Poster #66 - Educator Sexual Misconduct: Examining Victim and Defendant Characteristics as Predictors of Criminal Case Outcome

• In Event: 1-061 - Poster Session 02
  In Poster Session: PS 02 Section - Diversity, Equity & Social Justice

Integrative Statement

The victimization of children by educators is a rising social and child advocacy issue. Prosecution of these child sexual abuse cases is of vital importance as it leads to the removal of convicted perpetrators from schools, thus protecting children – both inside and outside the educational context – from further victimization. Low trial percentages and high plea agreement percentages are consistently seen in research on prosecution of child sexual abuse. Though the literature has highlighted these trends, in terms of demographic characteristics it has mostly focused on the relation of perpetrator characteristics to adjudication and conviction type, and the victim factors related to the way in which these cases are resolved remain understudied.
This study examined the relationship between victim and defendant demographic characteristics, including race, gender, and age, and criminal case outcome (guilty by trial, plea bargain, and not guilty/no charges) for a sample of sexual abuse cases where the defendant was an educator or a school staff member. These sexual abuse cases were part of the Educator Sexual Misconduct Database (Mulligan, 2014), which includes both legal and extralegal information pertaining to the sampled cases.
Multinomial logistic regression was employed to investigate the impact of defendant and victim characteristics on criminal case outcome. Model 1 took a traditional perpetrator-based perspective, examining case outcome as predicted by defendant characteristics alone, while Model 2 expanded upon the first model by controlling for the effect of victim characteristics, including victim gender and age. We found that the inclusion of these victim characteristics significantly moderated the relationship between defendant characteristics and case outcome. Specifically, the effects of defendant race and gender were moderated by the addition of victim characteristics for not guilty/no charges and guilty by trial, respectively. White defendants, compared to minority defendants, were less likely to receive no charges/be found not guilty than to receive a plea agreement (p < .05). This finding suggests that there is some bias in case resolution as a function of defendant race. Additionally, in this more complex model, gender was not a significant predictor of whether the defendant was found guilty by trial or received a plea agreement, and victim age became a more salient predictor. The impact of having multiple victims, included as a control variable, was significant in both models when comparing guilty by trial to plea agreement.
The importance of considering the impact of victim characteristics on case outcome is broadly considered. For victim age in particular, defendants with older victims, compared to defendants with younger victims, were less likely to be found guilty by trial than to receive a plea agreement (p < .05). This finding suggests that defendants are less willing to risk going to trial with older adolescent victims, and are more likely to accept a plea agreement. These different adjudication modes have varying implications for the possibility of retraumatizing the victim through the legal process, sentencing of the perpetrator, and use of judicial resources.

Authors

• Charlotte L. Wilinsky, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
  Presenting Author

• Jared R. Dmello, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
  Non-Presenting Author

• Allyssa McCabe, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
  Non-Presenting Author

• Joseph E. Gonzales, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
  Non-Presenting Author