Gang membership and sexual violence: associations with childhood maltreatment and psychiatric morbidity

Abstract

Background Gang members engage in many high-risk sexual activities that may be associated with psychiatric morbidity. Victim-focused research finds high prevalence of sexual violence towards women affiliated with gangs. Aims To investigate associations between childhood maltreatment and psychiatric morbidity on coercive and high-risk sexual behaviour among gang members. Method Cross-sectional survey of 4665 men 18–34 years in Great Britain using random location sampling. The survey oversampled men from areas with high levels of violence and gang membership. Participants completed questionnaires covering violent and sexual behaviours, experiences of childhood disadvantage and trauma, and psychiatric diagnoses using standardised instruments. Results Antisocial men and gang members had high levels of sexual violence and multiple risk behaviours for sexually transmitted infections, childhood maltreatment and mental disorders, including addictions. Physical, sexual and emotional trauma were strongly associated with adult sexual behaviour and more prevalent among gang members. Other violent behaviour, psychiatric morbidity and addictions accounted for high-risk and compulsive sexual behaviours among gang members but not antisocial men. Gang members showed precursors before age 15 years of adult preference for coercive rather than consenting sexual behaviour. Conclusions Gang members show inordinately high levels of childhood trauma and disadvantage, sexual and non-sexual violence, and psychiatric disorders, which are interrelated. The public health problem of sexual victimisation of affiliated women is explained by these findings. Healthcare professionals may have difficulties promoting desistance from adverse health-related behaviours among gang members whose multiple high-risk and violent sexual behaviours are associated with psychiatric morbidity, particularly addictions.

Understanding the Criminal Personality of Convicted Rapists in Pakistani Prisons

“…Most sex offenders have affiliations with gangs or are in the company of people indulging in violent activities. Coid et al (2020) stated that this affiliation of sex offenders is to find solace in their life and to feel like they are a part of something and not alone. Joining a group implies a need for acceptance and belongingness that he is deprived of in a sex offender's mind.…”

Interpersonal violence in a deprived Scottish urban area with aggregations of physical health risks and psychiatric morbidity: an ecological study

“…The relationship between violence and sexual health has rarely been studied. However, its importance is increasingly recognised, firstly, due to high levels of sexual risk-taking behaviour and sexual assault of women by violent men and gang members [ 45 ], and secondly, among population subgroups subject to high levels of incarceration, as in GE. This can lead to changes in population male-female ratios.…”

On the selection of variables in criminology: Adjusting for the descendants of unobserved confounders

“…The main assumption guiding the analyses was that exposure to violence is a descendant of mechanisms confounding the association between gang membership and criminal behavior. Exposure to violence could be causally influenced by a variety of mechanisms, such as social learning (Akers & Jensen, 2017), routine activities (Cho et al, 2017), social control (Laub et al, 2017), childhood maltreatment (Benedini et al, 2016;Edalati & Nicholls, 2019), and psychological health (Edalati et al, 2017), all of which have been theorized to causally influence or empirically demonstrated to influence gang membership and criminal involvement (e.g., Brownfield et al, 1997;Coid et al, 2020;Watkins & Melde, 2016).…”