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Applying a Criminal Career Approach to Expose Myths , Misconceptions, and Erroneous Conclusions About Sexual Offending

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Understanding Sexual Offending

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Abstract

After nearly a century of research investigating the causes, nature, and extent of sexual violence, widespread myths, misconceptions, and erroneous conclusions still persist about sex offending and the perpetrators of these behaviors. More specifically, there is a pervasive idea that sexual violence is widespread throughout the whole of society, is getting worse as time goes on, and that all perpetrators of sex crimes manifest sexual deviance and begin offending early in life, offend frequently, target any potential victims, and offend more seriously as time goes on—well into the late years of adulthood. To be sure, there has always been, and continues to be, a significant gap between these perceptions and the scientific evidence associated with the prevalence and characteristics of perpetrators’ sex offending behavior. Having said that, while scientific measurement of the prevalence of and characteristics of sex offending behavior has improved dramatically over time, it still remains an imprecise science to a large extent. This chapter marries widespread myths, misconceptions, and erroneous conclusions about sex offending with the scientific evidence about them as it has developed over time. Using the criminal career framework in criminology, this chapter highlights the complexity of sexual criminal careers and how the associated measurement of criminal career parameters may lead to the underestimation or overestimation of sexual offending behavior, all with the aim of zeroing in on the most scientifically informed estimates science can currently provide.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    These findings sharply contrast with Swartout et al. (2015) review of major task forces and reports that influence federal legislation, media coverage of the phenomenon, and public discourse. Such perspectives portray campus sexual assaults as the result of an extremely small number of men perpetrating the majority of all sex offenses. Indeed, the White House Council on Women and Girls (2014) received information suggesting that 3% of college men perpetrated 90% of all rapes. Accordingly, the report concluded that the typical campus assailant is one that repeatedly engaged in such crimes. Swartout et al. (2015) findings suggested not just that such an offender was rare, but that such an offender did not exist according to their data. In sum, the problem of sex offending on high school and college campuses was an issue of prevalence rather than frequency; approximately 10% of men had a history of perpetrating rape and yet the most frequent offenders in Swartout et al. (2015) study accounted for only 13% of all individuals that perpetrated rape on a high school or college campus. Put clearly, “at least 4 of 5 men on campus who have committed rape will be missed by focusing solely on these men” (Swartout et al., 2015, p. 1153). The findings, therefore, also suggest that the prevalence of rape as reported in victimization surveys should be closer than previously believed to the perpetration rate estimated in self-reports.

  2. 2.

    Birth cohort data refers to information stemming from a sample of individuals born the same year in a specific location (city, state, country). The objective of using birth cohort data is to have information representative of society as whole and not just a segment or a subgroup of the population (e.g., inmates).

  3. 3.

    It is also important to note that the impact of similar sociolegal definitional changes on prevalence estimates of sex offending can be observed in the studies discussed earlier based on the Philadelphia Birth Cohorts—these involved changes to laws surrounding behaviors such as sodomy, prostitution, and buggery and others that legally constituted sex crimes historically that coincided with shifts in prevalence estimates in the 1960s and 1970s (see Zimring et al., 2009). In effect, attempts to estimate the prevalence of sex offending over time are also plagued by the fact it is a phenomenon that has been defined differently across generations.

  4. 4.

    For example, in the study by Prentky and Knight (1993), 49% of their sample of adults convicted of rape reported an onset prior to age 18, while the rest of the sample reported an onset in adulthood. These results mirrored those reported Groth et al. (1982) earlier study, which showed an average age of onset of 19 years old for a sample of males who committed sexual offenses against adult women, while in the study of Abel et al. (1993), it was 22 years old. The self-reported onset age for adults who committed sexual offenses against children appears to be different than the one reported for adults who sexually offended against women; however, these findings are not stable across studies. In the Prentky and Knight (1993) study, whereas 49% of adults who sexually offended against women committed sexual offenses in adolescence, that number increased to 62% for adults who committed sexual offenses against children. Therefore, given these results, one would expect that most adult sex offenders initiated their sex offending career during adolescence and were persisting into their adult years. This is not the case, however, and this could be attributable to sampling differences. To illustrate, in the Marshall et al. (1991) study, the self-reported age of onset was 24 years old for extrafamilial perpetrators against boys, 25 years old for extrafamilial perpetrators against girls, and 33 years old for fathers who committed acts of incest against their children. Similar numbers were reported by Smallbone and Wortley (2004).

  5. 5.

    For example, the Seto et al. (2011) meta-analysis showed that only 2.0% of online offenders recidivated with a contact sexual offense and 3.4% (n = 43) recidivated with a child pornography offense, based on studies using officially recorded information. Again, recidivism rates are not a robust measure of offending frequency as they are based on subsequent charges or convictions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Work and Criminology, Universite Laval, Quebec, QC, Canada

    Patrick Lussier

  2. School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada

    Evan C McCuish

  3. School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University, Gold Coast, QLD, Australia

    Jesse Cale

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  2. Evan C McCuish
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Correspondence to Patrick Lussier .

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Lussier, P., McCuish, E.C., Cale, J. (2021). Applying a Criminal Career Approach to Expose Myths , Misconceptions, and Erroneous Conclusions About Sexual Offending. In: Understanding Sexual Offending. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53301-4_3

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