In this chapter we shall examine the circumstances in which the various sex offenses took place. The offenses involved considerably outnumber the offenders since many of the 1,356 offenders committed more than one offense. Thus the total number of offenses in the sample is 2,274. Of these, 2,111 fall in the 14 major categories and 163 constitute the miscellaneous-offense groups.
In the tabular material on circumstances of the offense there are often instances where the desired information is lacking for a substantial number of cases. There are several reasons for this:
Some histories were taken in the early part of the research before our plans for the sex-offender study were formulated.
Sometimes the offender either concealed or did not volunteer data concerning offenses prior to the one known to the interviewer, and these did not come to light until prison files were examined later. At this point it was impractical to reinterview the subject for fuller details about his earlier offenses.
Sometimes the offenders history was obtained in a nonprison interview, and thus attention was not focused on his particular offense, which came to light only incidentally during the history taking. These histories were, for the most part, those of homosexually oriented males who had in the course of their lives been arrested, convicted, and perhaps put on probation or fined. In planning the present volume, the problem arose whether to include these cases in the sex-offender sample, since their histories had not been obtained through penal sources and they had not been interviewed in the framework of the sex-offender study. The decision was made to include them, and as a result the data on these cases is sometimes sadly incomplete.
Oversight on the part of the interviewer, or the lack of knowledge of the fact asked for on the part of the offender accounted for other gaps.
These cases of inadequate data posed a serious problem in how best to calculate the percentage figures in the tables. Because the number of cases with no data varied widely among offense types, and because in general there was no indication that the cases lacking data were different from those for which data were available, it was decided that percentages would be calculated on the basis of available cases. The proportion of cases where data are lacking in each group is indicated in each table, and the total Ns are constant.
Certain offenses tend to be repeated more often than others, and the circumstances of a crime that has been committed repetitively by the same person may distort the data slightly in the direction of his modus operandi. The exact contamination of the findings as a result of this fact are hard to evaluate. The number of times certain offenses are repeated by the same person are presented in Chapter 32 on criminality.
Four major aspects of the offense data will be examined in order; the status of the offender at the time of offense in terms of age, marital status, prior sex offense, and mental condition; the setting for the offense; the offense behavior; and the apprehension of the offender.
*355\161\2*
