Sexual Abuse Offender Ages

About half of all perps are under the age of 25. That is a helpful thing to know in keeping our kids safe.

That's gross, although I wonder how many of those are pedophilia vs. date rape, etc.

WOW, this is eye-opening. i realize that i guess i had bought in to the stereotype the media propagates about dirty old men schoolteachers who assault their young women students.

wonder how "sexual assault" is defined for this data...

Actually, if you look at the spread of the age ranges, it looks like almost two-thirds are under 30:

0-18: 27%
19-30: 36%
31-40: 23%
41-50: 10%
51+: 4.0%

A striking and informative graph. Might be helpful to be more specific about the source site: www.usdoj.gov is rather large. Another of yoavlurie's graphs refers to a document that leads to www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/p... It contains a wealth of related data, collected from 12 US states between 1991 and 1996, though if that document is the source of the above graph, some of the figures in Table 5 on page 8 don't neatly correspond. Or is there another source document? Might it also be helpful to add the years of the source data to all charts and tables on swivel?

To whistleblower's question - the diferentiation between pedophilia, sexual abuse, and rape typically speaks back to the ages of the victims and offenders. There is another graph in my set that might be helpful in answering this question. Also, an interesting other graph shows that there is a difference in the time of day when a victim is abused based on his/her age - ie. adults are almost all abused between 8pm and 5am, while children are abused during meal times during the day.

Miick - great questions. I wish the year option was a part of these graphs. The dataset is current to 2000; however, I have no information that leads me to believe that there are statistically signifigant deviations of these figures over time. While online groups have given abuses a new tool, it is not clear that it has actually increased the number of abusers. Abusers are addicted to having sex with children - they will do anything to feed their addiction.

Also, for the source, I'll try to give you something more specific. The DOJ BJS dataset does not speak to this data alone as it is not grouped, but it is more compelling when grouped (as opposed to having every age from 7-60 available). I will try to regroup the data into another set that shows some more texture with categories under-12, under-18, under-25, under-30, etc. I hope that one will give you all a better understanding of how much of a problem peer-on-peer abuse really is.

I'll try to get to that soon...

Does this include statutory rape? If so, it could explain why so many perps are younger (slightly older people dating below-18ers).

Maybe this just means that many sex offenders are caught early in their "careers." Or maybe it means that very few sex offenders are repeat offenders. We should keep that in mind when "keeping our kids safe."

I checked around on the source, and 57% of the sexual offenses are ones that don't involve force or threat. That means a majority of these are public lewdness or statutory rape cases. Because a huge percentage of statutory rape cases are "Romeo & Juliet" cases (one partner is not quite 18 and the other is less than four years older than the other), the results here are going to be skewed towards the 0-25 year old age bracket.