Adolescent male sexual offenders: pubertal timing, psychosocial functioning and sexual abuse: what links?

The impact of pubertal development on the psychological and social functioning of the teenager arouses a particular interest; the most recent research shows the existence of complex relationships between pubertal development and the manifestation of internalized and externalized disorders. According to a biosocial model, biological and social factors interact in their influence on sexual behavior. A number of studies have shown that sexual activity is associated with pubertal timing. Our study is interested specifically in the links between sexual activity (and sexual abuse) during adolescence and pubertal maturation in a population of juvenile sexual offenders aged between 12 and 18 years. We measured the pubertal variable starting from the perceived pubertal timing (PPT), which evaluates the teenagers' perception of their pubertal maturation, compared with that of their peers, to understand its impact on various dimensions of the functioning of teenagers: the perception of self , aggressiveness, association with peers, self-revealed delinquency and sexual offenses. Two predominant hypothesis are used for explain influence of pubertal timing on sexual offense: the maturational deviance hypothesis and the early timing hypothesis. Our results confirm the importance of integrating the puberty variable into research on adolescent male sexual offenders, but also at the level of intervention.