are somewhat suspect.

Essentially the same picture is seen in the mother’s (or surrogate mother’s) educational attainment, the sex offenders and the control group being very similar, and the prison group’s mothers being better educated. Interestingly, more mothers than fathers attended high school; about 30 per cent of the mothers of the sex offenders and control group had from nine to 12 years of schooling (as opposed to one fifth of the fathers), and only about three; fifths never went beyond grade school (as opposed to two thirds of the fathers). This same trend is visible in the prison group. It probably represents the result of what was once a prevalent education vs. economics philosophy—a boy can be put to gainful work after graduation from grade school, but a girl is better kept in school and out of trouble for a few years until she is old enough to be married. As with the fathers’ education, the unknowns in these data are usually large.

A comparison of the parental education of the various types of sex offenders reveals nothing outstanding except that the educational achievement tends to be low for parents of incest offenders and high for homosexual offenders. Considerable intergroup variation occurs.