OFFENDER AND OFFENSE CHARACTERISTICS OF SEXUAL SADISTS - A COMPARATIVE-STUDY

This paper compares the offender and offense characteristics of 30 sex ually sadistic criminals studied by Dietz et al. with those of 29 sexu ally sadistic criminals and 28 nonsadistic sexual offenders from the R oyal Ottawa Hospital. We examined whether the characteristics noted by Dietz et al. would be found among a less violent group of sadistic of fenders and also to what extent these characteristics were specific to sexual sadism. Results suggest some offender and offense characterist ic are specific to sexual sadism and that others appear to be common t o sexually aggressive offenders more generally. In addition, there wer e a number of characteristics found exclusively among the most violent offenders described by Dietz et al. An explanation of these results i n terms of a biopsychosocial understanding of sexual sadistic offender s is provided.