Managing Sex Offenders in the UK: Challenges for Policy and Practice

Abstract

The community management of sex offenders has attracted much media and political interest in recent times, not least due to high-profile failures in risk management (Kitzinger, 2004; Thomas, 2013), as well as issues both historic (e.g., Welsh care home scandal, the Jimmy Savile case) and contemporary (e.g., the Ian Wakins case) with the policing of sexual offenders. This has resulted in increased policy concern with sex offenders, and practice developments at both the individual practice level and in multi-agency working (see Kemshall and Wood, 2009). Community supervision and management of sex offenders, particularly those considered ‘high risk’ was given added impetus in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century by the ‘discovery’ of the predatory paedophile (Kitzinger, 1999; Silverman and Wilson, 2002) and fuelled by the infamous case of Sydney Cooke,1 and various studies that established the extent of sexual offending both nationally and internationally (e.g., Grub in 1998). Whilst the accuracy of prevalence studies can be debated (Matravers, 2003), there are research estimates that 1 in 6 children will be the victim of sexual offending (Cawson et al., 2000); with 18,915 children under 16 being the victim of sexual abuse in England and Wales in 2012–2013, approximately 35% of all sexual crimes in this period (Office for National Statistics, 2013). Ministry of Justice (MoJ, 2013a, pp. 6–7) figures state that ‘[b]ased on aggregated data from the “Crime Survey for England and Wales” 2009–2012, on average, 2.5% of females and 0.4% of males said that they had been a victim of a sexual offences (including attempts) in the previous 12 months’, and in 2011–2012, police recorded a total of 53,700 sexual offences across England and Wales.