Sexual Predation Characteristics

By legal definition, a sexual predator is a person who has been convicted of or pled guilty to committing a sexually oriented offense, and who is likely in the future to commit additional sexually oriented offenses. Sexual predators present unique challenges to the forensic psychiatrist because their condition is often resistant to current treatments; they may or may not have a concurrent mental illness; and it is often difficult to properly place convicted sexual predators, whether within the prison population or in mental health facilities. Offenders can be classified as sexual predators in one of the following ways: (1) The offender is convicted of a sexually violent offense with a sexually violent predator specification, or (2) the sentencing court, after holding a sexual predator hearing (based on legal statutes) determines that the offender is a sexual predator. Offenders who are classified as sexual predators are bound by lifelong registration and verification requirements unless an additional hearing is held and a judge makes a decision to modify or to terminate classification of the individual as a sexual predator. Sexual predators are subject to local jurisdictional rules and requirements for neighbor and community notification, and they may be required to report their whereabouts to an officer of the court, or to a law enforcement agency, every 90 days.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) National Center for the Assessment of Violent Crime (NCAVC), while sexual predators do not always commit homicides, they do typically escalate their criminal sexual behaviors over time. Fantasy plays a key role in the lives of sexual predators, and they are reported (on the basis of extensive research and interviews with incarcerated and convicted sexual predators) to experience violent sexual fantasies well before they begin to act them out. Over time, they progress to the point of carrying out their imagined or fantasized scenarios with both willing and unwilling sexual partners. When sexual predators become lethal (that is, when they kill), they typically refine their means or methods of choosing, pursuing, abducting, and controlling their victims throughout a scenario that leads to the eventual sexual homicide.

It is quite common for sexual predators to report experiencing sexual pleasure, or achievement of sexual gratification, resulting from behaviors that would not generally be considered sexual, such as intentionally causing their victims to experience pain; mutilating or disfiguring their victims; collecting trophies such as articles of clothing or personal items belonging to the victim; taking tokens from the environment in which the crime was committed (in sexual homicides, the latter may be a piece of flesh or other body part); the manner in which the victim is left (bound or tied with the use of symbolic ligatures); or, in the case of murder, the manner in which the corpse is arranged or designed to be discovered.

Sexual psychopaths are a subcategory of sexual predators who are characterized as being far more likely to rape (and/or commit homicide) than simply to molest their victims. They are more likely to victimize both children and adults, rather than one or the other. Their criminal sexual predatory behavior, if they are motivated by thrill-seeking rather than by specific fantasies, may be directed into indiscriminate victim choice, not targeting one or a small number of victim types.