Monic P. Behnken

Forced sexual intercourse, suicidality, and binge drinking among adolescent girls

Although sexual assault victimization has been shown to predict suicidality, little is known about the mechanisms linking these two factors. Using cross-sectional data (N=6364) from the 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, binge drinking significantly mediated the relationship between forced sexual intercourse and suicide for Hispanic (n=1915) and Caucasian (n=2928) adolescent females, but not for African American adolescent females (n=1521). Results suggest the need for closer monitoring of adolescent victims of sexual assault who also abuse alcohol to intervene in early suicide behaviors. Treatment and intervention programs should also be culturally sensitive to account for differences in reaction to sexual trauma among race/ethnicity. Implications for suicide prevention and alcohol intervention strategies as well as suggestions to clinical providers are discussed.

Do Adolescent Drug Users Fare the Worst? Onset Type, Juvenile Delinquency, and Criminal Careers

Although substance abuse often accompanies delinquency and other forms of antisocial behavior, there is less scholarly agreement about the timing of substance use vis-à-vis an individual’s antisocial trajectory. Similarly, although there is extraordinary evidence that onset is inversely related to the severity of the criminal career, there is surprisingly little research on the offense type of onset or the type of antisocial behavior that was displayed when an individual initiated his or her offending career. Drawing on data from a sample of serious adult criminal offenders (N = 500), the current study examined 12 forms of juvenile delinquency (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, auto theft, arson, weapons, sexual offense, drug sales, and drug use) in addition to age at arrest onset, age, sex, race to explore their association with chronicity (total arrests), extreme chronicity (1 SD above the mean which was equivalent to 90 career arrests), and lambda (offending per year). The only onset offense type that was significantly associated with all criminal career outcomes was juvenile drug use. Additional research on the offense type of delinquent onset is needed to understand launching points of serious antisocial careers.

Alias: Lying to the police and pathological criminal behavior

The use of aliases has been shown to be associated with antisocial behavior, but the empirical research on this topic is modest. The current study employs a multiple analytical approach to explore the association between aliases and career criminality in two large samples of adult offenders. We hypothesized that the use of aliases would not only be strongly associated with arrest history but this singular behavior would accurately classify a large proportion of habitual criminals. Results show that alias usage is robustly associated with career arrests net the effects of arrest onset, age, and sex in negative binomial regression models and was an excellent classifier (AUC = .82) of habitual criminality. Implications of the findings for forensic and criminal justice practitioners are offered.