RECIDIVISM OF SEXUAL OFFENDERS: A RE-APPRAISAL

Abstract

Few are likely to deny the relevance of the recidivism rates of sexual offenders in considering appropriate penal policy in relation to sexual offences. However, one should recognise from the outset that there are clear dangers in attaching too much importance to the recidivism rates of offenders consistently engaged in more trivial, though still criminal, behaviour; such a danger was demonstrated in the working of the sentence of preventive detention (introduced by the Prevention of Crime Act 1908) when petty but persistent offenders often received long prison sentences of preventive detention (Hammond and Chayen, 1963) which were quite disproportionate to any threat they represented to the community. On the other hand, if serious sexual offenders, such as rapists for example, were shown to repeat without exception the offence of rape, this finding could quite reasonably have important implications for penal policy. In fact we know comparatively little about the subsequent behaviour of sexual offenders and the present article stresses the limitations as well as questioning some of the assumptions of what is supposedly known on the recidivism of sexual offenders. It is important to stress that the condemnation of particular kinds of sexual behaviour is a relative matter. Certain sexual behaviour is legal in one society but not in another. Sexual behaviour which is regarded as serious in one decade may be considered as only inappropriate a decade later. For reasons of this kind we later take as our example the offence of adult males having or attempting sexual intercourse with girls under i3, for unlike some other possible examples there will probably not be much dispute about the seriousness of such behaviour. Furthermore, it is exactly the type of sexual activity where the issue of likely recidivism is rather pertinent. There is perhaps an apparent conflict in some of the views held about the recidivism of sexual offenders. On the one hand, psychiatrists on the basis of their clinical evidence probably tend to feel that sexual offenders possess a persistent tendency and are fairly likely to repeat the offence on a future occasion ; it is often overlooked that they base their views on detailed psychiatric studies of small and biased samples, for clinicians usually see offenders who are viewed as the more seriously disturbed with already a previous manifestation of the activity. On the other hand, criminologists, on the basis of more representative samples, indicate that sexual offenders, after a follow-up of three to five years, generally have a lower reconviction