Why The Statistic Matters: Part Three, Sex Offenders

This is part of a miniseries about why the statistics on this site, and the upcoming website, should matter to you, not only in your everyday life, but in preventing child sexual abuse... before it can happen.

Statistic 1: Most Who Commit Sex Crimes Are Not Sex Offender Registrants

You have heard me cite this time and again: 95% of new sex crimes are committed by those new to the criminal justice system, stemming from a study on 21 years of arrest data in New York. Another 2015 study out of California is also significant, finding that just .6% of the 56.1% three-year return-to-prison rate were new sex crime convictions. Unless other criminals are committing sex crimes (which is not supported by the rest of the report, or general trends among sex crimes in general), it is safe to conclude that, nationwide, upwards of 95% of sex crime is committed by those with no criminal background.

Why does that matter?

Well, if the bulk of our policies on "preventing" sexual crimes are aimed at sex offenders, who are not responsible for a very high percentage of sex crimes... and we spend lots of money on these policies... then our policies are simply ineffective, and costing lots of money we could spend on more effective methods. This does not just refer to sex offender registration: Notifications of sex offenders, residency restrictions, civil commitment, and of course, juvenile registration and notification. If it targets sex offenders, the policy does very little to protect communities because it is not registered sex offenders who commit sex crimes.

Statistic 2: Juveniles Commit Sex Crimes Too... 

Specifically, juveniles commit 35.6% of sexual offenses against minors. Researchers such as Elizabeth Letourneau and Jill Levenson have said that half of sex offenders were juveniles during the commission of their sex crime. Regardless of the specific figure, it is safe to say that a statistically significant portion of sexual crimes are committed by juveniles, not adults.

This matters almost as much as the first statistic, because it means that the bulk of our policies are aimed at people who committed their crimes as juveniles. While these crimes absolutely were harmful to the victims, one must wonder if punishing juvenile perpetrators for life is aiding prevention, particularly if most of them never commit another sexual crime (97%, to be precise).

Statistic 3: General Recidivism Is High, But Lower Than Other Criminals On Average

Recidivism is a much-discussed statistic, and before I touch on why a somewhat high recidivism rate for general crime (both sexual and non-sexual crimes) is high, we must first understand recidivism rates. Some studies look at rearrests, which are considered the most liberal picture of recidivism. Some studies look at returning to prison, which are considered the most conservative picture of recidivism. Still others look at reconvictions, which are a middle ground between the two. As with any crime, any recidivism statistic paints an incomplete picture of new crimes committed by offenders.

If you recall the 56.1% return-to-prison statistic from the study mentioned in the first section, it should be noted that most studies find, on average, a general recidivism rate around 30-40% for sex offenders. This means that California has a rate that is much higher than what would be considered "the norm" for sex offenders. While the very term "sex offender" encompasses a wide variety of crimes and offenders, this also means that specific types of offenders that commit specific crimes have varying rates of recidivism specific to that type or crime.

This matters, because it means there is room for much improvement in rehabilitating and successfully reintegrating sex offenders back into our communities. It means there are barriers for successful reintegration, and a need to change how we treat criminals in general. While recidivism statistics can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways depending on the study, offender, and offense, it is safe to say that in most cases, sex offenders do not reoffend, whether that is with a sexual crime or any other crime.

Statistic 4: Population Of Sex Offenders, Victims

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (whose figures are somewhat disputed among some advocates and state leaders), there are 861,837 registered sex offenders living in the United States. That is 264 sex offenders per 100,000 people. If you have followed the rest of the statistics to this point, then you can probably guess what I am about to say: Focusing our policies on nearly 1 million Americans to protect children, when most of those .862 million people are not responsible for further sex crimes means that we are creating much more damage than we are solving. How do I figure that? The math is simple.

Restated from part two, child sexual abuse, according to this source, there are 73.8 million children in the United States, and the known victim-reported prevalence is pegged at 8% for boys and 19% for girls, which translates to roughly 3,011,040 boys and 6,870,780 girls, or 9,881,820 children. The estimates that attempt to account for underreporting translate to 6,273,000 boys and 9,040,500 girls, or 15,313,500 children. In other words, our best data and estimates indicate that 13.39-20.75% of children are sexually abused (which is a big deal).

Running the estimates, 494,091-765,675 children are sexually abused by registered sex offenders, or repeat sex offenders, in other words. If somewhere between .6% and 5% of these 861,837 sex offenders are repeat offenders, that means that there are between 5,171 and 43,092 sex offenders that are repeat offenders.

This means that there are between 818,745 and 856,666 sex offenders who are being needlessly registered, and if we assume that each of them have 5 family members and 10 friends, that is 12,281,175-12,849,990 people that are affected by the sex offender registry without sufficient basis. Compared to the 494,091-765,675 children that are victimized by repeat sex offenders, that is a very disproportionate number, and while sexual abuse is not trivial, this means that we punish and indirectly affect about 12-14 times the number of people we need to. When you remember that somewhere between 35-50% of these people are juveniles at the time of the offense, you get an appalling number of children that are being harmed by the very laws that were formed to protect them.

Closing Thoughts

I have re-written the overview of sex offenders for the website three times now, and each time, I wonder if I am covering all of the bases or giving an overly simplistic view of sex offenders. Even writing this one post has taken me two weeks for similar reasons.

"Sex offender" is a term that encompasses a wide variety of crimes beyond rape and crimes against children, though together, these crimes make up the majority. However, the mere commission of these crimes, as discussed in the first and third statistics, does not mean the person committing them is an ongoing danger to children. Even the commission of a "child sex crime" would not appear to indicate such a danger because most such crimes are committed by first-time offenders. Covering each segment of restrictions against sex offenders is likewise complex.

Thus, any attempt to tackle the issue of sex offenders from any angle, research-based or journalist-based, will lead any reader to misleading conclusions about sex offenders.

Moore Center Sex Abuse Symposium: Part Four: Adverse Childhood Experiences And Causes Of Sexual Offending

In case you missed the other parts for this series, please see part one, two, three, or five.

As a refresher...

So, What Is This Symposium?

The Moore Center Symposium is a "meeting of the minds" on the prevention of child sexual abuse. It  offers professionals (and advocates) an opportunity to learn more about the issue of child sexual abuse and how it can be prevented. The Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse is a subset of Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health, which is a major educational institution in Maryland that is well-known for its work in the public health sector (as its name should indicate). The Moore Center is currently being directed by Dr. Elizabeth Letourneau, who used to be the president of The Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA), and is a researcher that studies a myriad of topics within the realm of sexual abuse prevention. I am watching these admittedly dry and boring speeches to pull the essential parts out and communicate them to you. If you want to view them yourself, by all means, just be forewarned that they are dry and can be triggering. 

Beginning Introductions

The symposium starts with an introduction by Johns Hopkins' President, Ronald Daniels, regarding some of the reasons for the symposium and the keynote speaker at the symposium, Patrick McCarthy, who is the president and CEO of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, an organization that focuses on improving the lives of children in a variety of ways.  Other speakers at the symposium were Dr. Elizabeth Letourneau, Dr. Bruce Taylor (an expert in criminology), and Jill Levenson (expert in sociology and social work), followed by a showing of the film Untouchable, which I have talked about on this blog before. Following the film, there is a panel discussion about the film and closing remarks by Stephen and Julia Moore, the founding donors of the Moore Center.

Jill Levenson's Speech

Her speech focuses on early adverse childhood experiences and the causes of sexual offending. She starts with a handy little comic to illustrate the need to move beyond myth and current policy practices around prevention, and suggests that we need to start thinking about prevention differently. 

She then gives a disclaimer that she does not want to minimize the pain done to sexual violence victims, but that it helps to have an understanding of how sexual violence happens and inform interventions. She states that there are no sides, there is no contest, and that sexual abuse victim organizations and advocates and sex abuse preventionists are not on opposing sides: Everyone is on the same team, trying to stop sexual violence. I would hope that advocates for the primary prevention of child sexual abuse, who have either been victimized by abuse, perpetrated abuse and lament it, or of any background really, are included in her team. 

Public Health Model Of Primary Prevention

She starts by showing a graphic from the CDC about primary prevention where there are five areas that the CDC suggests to stop sexual violence: Promote social norms of protection, support victims/survivors, create protective environments, provide opportunities to empower and support women, and teach skills to prevent sexual violence.

She then asks what is missing from the model: Perpetrator prevention, or preventing someone from becoming a perpetrator. That is the focus of her speech. She then gives a handy demonstration of the public health model, which has three focuses: On primary prevention of universal precautions first, on secondary prevention of at-risk populations, and lastly on tertiary prevention of reacting when the problem presents itself.

Note: A handy way to think of this would be the flu: It is best to handwash and cover your mouth/nose (primary prevention - before the flu), and barring that, it is best to stay away from those that might be sick or getting flu shots to those who are vulnerable (secondary prevention - focusing on at-risk populations). The last thing you would want to do with the flu is just do nothing and wait for it to happen and then take steps (tertiary prevention).

She then points out that our resources and policies are currently aimed the polar opposite from what you would expect: Rather than focusing on primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention in that order, we "flip the pyramid" by focusing on tertiary prevention first, secondary second, and primary prevention last. In other words, we focus first on foster care, delinquency programs, incarceration, and sex offender registries/policies, we focus second on programs for at-risk youth and families, and improving parenting, and lastly we focus on primary prevention like changing cultural messages, reducing social problems, and reducing adverse childhood experiences (ACE's).

Overviewing The ACE Study

The Adverse Childhood Experiences study was a collaboration with the CDC and other researchers looking at family dysfunction and its causes. They originally were looking at obesity, and were noticing that many with issues with obesity had early harmful experiences in their childhood, so they did a study of over 17,000 participants to look at background challenges like abuse, family conflict, or neglect.

The survey looked at abuse, household challenges, and neglect: In abuse, they found that 21% experienced sexual abuse, 28% experienced physical abuse, and 11% experienced emotional abuse. In household challenges, they found that 13% dealt with violence towards their mother, 27% dealt with substance abuse, 19% had mental illness in the family, 23% dealt with a separation or divorce, and 5% had an incarcerated family member. In neglect, they found that 15% experienced emotional neglect and 10% experienced physical neglect.

They found that 36% of their sample had zero ACE's, 26% had one ACE, 16% had two ACE's, 9% had three ACE's, and 12% had at least four ACE's. Those numbers are about to be very important, but notice that in the original ACE study, they found that the higher number of participants had lower ACE scores, and that percentage drops as you increase the ACE score.

In other words, at least 64% of the population had some sort of adverse childhood experience of some kind. These experiences seemed to be correlated with social issues like a disordered social environment or caretakers who are not equipped to protect them from harm.

The ACE's that people experience as evidenced in the study are just a small representation of what people actually deal with in their life. She discusses the two kinds of ACE's that people can suffer: Disadvantaged communities (discrimination, poverty, bullying, crime, and violence) and unexpected events (accidents, injuries, illness, death of loved ones, a natural disaster).

She discusses the three different kinds of issues that are correlated with various mental health problems: Chronic events, multiple events, and cumulative events. She goes on to talk about the lasting effects that ACE's can have on people: Health issues (diabetes, obesity, depression, STD's, heart disease, cancer, stroke, COPD, broken bones), behaviors (smoking, alcoholism, drug use), and life potential (graduation, academic achievement, lost time from work). The ACE study found that the higher the ACE score, the more issues that come up.

Dr. Levenson's Study: Looking At ACE's and Sex Offenders

Dr. Levenson was interested in these effects, and what the backgrounds of sex offenders might look like with the ACE study in mind. So she and a few others did a study on that (Adverse Childhood Experiences in the Lives of Male Sex Offenders, Levenson, Willis, and Prescott, 2014). What they found was that sex offenders had a much higher number of ACE's in their background than general population males in every single category they studied.

When they broke down how many ACE's the male sex offenders reported, they found that 15.6% of sex offenders had zero ACE's, 13.7% had  one ACE, 12.8% had two ACE's, and 12.3% had three ACES, which so far is in keeping with the original ACE study: Higher ACE scores are associated with lower percentages. However, instead of finding a lower percentage than 12.3% for sex offenders with an ACE score of 4+, they found a whopping 45.7% did... compared to 9% for general (non-sexual) offenders.

She then looked at specific states, such as Texas (Obstacles to Help-Seeking for Sexual Offenders, Levenson, Willis, and Vicencio, 2017), which generally found very similar results to the original 2014 study. She also looked at the ACE scores of female sex offenders (Adverse Childhood Experiences in the Lives of Female Sex Offenders, Levenson, Willis, and Prescott, 2015), which again found similar results to the original 2014 study..

She looked in two other studies (Levenson and Socia, 2015, Levenson and Grady, 2016) studies at the correlations between ACE's and five areas: Criminal versatility (different types of arrests), persistence (quantity of arrests), sexual deviance, sexual violence, and substance abuse. She wanted to know which ACE's correlated with which of the five areas, finding that more sex crime arrests correlated with domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and emotional neglect, and that more general arrests were associated with substance abuse, unmarried parents, and an incarcerated family member.

She also overviews a study that featured in the OJJDP Journal of Juvenile Justice (The Prevalence of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) in the Lives of Juvenile Offenders, Baglivio at al, 2014, p. 6-23) looking at the prevalence of ACE's in juvenile offenders. They surveyed over 64,329 juvenile offenders in Florida  finding that the lower the ACE score, the fewer offenders (male or female) who reported having them, and the higher the score, the more offenders report them, maxing out at three ACE's for males and four ACE's for females, dropping back down. This finding was again consistent with the previous three studies overviewed.

She goes on to describe the results of a new, not-yet published study, looking at a variety of demographics: Original CDC ACE study sample (pink), adult sex offenders (gray), juvenile sex offenders (orange), and juvenile non-sex offenders (blue) and found a similar trend to the previous studies. As the results are not yet published, I drew a proportionate graph:

Sex Offenders Had It Rough. So What?

The point to all this is that both adult and juvenile sex offenders have some sort of childhood trauma, in many cases multiple traumas, that may serve as the backdrop for sexual offending. That being the case, how can we form interventions to help children with these traumas to prevent abuse, prevent maladaptive behavior, and also begs the question... what effect does this trauma have on children, and how to children react? She proposes three basic responses: Fight, flight, or freeze. When this happens, there are multiple internal reactions within the brain.

She says that these ACE's can change the architecture of the brain to create stress hormones, and they become conditioned psychologically, socially, and behaviorally to be ready for the next stressor or threat, and this limits the growth in essential processing skills areas. In other words, these events start a domino effect in the brain that, if not interfered with, can have lifelong consequences for those with ACE's in their background.

These can form beliefs and themes that are unhealthy and can lead to cognitive distortions, mental illness, and damaging patterns of thinking. Those beliefs and themes affect behavior through internal impacts that lead to impeded self-regulation and relational skills, two essential areas to developing appropriate behaviors that do not hurt others.

No Excuses, But Understanding For Interventions

She emphasizes that prior trauma is no excuse for sexually violent behavior, and that the presence of ACE's can help understand how sexually violent behavior develops and thus how we can intervene. She suggests that these effects on children and the child's brain can lead to using sexual assault to meeting emotional and social needs.

In other words, ACE's that are chronic and continuous can lead to factors like distorted boundaries, distorted skills, reenacting trauma on others, turn to children that are less threatening, getting needs met through violence and power, or taught to act in certain ways. Summarized more simply, "Kids growing up in chronically adverse conditions who then later in life sexual offend are somehow using sex and sexual assault as the vehicle to meet psychological, emotional, and social needs." The point, again, is to understand why this behavior happens. She proposes that children raised in chronically traumatic conditions (ACE's) evolve: Just as mankind evolved, children from traumatic vs. healthy environments develop maladaptive vs. healthy behaviors.

She acknowledges that we know that there are children who do not grow up to abuse others despite horrific trauma, but that we need to shift our paradigm in our communities in how we look at policies so that those with trauma in their backgrounds can get the help and interventions they need.

How Do We Treat Trauma, And How Must Policy Change?

In wrapping up her speech, she looks at the trauma-informed approach from SAMHSA: Realizing the prevalence and impact of trauma, recognizing the symptoms of trauma, responding by including knowledge around trauma into policy, procedure, and practice, and avoiding re-traumatization. 

They discuss trauma-informed care and how to treat people in light of prior trauma as a way to solve a wide variety of problems besides just sexual violence. She also suggests a top-down, bottom-up approach by policymakers and other leaders. She talks about the need for role-models and supportive people who believe in those with trauma in their backgrounds, and how immensely helpful it is to have supports for those with ACE's and the earlier the better, but also for adults. Make sure that those with trauma have access to role models, mentoring, and are exposed to adults and peers who believe in them.

She suggests that people need to feel a certain accepted, valued, connected, and empowered, and without that, they resort to crime, gangs, teen pregnancy, and self-medication. In order to counter that, we must make opportunities for attachments, meaningful pursuits, self-efficacy, and self-sufficiency. 

She reinforces that while not every abused child becomes an abuser, those with ACE's are more likely to grow up to abuse others.

She goes back to the prevention pyramid from the first few slides and flipping the pyramid to focus on primary prevention, the need to teach respect, consent, and issues in creating solid gender roles, as well as focusing on secondary prevention for at-risk populations of trauma-informed care in helping those with ACE's. She also touches on tertiary prevention, which should be the smallest area of focus: Think about treatment, support, and accountability so that they can successfully lead a law-abiding life and be responsible citizens.

How Australia Is Failing Its Children

So, this past week, my news feed has been blowing up with big-sounding news out of Australia. The claim is that they are about to put a big dent in "child sex tourism", which is such a bad term to be using. Just call it child sexual abuse overseas or something, can we? I mean, you do not want to legitimize that sort of thing.

What Is The Issue?

Anyway, the news is that they are working on a bill to invalidate the passports of child sexual offenders. And that may seem like a good idea, right? I mean, clearly, if there are 20,000 people who are child sexual offenders in Australia, and 800 of them traveled abroad in the last year, it is an issue. You know, even if only half of those travel to SE Asia, and half of THOSE (by now we are talking 200 people, 1% of the total) failed to notify authorities per the requirement of their registration. So, clearly, focusing on maybe 1-2% of those affected is going to make a big impact on child sexual abuse in SE Asia. Something is not right there.

Several outlets have reported the news in a variety of ways:

Quartz

CNN

US News

The Australian

Australia Is Walking Down The Path Of The United States: Tertiary Prevention

I have covered this time and time again: Policies aimed at sex offenders are only ever effective on recidivists, because these policies are what we call "tertiary prevention." They are a way to stop those who have already acted from acting again. This seems important, until you look at the data: Sex offender recidivism is extremely low, and most sexual crimes are committed by first-time offenders, not registrants.

In other words, primary prevention methods, or methods of intervening before a sexual crime takes place, are always going to be far more effective at stopping sexual crime, and tertiary prevention methods are always going to be the least effective way to stop sexual crime. Focusing on sex offenders, which works as a political maneuver but not much else, does not protect children.

Issues In Asia

One of the issues related to this is that child sexual abuse is a very serious problem in Asia, particularly the Southeast portion including Cambodia, India, and the Philippines. One of the problems is claimed to be that people are visiting these countries specifically to sexually abuse children, both boys and girls. While this is certainly an issue, and one that appears to be normal and accepted in these cultures (ie, it happens to everyone, not that people are okay with it), I very much doubt that this issue stems from travelling convicts with sex crimes on their record, because of the statistics I have seen. If that is not an issue in the United States (and the State Department has been on record saying that exact thing), then I doubt that other countries that are less wealthy than the United States have an issue either. Rather, the problem would be those who have no criminal record, some of whom are on business trips and dealing with job-related stress. It would be interesting to do a study on this issue, to see what kind of demographics are at play, but the proposal in Australia, similar to International Megan's Law in the United States, seems based more on politics than it is in actually keeping children safe.

Even The Jacob Wetterling Resource Center Says This

Remember Jacob? Maybe you did not grow up in Minnesota, but much of the sex offender policies we have started with three victims: Jacob Wetterling, Megan Kanka, and Adam Walsh. Jacob Wetterling's sexual assault, kidnapping, and murder (that last revelation came last year) sparked the activism of Patty Wetterling in creating a sex offender registry as an investigative tool for law enforcement. Her activism started the Jacob Wetterling Resource Center, which recently suggested we need to stop spending money on sex offenders and start spending it on prevention.

Pedophiles Are Not The Same As Child Sex Offenders Are Not The Same As Sexual Abusers

As always, the news media is butchering terminology around this issue. A pedophile is not someone who has hurt a child, they are someone with a sexual attraction to children. Most with that attraction never abuse, and most who abuse do not have that attraction. A child sex offender is someone who has been caught for a sexual offense with a child: Caught, not someone who has perpetrated it. For the purposes of the article from Australia, this is an accurate term.

However, when we refer to those that hurt children, it is highly inaccurate to call them child sex offenders because most are not adjudicated (seen in the criminal justice system). Most have never been caught, and most are known and trusted in the community and unlikely to ever be caught. Without using accurate terminology around this issue, we spread myths, like the idea that sex offenders just keep hurting children, or the idea that all pedophiles are a threat to children. Those myths fuel harmful policies that do not protect children, and cause all kinds of collateral damage.