Understanding desistance from sexual offending

There is a long tradition of research in criminology which examines why convicted offenders desist from further offending. However, to date research into desistance from crime has focused almost exclusively on the general antisocial offender and there has been little published research into desistance specifically from sexual offending. This proposal addresses this specific gap in the literature - it sets out to use some of the techniques that have been used to examine desistance amongst offenders in general within the specific problem field of desistance from sexual offending.

The research design will involve interviewing and comparing the life stories of a sample of 'recidivist' sex offenders and a sample of 'desisting' individuals.

The recidivist sub-sample will be used for comparison purposes and will consist of 10-15 individuals under probation supervision. This group will be determined by the presence of more than one conviction for a sexual offence against a child and will be further refined by including only those offenders where the most recent sexual offence is within 12 months from the date of the research. This is because other research (e.g. Healy 2010) shows desistance from crime to be an iterative process that develops over time. By interviewing persistent sex offenders relatively close to the date of their most recent offence we will be able to better understand their experience of 'persistence'. These individuals will be approached through their probation officer.

The 'desisting' sub sample will consist of 25-30 individuals who were convicted of committing a sexual offence against a child a minimum of 3 years previously and have been living crime free in the community under licence for at least 2 years, but who are still under the supervision of the probation service. This group will be identified from probation records and in consultation with the individuals' probation officers who will have monitored them closely for several years in the community.

Sub-samples will be matched on a case-by-case basis as closely as possible on key variables known to be related to recidivism (e.g., age, conviction type, numbers of previous convictions). The active group will be selected from those offenders currently attending sex offender treatment in one or more of the probation trusts covered by the Regional Sex Offender Unit (RSOU). The RSOU is run by Mark Farmer and provides sex offender treatment for five of the probation trusts in the Midlands of England. This gives a potential sample group of over 400 individuals.

The data collection method will be semi-structured intensive interviews with the two groups. A broadly phenomenological approach will be adopted to identify the way participants understand their lives and particularly how they have experienced life events that have led to offending, and its persistence or otherwise. The formulation of theory will follow a grounded theory methodology. This is a novel approach with sexual offenders because although qualitative research has been used widely with non-sexual offenders (see above) there is little research using this methodology with sexual offenders.

This methodology has been chosen because there is a general lack of qualitative research with sex offenders, and what research there is has uncovered a rich source of data that has so far eluded more quantitative methods.

The results will be used to inform sex offender assessment and treatment approaches in probation and prisons, as well as to advance the knowledge in the academic field.

The main beneficiaries of this programme will be public sector bodies charged with the treatment and management of sexual offenders, particularly probation and prison services, and the police. The potential impact will be improved treatment, management and assessment of sexual offenders. This would in turn lead to increased effectiveness of the public bodies named, and consequently improvements in quality of life and public safety in general. An additional beneficiary will be people who have committed sexual offences. They would benefit from improved treatment programmes and assessment methods that were more accurate and took better account of protective or desistance related factors.

1) In 2010/11 the UK National Offender Management Service (NOMS) redesigned its sex offender programmes for use in prisons and probation. The model of change for these programmes developed from a purely psychological one to a 'biopsychosocial' approach. The 'social' aspects of the new programmes were intended to take account of the literature on desistance from offending, which seemed to indicate that offenders desist from further offending for a number of social reasons as well as psychological ones. Such reasons seemed to include social networks, employment, and relationships with others. Yet for the most part the design teams relied upon research into desistance from general, antisocial crime rather than specifically from sexual crime. It is intended therefore that one beneficiary of the research will be NOMS, which will be able to base its sex offender interventions on practical, specific research into desistance from sexual crime rather than extrapolating from other research.

2) At present the assessment of sexual offenders relies almost exclusively on examining 'risk factors'. These are factors that have been shown by prior research to be common to individuals who re-offend. This approach raises issues of fairness in that it ignores work that offenders may have carried out themselves to reduce the likelihood of reoffending, and it can be seen as burdensome by offenders. It also fails to give a balanced assessment of offenders because it ignores the fact that offenders may desist from future offending for reasons other than having the presence or absence of such risk factors. NOMS has been working on a new assessment tool for sex offenders called the Active Risk Management System, which sets out to address some of these shortcomings by enabling an assessment of desistance factors as well as risk factors. As with the development of treatment programmes, however, because of the dearth of research into desistance from sexual offending this work has tended to rely on research on desistance from general, non-sexual offending. Again the ability to access sex offender specific research into desistance would provide a more defensible basis on which to develop such tools.

3) Research into desistance from crime so far has tended to indicate that a combination of informal social controls (such as work, relationships etc.), combined with cognitive transformations, or changes in the way offenders think about themselves and their lives, are important in promoting desistance. This provides non-specialist correctional staff such as probation or police 'offender managers', with concrete, non-technical means of addressing offending behaviour that do not require specialist skills or training in the way that many offender treatment programmes based on risk/need/responsivity principles do. Thus probation and police services will benefit more generally by an increased knowledge about management and treatment of this risky group of individuals.