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Insight Child sex offenders 18 January 2010 In the final part of her series on childhood Stella Perrott examines when children become a risk to other children When thinking about how best to protect children, especially from sex offenders, we tend to think about the risks posed by adults. Only rarely does the picture of a young person, perhaps a friend or even a sibling come to mind. Yet one third of sex offences are committed by young people and sexual bullying, many incidents of which would be described as assault or stalking if perpetrated by an adult, is a major threat to young people’s wellbeing. According to ‘Stop it Now’, the helpline for those concerned about their propensity to abuse, of the estimated one in six children who have been sexually abused at some point in their lives, 80 per cent of these will have been abused by a close family member or a trusted person, some of whom will be another child. The level of recorded offences and the number of children and young people convicted in a court or dealt with at a Children’s Hearing for offences against other children is a poor indication of the level of offending. The Scottish Crime Survey estimates that 60 per cent of sex offending goes unreported and UK research shows that 75 per cent of all reported sexual offending against children remains undisclosed until the child reaches adulthood and is free of the influence and power of their abuser. In Scotland, only 40 per cent of rapes and as few as 25 per cent of reported lewd and libidinous offences against children result in a conviction. Because so little illegal or harmful behaviour results in a conviction, the number of convictions a person has for sexual offences bears only a weak relationship to the number of assaults that person has committed, particularly in respect of the first conviction, where an offender is likely to have had a run of offending before being caught. Estimates (based on disclosures in therapy or for research purposes) vary between the ratio of convictions to offending from about one conviction for between nine to 450 previous offences with offending by trusted adults remaining undetected for considerably longer than offences committed by strangers. Long undetected periods of offending may also serve to mislead practitioners and policy makers about the extent of offending by children and young people. Sex offenders often indicate that, although convicted as an adult, their offending began in their youth. How sex offenders are understood has changed over time. In the past sex offending by adults against children may have been attributed to poor social functioning, immaturity and even lack of sexual responsiveness of a wife. Children or young people’s sexual violence was not considered to be a deliberate act of harm but as part of youthful ‘experimentation’. It was not until the 1980s that offences by adults were seen as compulsive deliberate acts requiring strong behavioural controls and it is only since the death of Karen Dewar in 2005 by her boyfriend, Colyn Evans, a young man with a long history of offending (only some of which was violent or sexual), have agencies fully taken on board the potential risk some young people may pose to others. There is still considerable uncertainty about how to deal with sexually harmful behaviour by young people. While the days when it would have been automatically dismissed as behaviour that the young person would grow out of may be long gone, young people do experiment sexually and some young people’s sexual and relationship norms, while harmful at the time, will not persist into adulthood. Some behaviours which, if committed by adults, would be understood as criminal are not necessarily understood as such by young people. For example, peer on peer (hetero) sexual and physical aggression is not uncommon. (The continuing taboos around homosexual or lesbian relationships have not normalised coercion or bullying between same-sex couples in the same way as between boys and girls.) Children and young people are engaged in sex at a much earlier age than previously and, in a good many relationships, pressured sex is the norm with girls expected to be sexually available for their boyfriends or males within their social group. Acceding to sexual demands may be a means of social affirmation for many girls and being within a group also offers protection from other young people who belong to a different group or gang. The girls themselves may not understand what is happening to them as sexual assault, even though they do not like it. Sugar magazine and the NSPCC in a 2005 survey found that 1 in 5 girls who responded to the survey had been hit by a boyfriend (findings in other western countries such as the US and Canada are broadly similar). Surveys of young people’s attitudes have indicated that a high number of both boys and girls are accepting of male on female violence within a relationship and may not see this as a crime. While girls are not willing victims (although some see it as the mark of relationship commitment), they may receive benefits from the relationship and be unwilling to jeopardise these by understanding these experiences as assault. Their vulnerability derives, not from the predatory nature of the relationship but, from group and wider societal gendered norms. Often their parents, believing the relationship to be ‘childish’, do not encourage their daughters to discuss the relationship and any risks that might be inherent in it. So concerned is the Home Office about the prevalence of violence towards girls that, as part of its End Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy, it proposes to introduce gender equality and respectful relationships into the school curriculum. There is a risk, however, that the strategy’s other measures relating to investigation, detection and prosecution will also serve to criminalise more young people without necessarily raising their awareness or changing their behaviour. There is a continuing debate about causal factors. Studies of offenders point to an abusive background or exposure to abuse being a factor in their history while studies of victims suggest that most people who were abused do not go on to abuse. From this we might conclude that experience of sexual and physical violence is not a predictor of later abuse, and may kindle greater determination to prevent it, but it is also a strong risk factor. The picture is a complicated one. While abused boys may become abusers, abused girls are less likely to but may struggle to protect their children from potential abusers when they become parents. The widespread use of sexual violence in times of war, even by young children, the pervasiveness of sexual imagery bordering on child pornography and the disrespectful nature of many relationships all suggest that sexual offending is not only a product of individual psychopathology but also a product of the cultures in which we live and grow. Many of those who harm children or young people are stretching the boundaries of normal behaviour only a degree or two more than their peers – the slap that becomes a thump, the insistence of sex within an adolescent relationship or looking at child pornography accessed, initially, through an adult website, for example. While offenders against children are often seen as different to other offenders and non-sexual offenders are very keen to see and to mark such distinctions, they are frequently not. Often sex offending or violence towards young people is just one of the many antisocial behaviours offenders participate in. Higher risk is also associated with multivariate offenders, i.e. those whose offending is varied, indiscriminate and frequent. Abusing young children at an early age is associated with greater risk of future and more serious offending. The earlier and the more serious the offending, the more problematic the behaviour is likely to be in adulthood. Distinguishing between what is normal childhood behaviour and what is abusive can be difficult at times especially for parents but they may also be concerned about seeking help where the behaviour of concern is labelled offending or abusive and seeking help could result in an appearance at a Children’s Hearing or even court. While most police and local authorities treat overly sexualised or sexually aggressive behaviour of young children as indicators of a child in need rather than as indicative of an offender in the making, this is not always the case and there have been referrals to the Reporter of children as young as five on the basis of their ‘offending behaviour’. While difficulties with reporting offences and in securing convictions can make reoffending statistics unreliable, those relating to reoffending tend to be more reliable as the offender is under much greater scrutiny. Research by Worling and Curwen indicates that about 15 per cent of untreated child sex offenders will offend again while only 5 per cent of those that have undergone a specialist programme will do so. There is a very low rate of sex offender recidivism overall, even for adults, and it is rare for young offenders who have committed the most heinous crimes to do so again. Once convicted and within the sex-offender system, with its requirements for registration, reporting to the police and higher levels of supervision, the opportunities for reoffending shrink and crimes may be detected earlier. If an offender forms a relationship with a family which may be vulnerable to abuse, the family will be notified of the dangers to which they are exposed thereby, perhaps, averting an offence. Also, if offenders under supervision behave in ways that seem to be placing themselves at risk such as involving themselves with children in their locality or hanging around playgrounds, then social work and police will take action, such as recall to prison, to prevent the risk escalating. This oversight of known offenders and the disruption to their capacity to commit offences may allow for greater confidence in the reoffending data than the statistics collated about levels of offending or overall convictions. Since the death of Karen Dewar there has been considerable progress in managing the risks posed by young people. Children’s sexually harmful or violent behaviour is now taken much more seriously than it was and greater knowledge and awareness means practitioners are able to better distinguish between those children who pose a serious and continuing risk and those whose behaviour is within the norms for their age and stage of development. Where the risks are high, young offenders within the Children’s Hearing system are likely to be cared for with specialist foster carers, residential care or in secure care. Those convicted in a court under the age of sixteen are likely to be in secure care while those over sixteen are likely to be imprisoned. The older the child is the more likely they will be in an institution where the programme is focused on offending. With younger children, the emphasis will be on providing a caring and nurturing environment where new behaviours can be more readily learned and assimilated. Highly supervised residential care may not always reduce the risk some young people pose. Bullying, including sexual bullying, remains a problem in residential care although it has been a major focus for improvement in recent years. A number of establishments still mix those who are at risk of abuse with those who have abused (and a good many children will be both at risk and pose a risk) but the containment of like offenders together also presents problems in terms of challenging the acceptability of their behaviour. In Scotland, the lack of appropriate facilities for the most dangerous, especially those with mental health problems, means they are likely to be sent to England or live in suboptimal environments. Specialist foster care for younger children has proved beneficial in some cases but care needs to be taken that the foster family (or neighbours and friends) are not placed at risk by the presence of a highrisk child. Often the real extent of damage to a child and the risks deriving from this do not become fully evident until he or she has been removed from home. There is a tendency to underestimate the level of harm a very young child is capable of or to be over optimistic about the capacity of carers to contain behaviour or achieve change. The breakdown in care arrangements for those children displaying sexually harmful behaviour is high, often as a result of risk to the foster carers’ own family or relations or because the worrisome behaviour becomes apparent or known in the community and the child is no longer safe. A small number of children require, from a very young age, specialist therapeutic residential care without which the prognosis for them and society looks bleak. Agencies are now much better prepared for addressing the risks young people pose as they approach adulthood and leave the care system. Serious concerns are generally managed through a multi-agency forum either the Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) which are designed for adult offenders or through child protection case conferences. All relevant agencies come together to pool information, assess risks and plan to meet them. The approach to young offenders is different to that of adults, involving as it does a range of different agencies such as foster carers, schools or child mental health services and with its equal focus on needs as well as risks. Work with the young person’s family is particularly important especially if the child poses a risk to other family members. Where social policy and practice remains weak, it is in the areas of tackling the wider culture of the acceptability of pornography and violence within which sexual offending can thrive and the early intervention and support for those exposed to risk. Early intervention which focuses on the child’s unacceptable behaviour can increase risk by confirming the young person in an offender identity and by encouraging a preoccupation with the problematic behaviour. However, children who have gone on to commit serious offences have, almost always, been themselves subject to or exposed to abuse and neglect to an extent that their needs warranted early and intensive support. Abuse and neglect is indicative of many future risks (poor physical and mental health, poor educational or employment outcomes, poor future parenting) and should be addressed irrespective of whether or not the child is a potential offender. By eight or nine years of age future persistent and violent offenders, not just sex offenders, are often already displaying a number of other worrying symptoms such as aggressive behaviour, truanting, hurting animals, fire raising, petty offending, being known to the police and taking drugs or alcohol. These, of themselves, should demand action that is appropriate for the child and should not require the child to be labelled as an offender or potential offender. As Frances Crook, the Director of the Howard League for Penal Reform went as far as to suggest recently, the juvenile secure estate in England is full of Baby Peters, now a few years older, whose needs had not been met as babies and who were now causing such problems for others. Greater investment in those children already showing signs of having been harmed would be more effective in the longer term than the continued high expenditure on protecting the public from young offenders through secure care later. Holyrood Magazine - issue 226 | Previous article | Next article Related articles: In safe hands 25 June 2010 Denied a voice 25 June 2010 Voice of experience 11 June 2010 Fiscal responsibility 28 May 2010 Protecting childhoods 26 April 2010 See all articles in this category Submit a comment |
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