Murder and Serious Sexual Assault - Lancaster EPrints - Lancaster ...

UNUSUAL PREVIOUS OFFENCES
The relationship between child cruelty or neglect and subsequent SSA was not
expected. Five SSA offenders and just two controls had child cruelty or neglect of
children in their criminal history. If there had been no differences between the
groups, it would be expected that 20 controls would have child cruelty or neglect in
their criminal record. It is estimated that offenders with this conviction in their
criminal history are nearly ten times as likely to be convicted of a SSA.
Here too, knowledge of the relationship between the offender and the victim of the
SSA would have been helpful, in order to establish whether these persons were
more likely to commit a particular kind of SSA (e.g. stranger offences). If this were
the case, then the relative risk score for a particular kind of SSA would probably be
even higher. However, an enhanced dataset would be necessary to confirm this.
In general, those who are convicted of child cruelty also have a first conviction of
some kind occurring at a young age. Only one of the cases had convictions for an
offence other than child cruelty at the same sentencing occasion, while this was the
situation for both controls, and for all three, the offence in question was ‘other
wounding etc.’. The most noteworthy feature is the short time between the
conviction for child cruelty or neglect and the subsequent conviction for SSA (see
Table 13). One difference between cases and controls would appear to be the use of
custody for the cruelty offence among the cases. Three of the five cases, but neither
of the controls, received custodial sentences for the child cruelty offence. This
finding suggests that some of the cases (who were eventually convicted of SSA) had
committed a particularly serious child cruelty offence (although persistent criminal
behaviour may also have been a factor in being awarded a prison sentence).
Whatever the reason, those imprisoned for child cruelty or neglect were at greater
risk of subsequently committing a SSA.
Table 13: Relationship between age and sentence for child cruelty or neglect and
subsequent SSA conviction
Child cruelty or neglect of Sentence awarded SSA conviction
children conviction at age: for Child cruelty etc. at age:
Case A 29 6 years’ imprisonment 30
Case B 23 5 months’ imprisonment 25
Case C 27 2 years’ conditional discharge 31
Case D 35 3 1/2 years’ imprisonment 41
Case E 18 £150 fine 23
37