Frequency, chronicity, and severity: New specification of adverse childhood experiences among federal sexual offenders

Correctional clients frequently have extensive trauma and abuse experiences and the adverse childhood experiences framework is increasingly influential in the criminological and forensic sciences. Unfortunately, most measurement involves binary measures that fail to capture the complexity of this abuse. Using a population of federal offenders who ever perpetrated a sexual offense, the current study introduced new measures of physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, and incest abuse that included ordinal-scale measures of the frequency, chronicity, and severity of these experiences. Descriptive, correlational, and ROC-AUC models indicated that the prevalence of adverse childhood experiences depends on its measurement with some clients experiencing frequent and severe abuse across years. Adverse childhood experiences significantly correlated with multiple measures of criminal onset and sexual offending and had excellent classification accuracy for behavioral disorders especially Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) and Conduct Disorder (CD). We encourage further measurement development of adverse childhood experiences so that the ecological validity of research is commensurate with the trauma experiences of offenders who commit sexual crimes.