4-13-15 National:
A study on offenders that indicates a genetic tendency has some sinister implications
In the film Minority Report, police employ psychics who foresee offences before they’re committed. The special unit “PreCrime” swoops down to arrest citizens before they break the law. We’re not there yet, but a large Swedish study has nudged us an inch towards Philip K Dick.
Across more than 20,000 cases of male sex offences in Sweden 1973–2009, men with brothers or fathers convicted of sex offences were five times more likely than average to commit the same kind of crime. (The chances were 2.5% if sexual predation ran in the family, 0.5% among the general male population.) The study’s authors brandish numerous disclaimers: they’re not giving offenders an excuse, proposing male relatives of rapists be imprisoned or isolating a sex-abuse gene. But they believe the finding of a broad genetic proclivity paves the way for prevention strategies. As one forensic psychiatrist put it: “If interventions can be provided that are not harmful, this is an opportunity.”
Imagine being the son or brother of a man imprisoned for sexual assault – traumatic in itself. A social worker rings the doorbell. She offers therapy, anger management or gender–sensitivity training – when you’ve done nothing wrong. Wouldn’t you slam the door in her face, after telling the busybody from PreCrime where she can shove her “prevention strategies”?
It’s challenging to conjure any intervention that would not be stigmatizing and insulting. One could even risk planting a seed of fatalism about the inevitability of giving into a base nature.
Previous research has hinted at a genetic component of criminality, particularly at the possibility of a heritable predisposition to violence, which reminds us of the problematically thin line between explanation and excuse. Instead of insisting that their client was dominated by a dark-hearted older brother, maybe lawyers for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev could have argued that the males in his family share a tragic genetic marker that inclined both young men towards terrorism.
Lawyers might look before they leap at this novel line of defence. Criminality being partially preordained may seem to let culprits off the hook. Yet it also makes the proclivity seem ineradicable and suggests that reform is unlikely: once a baddie, always a baddie. The prospect is sci-fi for now, but picture a population whose DNA has been identified as antisocial, kept in vast, isolated camps to protect the virtuous, whose inclination to decency is also genetically certifiable.
That vision is only preposterous to an extent. Because we already treat sex offenders as if they’re genetically marked. There’s no other crime on the books that you never live down and for which you never finish paying your debt. Released sex offenders must lodge their whereabouts with the police, whether their offence was violent rape or mere voyeurism, and may be electronically tagged.
They’re required to inform police if they leave home for a week or more, and to ask permission to holiday abroad (sometimes denied). Police are licensed to identify sex offenders to members of the public. Those given sentences of more than 30 months are put permanently on the sex offenders register, like Santa Claus’s list of who’s been naughty and nice. We don’t treat these people as folk who’ve done wrong, but as folk who are wrong – hopelessly and irredeemably dangerous because of what they are.
In this sense, the Swedish study’s results are unwelcome. If anything, we need to dial down the hysteria over sex crimes, increasingly regarded as more horrific than murder, and allow for the possibility that some people make a mistake and don’t repeat it, even if that mistake is of a sexual sort.
We could also allow for the possibility that a conviction was itself a mistake. Take the case I heard of anecdotally recently of a man whose secondary-school girlfriend was in his class, and barely below the age of consent, which he was barely above. Her angry father had him arrested. With a sex offence on his record, the poor guy’s life is ruined. Does he really belong on that register? Perhaps in future we could have his DNA tested for whether he’s one of those “monsters” after all. ..Continued.. by Lionel Shriver
Showing posts with label ( .News-RSO-Family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ( .News-RSO-Family. Show all posts
April 13, 2015
Don’t be so hysterical about sex crimes
April 9, 2015
Reality check: Is sex crime genetic?
See also: Sexual assault in DNA: Sex offenders 5X likelier to have sex offending relatives4-9-15 Foreign Study Followup:
A splashy headline appeared on the websites of many U.K. newspapers this morning, claiming that men whose brothers or fathers have been convicted of a sex offense are “five times more likely to commit sex crimes than the average male” and that this increased risk of committing rape or molesting a child “may run in a family’s male genes.” The study, published online today in the International Journal of Epidemiology, analyzed data from 21,566 male sex offenders convicted in Sweden between 1973 and 2009 and concluded that genetics may account for at least 40% of the likelihood of committing a sex crime. (Women, who commit less than 1% of Sweden’s sexual offenses, were omitted from the analysis.) The scientists have suggested that the new research could be used to help identify potential offenders and target high-risk families for early intervention efforts.
But independent experts—and even the researchers who led the work, to a certain degree—warn that the study has some serious limitations. Here are a few reasons to take its conclusions, and the headlines, with a generous dash of salt.
Alternate explanations: Most studies point to early life experiences, such as childhood abuse, as the most important risk factor for becoming a perpetrator of abuse in adulthood. The new study, however, did not include any detail about the convicted sex criminals’ early life exposure to abuse. Instead, by comparing fathers with sons, and full brothers and half-brothers reared together or apart, the scientists attempted to tease out the relative contributions of shared environment and shared genes to the risk of sexual offending. Based on their analyses, the researchers concluded that shared environment accounted for just 2% of the risk of sexual offense, while genetics accounted for roughly 40%. Although there is likely some genetic contribution to sexual offending—perhaps related to impulsivity or sex drive—the group “may be overestimating the role of genes” because their assumptions were inaccurate, says Fred Berlin, a psychiatrist and sexologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Data on sexual crimes are tricky to obtain and parse: It’s extremely difficult to collect sufficient data about sexual offenders and their families to detect statistically robust patterns. Sweden is unusual because its nationwide Multi-Generation Register allows researchers to mine not only anonymized criminal records, but also to link them with offenders’ family records as well. Even with access to a nationwide database, Seena Fazel, of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, and colleagues had to include a very diverse range of offenses, from rape to possession of child pornography and indecent exposure, to maintain a large sample size.
The team did do some analysis by type of offense, separating rape from child molestation, for example. But some researchers worry that attributing a genetic basis to such a wide swath of behaviors is premature. There are also problems with relying on conviction records: Many more sexual crimes are committed than reported, and the proportion of those that go to trial is even smaller.
In addition, families with one member who has been convicted of a sexual offense are likely to be under much higher scrutiny by social services and law enforcement, leading to potential detection bias that artificially enhances the perception that sex crimes run in families, says Cathy Spatz Widom, a psychologist at the City University of New York who studies the intergenerational transmission of physical and sexual abuse. In a recent study, for example, Widom found that parents with a formal record of being abused as children were 2.5 times more likely to be reported to Child Protective Services for abusing their own children than parents in a control group who admitted to abusing their children, or whose kids said they had been mistreated.
The absolute risk of becoming a sex offender is very low: One of the study’s more dramatic-sounding findings is that brothers and fathers of sex offenders are four to five times as likely as men in the general population to commit sex crimes themselves. That statistic seems pretty striking until you look at the low prevalence of sex offense convictions in Sweden overall—a number comparable to that in the United Kingdom and many other countries. “If you look at the absolute rates, we’re looking at quite small numbers,” Fazel says. According to Fazel, convicted sex offenders make up about 0.5% of Sweden’s general population while about 2.5% of the brothers and fathers of convicted sex offenders are themselves convicted. Widom thinks even those estimates are likely too high. Because the risk of being a sex offender in both groups is so low, the difference between the two groups is hard to interpret, she says: “Who knows what the [relative difference in risk] even means when the prevalence is that low?”
In summary, there’s no doubt that some families are at a higher risk for abuse and criminal behaviors, including sexual offenses. But we’re a long way from pinning down genes that can explain why a person commits rape or any other sex crime. ..Source.. by Emily Underwood
Relatives of Sex Offenders Are 5 Times More Likely to Commit Similar Offenses Finds Study
Be sure to click on link in story and read that!4-9-15 Foreign Study:
Genetic factors were found to increase the risk of a sex crime conviction
A new study of thousands of male sex offenders found that close relatives of people convicted of sexual offenses were up to five times more likely than average to commit similar offenses themselves.
Researchers found that about 2.5 percent of brothers and sons of convicted sex offenders are themselves convicted of sexual offences, compared to about 0.5 percent of the wider public. The correlation, according to the study, is largely due to genetic factors rather than shared family environments.
“Importantly, this does not imply that sons or brothers of sex offenders inevitably become offenders too”, Niklas Langstrom, professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet and the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “But although sex crime convictions are relatively few overall, our study shows that the family risk increase is substantial. Preventive treatment for families at risk could possibly reduce the number of future victims.”
The study, which analyzed data on 21,566 men convicted of sex offenses in Sweden between 1973 and 2009, was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology. ..Source.. by Noah Rayman
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