Treatment of Sex Offenders

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P. Lussier
Aging, self-identity, access to social roles, informal social controls, deterrence and
negative consequences of offending as well as key developmental factors could
theoretically explain desistance from sexual offending the same way these factors
are said to explain desistance from offending. At the very least, for a research perspective,
the importation of criminological research on desistance from crime and
delinquency can be justified on the observation that individuals involved in sexual
offenses tend to be involved in other crime types (e.g., Lussier, 2005 ). Researchers
have, for the most part, exported ideas from the criminological literature to examine
the factors associated with desistance from sexual offending.
Static Explanations
According to Lussier and Cale ( 2013 ), there are two main schools of thought
explaining the propensity to sexually reoffend over time. These two schools of
thought emerged following controversies and debate surrounding the risk assessment
of sexual recidivism and whether or not risk assessors should consider the role
of age and aging. While the criminological literature recognizes that the age play a
key role on offending over time, whether because of a direct effect and/or indirectly
through a maturation effect, it remained unclear whether it also applied to sexual
offending. For some researchers, therefore, the age–crime curve does not apply to
sexual offending and risk assessment need not to be adjusted for the offender’s age
at assessment. This perspective is known as the static-propensity approach. Other
researchers, however, argued instead that there is an age effect and risk assessors
should adjust individual’s level of risk according to their age at assessment. In other
word, this static-maturational hypothesis impacts the propensity to sexually reoffend
over time. These two school of thoughts are presented below.
The static-propensity approach suggests that historical and relatively unchangeable
factors are sufficient to identify individuals most likely to sexually reoffend
over time. The key assumption here is that the propensity to sexually offend is relatively
stable over time and, therefore, risk assessment tools should only be used for
measuring the full spectrum of this propensity. For static-propensity theorists, the
only age factors that risk assessors should include are those reflecting a high propensity
to reoffend, such as an early age of onset and indicators of past criminal
activity. For example, Harris and Rice ( 2007 ) argued that the effect of aging on
recidivism is small. In fact, they argued that age of onset is a better risk marker for
reoffending than age at release. In other words, those who start their criminal career
earlier in adulthood show an increased risk of reoffending irrespective of age and
aging. Therefore, according to the static-propensity hypothesis, older offenders
with high actuarial risk scores represent the same risk of sexually reoffending as
younger offenders with similar scores (Doren, 2004 ; Harris & Rice, 2007 ). Their
findings showed that the offender's age-at-release did not provide significant incremental
predictive validity over actuarial risk assessment scores (i.e., VRAG) and
age of onset. However, this could be explained, in part, by the fact that age of onset