Underestimating Recidivism
Reliance on measures of recidivism as reflected through official criminal justice system data obviously omit offenses that are not cleared through an arrest or those that are never reported to the police. This distinction is critical in the measurement of recidivism of sex offenders. For a variety of reasons, sexual assault is a vastly underreported crime. The National Crime Victimization Surveys (Bureau of Justice Statistics) conducted in 1994, 1995, and 1998 indicate that only 32 percent (one out of three) of sexual assaults against persons 12 or older are reported to law enforcement. A three-year longitudinal study (Kilpatrick, Edmunds, and Seymour, 1992) of 4,008 adult women found that 84 percent of respondents who identified themselves as rape victims did not report the crime to authorities. (No current studies indicate the rate of reporting for child sexual assault, although it is generally assumed that these assaults are equally underreported.) Many victims are afraid to report sexual assault to the police. They may fear that reporting will lead to the following:
1. further victimization by the offender;
2. other forms of retribution by the offender or by the offender's friends or family;
3. arrest, prosecution, and incarceration of an offender who may be a family member or friend and on whom the victim or others may depend;
4. others finding out about the sexual assault (including friends, family members, media, and the public);
5. not being believed; and
6. being traumatized by the criminal justice system response.
Several studies support the hypothesis that sexual offense recidivism rates are underreported. Marshall and Barbaree (1990) compared official records of a sample of sex offenders with "unofficial" sources of data. They found that the number of subsequent sex offenses revealed through unofficial sources was 2.4 times higher than the number that was recorded in official reports.
In addition, research using information generated through polygraph examinations on a sample of imprisoned sex offenders with fewer than two known victims (on average), found that these offenders actually had an average of 110 victims and 318 offenses (Ahlmeyer, Heil, McKee, and English, 2000). Another polygraph study found a sample of imprisoned sex offenders to have extensive criminal histories, committing sex crimes for an average of 16 years before being caught (Ahlmeyer, English, and Simons, 1999).
Application of Studies of General Criminal Recidivism
The identification of factors associated with criminal recidivism has been an area of significant research over the past 20 years. This work has fueled the development of countless policies and instruments to guide sentencing and release decisions throughout the criminal justice system. If one assumes that sex offenders are similar to other criminal offenders, then the preponderance of research should assist practitioners in identifying risk factors in this population as well. Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) argued that there is little specialization among criminal offenders. In this view, robbers also commit burglary and those who commit assaults also may be drug offenders. The extensive research on recidivism among the general criminal population has identified a set of factors that are consistently associated with subsequent criminal behavior. These factors include being young, having an unstable employment history, abusing alcohol and drugs, holding pro-criminal attitudes, and associating with other criminals (Gendreau, Little, and Goggin, 1996).
However, there is some evidence that suggests that sexual offending may differ from other criminal behavior (Hanson and Bussiere, 1998). Although sex offenders may commit other types of offenses, other types of offenders rarely commit sex offenses (Bonta and Hanson, 1995; Hanson, Steffy, and Gauthier, 1995). If this is the case, then a different set of factors may be associated with the recidivism of sex offenders than for the general offender population. This statement is reinforced by the finding that many persistent sex offenders receive low risk scores on instruments designed to predict recidivism among the general offender population (Bonta and Hanson, 1995).
...Conversely, Prentky, Lee, Knight, and Cerce (1997) found that over a 25-year period, child molesters had higher rates of reoffense than rapists. In this study, recidivism was operationalized as a failure rate and calculated as the proportion of individuals who were rearrested using survival analysis (which takes into account the amount of time each offender has been at risk in the community). Results show that over longer periods of time, child molesters have a higher failure rate—thus, a higher rate of rearrest—than rapists (52 percent versus 39 percent over 25 years).