Risk assessment of sex offenders.

Abstract

What is needed to carry out a thorough risk assessment of an ex-offender? This article describes four major components: (a) a functional analysis of the offense process in order to determine how the offenders’ problems contributed to their offending and to identify the modus operandi used in their offense(s); (b) the application of a suitable actuarial risk predictor to assess the offender’s global level of risk; (c) identification of stable dynamic risk factors that make potential treatment targets; and (d) monitoring of acute dynamic factors that indicate offending is imminent. Professionals working with sexual offenders are often called on to assess the risk that the offenders present. These assessments are normally concerned either with the risk of further sexual offenses or with the risk of future violence of any kind. To carry out this task, the professional can use an actuarial risk predictor or clinical judgment. Actuarial instruments are empirically derived but are essentially atheoretical in character, in that they provide no guidance on which psychological risk factors underlie risk and hence no indication of how risk can be reduced or when such a reduction in risk has taken place (e.g., through successful treatment). Clinical judgment may allow a decision to be made at an ideographic level but has until recently been both idiosyncratic and unfounded in the research. In the last few years very real attempts have been made to draw these approaches together, both in general risk assessment (i.e., Andrews & Bonta, 1995) and its application to sexual offenders (Beech, Erikson, Friendship, & Hanson, 2002; Thornton, 2002).