Reality check: Is sex crime genetic?
Here's an article that references some research, quotes include:
A splashy headline appeared on the websites of many U.K. newspapers this morning, claiming that men whose brothers or fathers have been convicted of a sex offense are “
five times more likely to commit sex crimes than the average male” and that this increased risk of committing rape or molesting a child “
may run in a family’s male genes.” The
study, published online today in the International Journal of Epidemiology, analyzed data from 21,566 male sex offenders convicted in Sweden between 1973 and 2009 and concluded that
genetics may account for roughly 40% of the likelihood of committing a sex crime. (Women, who commit less than 1% of Sweden’s sexual offenses, were omitted from the analysis.) The scientists have suggested that the new research could be used to help identify potential offenders and target high-risk families for early intervention efforts.
But independent experts—and even the researchers who led the work, to a certain degree—warn that the study has some serious limitations. Here are a few reasons to take its conclusions, and the headlines, with a generous dash of salt.
Alternate explanations: Most studies point to early life experiences, such as childhood abuse, as the most important risk factor for becoming a perpetrator of abuse in adulthood. The new study, however, did not include any detail about the convicted sex criminals’ early life exposure to abuse. Instead, by comparing fathers with sons, and full brothers and half-brothers reared together or apart, the scientists attempted to tease out the relative contributions of shared environment and shared genes to the risk of sexual offending. Based on their analyses,
the researchers concluded that shared environment accounted for just 2% of the risk of sexual offense, while genetics accounted for roughly 40%. Although there is likely some genetic contribution to sexual offending—perhaps related to impulsivity or sex drive—the group “may be overestimating the role of genes” because their assumptions were inaccurate, says Fred Berlin, a psychiatrist and sexologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
----
Even if an overestimate, even if genes accounted for half of the estimation at a 20% increased likelyhood as a product of genes, it could be of concern. Even if just 1 percent, 1/40th of that estimated in the research article, were accurately that's 1% too many future rapes.
And not only that, but being a child of a single parent, without a father, knowing that your father was a rapist and that you were born out of wedlock, too could have additional negative affects on psychology of the child.
The following may be graphic:
My cousin raped a woman. He, an african american, was high on cocaine, and he took a white woman by knife point, as a hostage, in a college dormatory.
Sometimes I imagine the terror the woman experienced, and I wonder how she would feel, carrying my cousins progeny in her womb, and how her husband might feel about the same. My cousin too, was fatherless and born out of wedlock. As if something genetic may have been at play.
True story, I'm not making this up. It is what has partially inspired me to inquire about this.
