Tales from the Trenches: Zooming in on the Process of Desistance from Sexual Offending

Abstract

Almost everyone who is incarcerated is one day released back into the community (Petersilia, 2004). This is just as true for sexual offenders as it is for their non-sexual-offender counterparts, but their experiences of release and re-entry tend to be monitored considerably more closely. Given the undeniable gravity and significant social costs of child sexual abuse (in particular), it is essential that we are as well informed as possible about what helps and what hinders the successful community re-entry of the perpetrators of these offences. It is also necessary to identify not just the factors that reduce recidivism, but also the factors that maximize desistance from offending and prevent sexual victimization. Sexual offending research is now a well-established area of study, but the dynamic nature of a sex offender’s criminal career has only recently attracted research attention, and we know comparatively little about the mechanisms of desistance from sexual offending. We do know that desistance is not a new phenomenon. Criminologists have observed its existence for centuries (Laws and Ward, 2011; Sampson and Laub, 1993): most individuals with criminal histories eventually stop offending (Göbbels et al., 2012; Maruna, 2001). Decades of mostly psychological research on sexual offending consistently show that risk declines with age, and recidivism is lowered when treatment and social supports are available (Scoones et al., 2012). Without labelling it so, the empirical reality of low sexual recidivism is essentially evidence of desistance. What is new is the recent reframing of sexual offending within the language of desistance (Farmer et al., 2011; Laws and Ward, 2011; Willis et al., 2010). The central aim of the present study was to contribute to this growing body of literature and examine the nature and extent of desistance from sexual offending in a sample of men convicted of sexual offences and recently released from custody.KeywordsChild Sexual AbuseInterpersonal ViolenceSexual OffenceCriminal HistoryProbation OfficerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.