Features

Dung Hoang

Reason versus Rage (continued)

Myth #2: Convicted sex offenders never stop being a risk to children.

Monsters exist, to be sure. But researchers who have studied this issue say that the serial-offender pedophiles who garner media attention are more the exception than the rule.

The Department of Justice regularly runs statistical comparisons of different categories of criminal offenders, and its data indicate that sex offenders have a comparatively low rate of recidivism.

Much of Letourneau’s research focuses on young offenders—boys between 12 and 14, who are at the peak age of risk for engaging in sexual misbehaviors with younger children. Such offenders don’t fit the “monster” profile.

“They are acting oftentimes out of a lack of knowledge and with a lack of adult supervision, or sometimes their behavior is basically experimental,” Letourneau says. “Rarely are they acting out of genuine sexual interest in children, though that can happen and we know it does happen on occasion. But in reality, the vast majority of these kids—something like 95 percent of them—are simply not going to re-offend.”

This trend in recidivism data applies to adults as well as children. One of Berlin’s research projects involves tracking outcomes for more than 400 adult male offenders diagnosed with pedophilia, a strong sexual preference for children. Over the first five years of the study, the recidivism rate for this group was less than 8 percent. Among the pedophiles who were generally cooperative with terms of treatment and parole or probation, the rate was less than 3 percent. Berlin’s team is now tracking this same group on a 15-year time frame, and preliminary data show no shift toward increasing rates of recidivism as years go by.

These numbers can be imprecise, given how many offenses in this category go unreported, but Letourneau expresses confidence in the quality of the research. “For younger offenders, if you follow them for 10 years, you’re going to have a very good understanding of how many are re-offending,” she says. “You might not know how often they’ve re-offended, but if they’re re-offending with any frequency over a 10-year period, at some point a victim will come forward. The same is true of adults. If you follow them out 20 years, you’ll have caught pretty much everyone who’s committing offenses.”

Moreover, she adds, rigorous, randomized controlled clinical trials have repeatedly demonstrated that even high-risk youth and—importantly—their families can succeed with treatment.

In essence, most sex offenders are not serial predators. Both Letourneau and Berlin believe that prevention strategies must include both treatment for convicted offenders and outreach to potential offenders.

This is a bridge that it took Kathy Headley a long time to cross. Victimized in her youth by a pedophile grandfather, the Indiana resident has joined with her siblings (including Stephen Moore, MD, MPH ’93) to fund Letourneau’s position for a three-year startup period—and perhaps beyond.

Headley and Moore spoke about the long-term impact on victims and their families at an April 27 symposium, “Child Sex Abuse: A Public Health Perspective” at the Bloomberg School.

“One of the things we were asking about in our meetings is whether there is any possible way of getting to offenders before they offend and ruin children’s lives—and ruin their own lives for that matter,” Headley says. “That’s been hard for me, to get past the feeling that you should just lock them up and keep them there. But I’ve come to see that if it helps keep one person from becoming a victim, then that’s what we have to do.”