FP 6520 Sexual Offending Risk Assessment

Assignment 2: Sexual Offending Risk Assessment

FP6520

Assignment 2: Sexual Offending Risk Assessment

The two reasons that a forensic mental health professional would be called to complete a risk assessment for a sex offender depends on a lot of important factors. Firstly, mental health experts can truthfully predict the likelihood of future violent acts. Now how does a forensic mental health professional conduct this? Research on reoffending can be used to produce intervention strategies with sex offenders. Understanding, the way reoffending is measured can have an understandable alteration in study results of this criminal population. The second would be defining the appropriate sentence for a sex offender is important when concluding a risk assessment. Offenders, having individuals who position themselves a susceptible to danger and harm to the community, sex offenders cannot be held in incarceration after they have finished their court-ordered sentence for a criminal offense. The civil guarantee laws permit a judge, or jury, to resolve whether a sex offender, who seems to meet the description of a sexually violent offender, should be unconfined to the community following their imprisonment period. Or should maybe place in a protected Department Social Health Services functioned facility for control, caution, and treatment (Buchanan, 2004).

Risk assessment measures are extensively used with the sex offender population given that their past might trigger other offenses in the future. Basically, sex offenders are an extremely heterogeneous combination of people who have sexually assaulted strangers, engaged in inappropriate conduct with family members, individuals who have injured children, and sex offenders who have participated in a wide range of other wrong and criminal sexual behaviors. What should be taken into consideration if we place together several types of offenders and misconducts into a supposedly homogeneous category of “sex offenders,” differences in the factors related to recidivism will be concealed, and differential results achieved from studies of re-offense arrangements? The first concerns to reveal in studying sex offender recidivism is how “sex offender” is defined; who is involved in this category, and, as significant, who is probably not. Assessment measures hope to achieve understanding the capability to truthfully evaluate the possibility of future violent acts—and future illegal behavior more usually significant to clinicians, policymakers, and the public (Grady, Melissa D; Howe, Adrienne Rose Sheard; Beneke, Emma, 2013).

Mainly, there are two risk assessment instruments or methods utilized with the sex offender population. The first one is The Rapid Risk Assessment for Sexual Offense Recidivism, shortened as the RRASOR (Hanson, 1997). Then there is The Static-99 is a ten item actuarial valuation instrument invented by R. Karl Hanson and David Thornton. This risk assessment instrument was created for use with adult male sexual criminals with an age limit of 18 and above at the time of release to the community (Hanson, R. K., & Thornton, D., 1999). The research support for utilization of these instruments is for RRASOR this scale was the first empirically authenticated actuarial instrument specially intended for the assessment of sexual offense recidivism. ‘The Static-99’ is the most commonly used sex offender risk assessment instrument in the world. A lot of clinicians are familiar with this and is widely used especially in European nations.

Basically, sex offenders are categorized according to their misconduct or the age of the person they victimized. Thus, risk assessment of a sex offender is simplified by comparing them with other offenders who performed a similar offense. Rape behavior and child molesting remain the most common modes of sex offenses and hence studies on recidivism have reported high rates of these two major categories of sex offenders. Incest criminals are occasionally well-known from other child molesters in recidivism research. An inadequate body of research has also studied the recidivism rates of non-contact sex offenders, such as attention-seekers. After examining recidivism rates for different types of sex offenders, it is significant to remember that research has recognized a substantial amount of crossover offending among sex offenders (English, K., Jones, L., Pasini-Hill, D., Patrick, D., & Cooley-Towell, S., 2000).

The rates of female sex offenders remain low and negligible ranging from 1 to 3 percent of the total population assessed. Factually, there are specific risk assessment for female sex offenders and it’s evident that the rate of reoffending are also low at around five to six per year.

The experimental proof concerning the differential recidivism rates of female and male sex offenders recommends that intervention and supervision follow need to distinguish between female and male sex offenders. Besides Corton & Hamson (2005) noted that the measures used in assessing male sex offenders are less likely to provide feasible results when applied to female offenders.