Treatment of Sex Offenders

13 Desistance from Crime: Toward an Integrated Conceptualization for Intervention
291
might be more important at particular developmental stages. For example, school
might be more important during adolescence while work might be more important
during the adult-entry period. In sum, conclusions from variable-oriented studies
might not apply to all or most individual cases and a person-oriented perspective
can provide a complementary viewpoint to the process of desistance from crime.
To better account for the heterogeneity of individual development, the personoriented
approach focuses on the disaggregation of information and the identification
of individual longitudinal patterns, with the understanding that some patterns
occur more often than others (Magnusson, 2003 ). In that regard, development can
be conceptualized as a process characterized by states that can change over time
(Bergman & Magnusson, 1997 ) not unlike the process of desistance from crime.
Therefore, repeated measurements become pivotal to the identification of continuity
and change and fluctuate as individual age. As such, this perspective needs to
account for the diversity of onset and developmental course of the behavior. To this
end, nonlinear modeling becomes crucial to detect trends in individual development
over time.
Lussier ( 2015 ) proposed a developmental process model of sexual offending to
help describe and identify developmental patterns of sexual offending. The developmental
model recognizes the presence of three developmental stages (a) activation
of sexual offending, or the onset and the process by which the age of onset of leads
to repetitive, diverse and persistent sexual offending; (b) escalation of sexual offending
or the process by which sexual offending becomes chronic and escalate to more
serious sexual offenses; and (c) desistance or the process by which offending
becomes more patterned and infrequent until complete termination. Each developmental
stage also recognizes the presence of heterogeneity by suggesting that some
processes are more prevalent than others. For example, this model suggests that
most patterns of sexual offending are initiated late (in emerging adulthood/adulthood),
that escalation is minimal and desistance from sexual offending is near
immediate. At the opposite, it is suggested that there are some instances where
sexual offending starts early, escalate to more serious sexual offenses and where
desistance is slow and gradual. According to this model, therefore, desistance from
sexual offending includes a range of processes that vary from desistance being near
immediate to another whereby desistance is slow and gradual over a long-time
period. This person-oriented approach, therefore, recognizes the presence of certain
developmental patterns, with the understanding that some patterns are more prevalent
than others. Hence, configurations of variables, longitudinal data with repeated
measurements, nonlinear patterns of continuity, and changes over time best characterizes
the person-oriented approach. This is not to say that the person-oriented
approach is superior to the variable-oriented approach, but that it provides a different
perspective on human development (Bergman & Trost, 2006 ). This perspective
is in sharp contrast to most sexual recidivism studies which only looks at individuals
at two time point across the life-course, irrespective of the life stages and the offending
stage individuals are at. Sexual recidivism studies have been exclusively based
on a variable-oriented approach, and as a result, are not designed to inform about
within-individual changes and underlying processes responsible for desistance
among all individuals convicted for a sexual offense.