Treatment of Sex Offenders

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P. Lussier
als subject to increased social controls. But as those social controls mechanisms erode,
offenders could revert back to old patterns and sexually reoffend. Clearly, more
research is needed with repeated measurement of life circumstances over time. If
anything, these studies highlight the urgent needs of additional research to examine
the role of individual and social factors on desistance from sexual offending.
For adolescents involved in sexual offenses, the period of emerging adulthood
appears to be a critical turning point where most youth desist from sexual offending
(Lussier et al., 2012 ; Lussier & Blokland, 2014 ; Lussier, Blokland et al., 2015 ).
Emerging adulthood (18–25 years) is described as a transition period between adolescence
and adulthood. During this period, individuals are relatively independent
from parents, yet are still in the process of obtaining education and training for a
long-term adult occupation, and while they may cohabit with an intimate partner,
they are unmarried or not in a common-law relationship and have yet to have established
a stable residence and to have children (Arnett, 2000 ). Interestingly, work,
marriage and parenthood have all been described by life-course criminologists as
key factors leading to desistance from crime (e.g., Sampson & Laub, 2003 ).
Therefore, it is unlikely that such social factors play a role in the desistance process
of these youth as desistance from sexual offending appears to occur earlier than
entry into these social roles. In western countries, it is suggested that emerging
adults are more concerned about accepting responsibility for their actions, deciding
on one’s beliefs and values, establishing an equal relationship with their parents,
and becoming financially independent, and less concerned with thinking about their
career, marriage, and parenthood (Arnett, 2000 ). In effect, in contrast with
Gottfredson and Hirschi’s ( 1990 ) general theory of crime, the number of plausible
life directions during this period of emerging adulthood is greater than for any other
developmental period (Arnett, 2000 ; Giordano et al., 2002 ). Given the number of
possible directions, it is unlikely that all juvenile offenders go through this developmental
stage experiencing these changes or experiencing these changes the same
way. While discontinuity of sexual offending is important in adolescent offenders,
the role of transitioning into emerging adulthood on such desistance patterns
remains unclear. Clearly, more research is needed to examine whether the factors
promoting desistance from sexual offending are age-graded. While these findings
have not been validated, they do raise the issue of studying desistance in the current
sociolegal context where sex offenders have been socially constructed has pariahs
and monsters (Simon, 1998 ) which undoubtedly impacts at least some of the underlying
processes responsible for desistance from sexual offending.
Summary
Several definitions of desistance from crime have been proposed and measured by
researchers. These definitions somewhat overlap on certain aspects of desistance but
also capture relatively distinctive ones. For example, recidivism studies capture
probabilities of maintaining a non-offending state over time but does not inform