Most Molesters Attack Relatives, Acquaintances Study Also Finds That Children Bear The Brunt Of Sex Offenses

Two-thirds of sex offenders in state prisons attacked children, and a third of those victims were offspring or stepchildren of their attackers, the Justice Department reported Sunday.

In a report based on the largest survey ever of state prison inmates, the department said children under age 18 bear the brunt of sex offenses and that child molestation remains a crime most often perpetrated by relatives and acquaintances rather than by strangers.

The department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that state prisons held 43,552 inmates in 1991 who had raped or sexually assaulted children under 18. That represents 65.5 percent of the estimated 66,482 state inmates convicted of raping or sexually assaulting victims of all ages.

“This high rate of child victims is behind the heightened concern and the growing number of states passing laws that provide for notifying neighborhoods when sexual predators move in,” said David Beatty, acting executive director of the National Victims Center, a private advocacy group in Arlington, Va.. “The majority of sex crimes are committed against children because they are more helpless, easier targets and easier to intimidate into silence.”

The Justice Department data are consistent with a 1992 national survey of crime victims by Beatty’s group. “Of those who were sexually victimized, 61 percent said it had happened when they were under 18 years old,” Beatty said in an interview.

The Justice Department study found that more than half the child victims of rape or sexual assault were age 12 or younger. Among all child victims of violence, three-fourths were female.

A third of child molesters had attacked their own child or stepchild; another half of the molesters were friends, acquaintances or more-distant relatives of their victims. Only one in seven had molested a child who was a stranger.

Three out of four child molesters had committed their crimes either in their own home or in the child’s home.

The government also found that prisoners who had attacked children were mostly male (97 percent) and were more likely to be white (nearly 70 percent) and married or divorced (64 percent) than prisoners who had victimized those 18 or older. The average child victimizer was five years older than the average inmate who had attacked adults.