Investigating the impact of the Covid-19 outbreak on stranger sex offender behaviour and victim vulnerability.

In times of crisis, we know that offenders continue to commit crimes, and do so in a manner afforded by the new context (Thornton & Voigt, 2012). Sexual offenders are versatile (Lovell et al., 2019), and change their offending behaviour in accordance with the opportunity to offend (Woodhams & Komarzynska, 2014). The Covid-19 outbreak is a crisis that will alter offender behaviour, as well as who is vulnerable to sexual violence and under what circumstances. Our research is highly urgent because, in the UK and internationally, the police and other stakeholders need to know now how to protect people from increased and new vulnerabilities to sexual violence created by Covid-19, and how to best support those victimised. We will address this research gap, documenting the 'who, what, when, where and how' of stranger sexual offending (Leclerc et al. 2016), pre-, peri- (and potentially, post-) Covid-19, and across shorter time-periods defined by differing local/national restrictions.

Our project partner, the Serious Crime Analysis Section (SCAS) of the National Crime Agency, has a unique, large dataset of serious stranger sexual offences. Using this, we will document how offender modus operandi (MO) and victim vulnerability changes from March 2020 to September 2021, and compare this to one year of pre-Covid-19 data (March 2019 to February 2020). These data will be subject to repeated, multi-level analyses using our complementary expertise in analytical techniques from the social and engineering sciences. For example, relative frequencies for behaviours will be compared for periods of differing restrictions, and trends will be compared to macro-level findings regarding crime rates being produced by other research groups. The Covid-19 crisis is unlikely to impact on specific behaviours in isolation; therefore, we will also study patterns of co-occurrence between behaviours using clustering techniques.

As well as being of urgent relevance to stakeholders, our research will bring new insights to the sparse literature on situational crime prevention and sexual offending (Chiu et al., 2020). Dissemination of our methodology will assist other countries where, during the Covid-19 outbreak, the proportion of stranger sexual offences is high (e.g., Kenya; Flowe et al., 2020). Our findings will be relevant for preparations and responses to future pandemics and events where a population's routine activities (locally/nationally) are changed or disrupted (e.g., pandemics, natural disasters, humanitarian emergencies).