The Resettlement of Sex Offenders after Custody

Circles of Support and Accountability

David Thompson, Terry Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138898509
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317483137
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Circles of Support and Accountability is a voluntary initiative that assists people with convictions for sexual offences to resettle in the community. People leaving prison with such convictions often have difficulties in resettling. They carry the burden of the conviction itself, which may be both stigmatising and isolating, and they are the subject of sex offender register requirements, parole and other supervisory conditions.

Circles of Support and Accountability in the UK started over ten years ago and have slowly spread across the country. They work closely with the police and probation services but rely entirely on volunteers prepared to give up their time to work with people often otherwise shunned by communities. Circles offer support to the person concerned but also hold them accountable for their future behaviour. They aim to ensure there are 'no more victims'.

This book is based on original research and provides a close-up picture of how these Circles of Support and Accountability work in practice. It brings together for the first time the voices of all the participants, from the offenders and the volunteers through to the Coordinators who link the volunteers to the professionals in the form of the police and probation services.

The research was commissioned by Circles UK and funded by the Wates Foundation and the University of Leeds, School of Law.

1
Introduction

The problem of sexual offending and sex offenders has been one that has increasingly demanded the time and attention of politicians and policy makers over the last 30 years (Harrison et al., 2010). The need for ‘something to be done’ in the name of punishment and public protection has been fanned by a strident media that calls for ever tougher sentences and action to be taken when the professionals are seen to have made mistakes and the result is another victim. When that victim is a child who has been sexually abused the clamour simply increases (Thomas, 2016a).

What constitutes a sexual offence?

In broad terms we may divide sexual offending into behaviour that has an element of ‘contact’ and behaviour that is known as ‘non-contact’ sexual offending; add to that the central component of the absence of ‘consent’ and we start to define a sexual offence.

As the name suggests, ‘contact offences’ imply a degree of physical contact. This would range from acts of rape through to more limited forms of contact that still result in sexual assault. The common theme that makes this behaviour an offence is the lack of consent to the activities in question. Consent is either withheld or the person concerned does not have the capacity to make a consent. The Sexual Offences Act 2003 ss74–78 tried to clarify the law on consent (see also Pegg, 2015; Saunders, 2015).

Sexual activities between people are expected to be consensual, and we speak of ‘consenting adults’ and an ‘age of consent’ at which children are presumed to have achieved the capacity to consent. When one party to a sexual act has not consented, or is unable to consent, we are moving into the realms of sexual offending. The sexual offence of rape clearly occurs when penetrative sexual activity takes place without consent from the victim, and that victim has been overcome by physical force or immediate threats of violence or does not have the capacity to consent.

Children and young people below the ‘age of consent’ (16 years in the UK) are deemed to lack the capacity to consent; any consent they do make is considered invalid. Sexual offending with children can take place within a family (‘intra-familial’) or outside the family (‘extra-familial’); within a family it may be what was once called incestuous, and which is now referred to as ‘familial child sex offences’. Talking to children in an inappropriate way that might lead toward sexual activity has become known as ‘grooming’ (McAlinden, 2013).

Children and young people also attend various institutions outside the family, such as nurseries, schools, youth clubs and sporting clubs; sometimes they require substitute care – when for various reasons their parents are unable to care – which might include a children’s home or foster care. The extent of sexual offending against children in all these settings has been ‘discovered’ in the last 30 years and is often referred to as ‘historic’ or ‘non-recent’ offending.

One form of contact sexual offending that has been causing a great deal of concern in recent years has been that of ‘child sexual exploitation’ involving the sexual exploitation of children and young people under 18. This is where young girls – often described as ‘vulnerable’ – have been drawn into relationships they believe to be consensual at first but which then evolve into a more sinister form of exploitative prostitution. The consensual element is replaced by situations that can involve violence, coercion and intimidation. The use of alcohol or drugs further impairs their capacity to consent. Sometimes the perpetrator has administered the alcohol or drugs in question without the knowledge of the victim (HM Government, 2015). All references in law to ‘child prostitution’ have now been removed and replaced by the new terminology of ‘child sexual exploitation’ (Serious Crime Act 2015 s68).

The capacity to consent is also lost when one of the parties is an adult with a mental disorder or learning disability which has impeded their capacity to consent. Other offences involve sexual activity with animals or corpses where there is obviously no consent (Sexual Offences Act 2003 ss69–70).

Although a lack of ‘consent’ is said to be central to sexual offending it is also possible to commit sexual offences when consent has been present. This takes place if that activity has been legally declared as a ‘prohibited relationship’. This might involve sexual activity between adults within the same family that are deemed incestuous. It also includes teachers, residential care workers and other workers with children who have formed relationships with the children in their care even when those children have been over the age of 16. Such behaviour was legally declared prohibited in 2000 and these relationships declared ‘an abuse of trust’ (Sexual Offences Act 2003 ss16–24).

The opposite side of the coin to a ‘prohibited relationship’ is the idea that some recognised relationships give ‘automatic’ consent to sexual relations. For many years this was the case for married couples where the man had the relationship itself as a defence against a charge of rape; it was the orthodoxy that a man could not be charged with raping his own wife. The Law Lords overturned this common law idea that marriage means a man has a ‘continual’ consent from his wife for sexual activity at any time (R v. R (Rape: marital exemption) [1992] 1 AC 599), and this was later brought into statute law in 1994 (and is now in the Sexual Offences Act 2003 s1).

Non-contact sexual offending includes such activities as the possession or dissemination of child pornography, indecent exposure and voyeurism. The production, dissemination and ownership of pornographic images has been a criminal offence for some time but particular attention is focused on such images if they are images of children. The harm caused by these images of children is now accepted because they are often images of child abuse. The terminology ‘Child Sexual Abuse Images’ is increasingly used to make the point that these are actually images from a crime scene. Policing in this area has become more difficult with the arrival of the internet and digital means of exchanging pornographic images (O’Donnell and Milner, 2007).

What is the scale of sexual offending?

The intimate and often hidden nature of sexual offences means determining the scale of the problem is difficult to determine. The most up to date statistics on sexual offending in England and Wales were published in February 2016 by the Office of National Statistics. The annual official statistics bulletin on sexual violence, entitled An Overview of Violent Crime and Sexual Offences reported that there were 88,106 police recorded sexual offences in the year ending March 2015, an increase of 37 per cent compared with the previous year and that this was the highest figure recorded by the police and the largest annual percentage increase since the introduction of the police National Crime Recording Standard in April 2002. Within the overall increase, the number of offences of rape increased by 41 per cent to 29,234 offences, and the number of other sexual offences increased by 35 per cent to 58,872 offences (ONS, 2016: Section 8).

More information on sexual offending from across the crime and criminal justice system can be found in An Overview of Sexual Offending in England and Wales. This is a joint publication compiled by the Ministry of Justice, Home Office and the Office for National Statistics which was published in January 2013, and used combined information from the Crime Survey for England and Wales’s (CSEW) data for the year ending March 2010 to the year ending March 2012. For the crime types and population it covers, the CSEW provides a better reflection of the true extent of crime experienced by the population resident in households in England and Wales than police recorded statistics because the survey includes crimes that are not reported to, or recorded by, the police. The overview only divided sexual offences into ‘most serious’ (rapes and sexual assault cases) and ‘other sexual offences’ (exposure, voyeurism, etc.). It reported that:

• approximately 85,000 women are raped on average in England and Wales every year;
• over 400,000 women are sexually assaulted each year; and
• 1 in 5 women (aged 16–59) has experienced some form of sexual violence since the age of 16.

The overview also said that females were much more likely than males to have reported being a victim of a sexual offence (MoJ et al., 2013). At the time of writing (February 2017) there has been no further overview of this nature.

These figures are said to be very much the tip of the iceberg, illustrated in some part by the allegations against Jimmy Savile which came to light at the end of 2012 and demonstrated the extent of unreported sexual offences. In the wake of these allegations, accusations of sexual abuse were made against high-profile celebrities. Some of these allegations led to convictions such as Max Clifford, Rolf Harris and Fred Talbot, but other cases were dropped by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), or the accused were found not guilty following trial.

The media reporting of the arrests and trials of celebrities can be said to have increased public awareness of sexual offending and may have contributed to the higher reporting experienced by the police. There have been worries in the past that victims of sex crimes have been reluctant to talk to the police. Now with the high level of media coverage of celebrities, professional footballers and others accused and convicted for sexual offences, that reluctance may be diminishing. The police are certainly aware of the increased numbers of people coming forward, though the allegations have led to the police being inundated and struggling to cope. Mr Simon Bailey, who takes the lead on child protection at the National Police Chiefs Council said that the policing system had reached ‘saturation point’ from increasing reports of sexual abuse, including online and historical cases. Lower-level offending should be decriminalised and dealt with through counselling and rehabilitation (Hamilton, 2017).

The scale of the problem can also be illustrated by looking at prison numbers and the numbers being supervised in the community. The joint publication by the Ministry of Justice, Home Office and the Office of National Statistics showed that there were 10,935 prisoners in custody for sexual offences in 2012/2013 and this population represents one of the fastest growing groups in prison now comprising 14 per cent of the overall prison population. The average period in custody for sex offenders was reported as being 32 months (including time on remand). The number of prisoners serving sentences for offences against children was reportedly stable between 2008 and 2011. The number of offenders under post-release supervision for sexual offences by the probation service is also reportedly stable ranging between 2,750 and 3,024 (Ministry of Justice et al., 2013).

What is the law on sexual offending?

In 2000 the Home Office completed an extensive review of all its laws on sexual offending and updated and consolidated the previously fragmented laws in the Sexual Offences Act 2003. Part One of the Act outlines all the ‘contact’ and ‘non-contact’ criminal offences that may be committed and Part Two lists the various forms of civil laws that can be placed on a sex offender in the interests of ‘public protection’ such as the sex offender register or the prohibitive civil orders that can be imposed on an offender; further guidance would come from the Home Office (Home Office, 2004a, 2016). As with all laws a final interpretation of the Act is made by the courts.

The Sexual Offences Act 2003 has tried to clarify the concept of ‘consent’. The Act states that consent means a person ‘agrees by choice, and has the freedom and capacity to make that choice’ (Sexual Offences Act 2003 s74). Prosecutors are expected to look at this in two stages:

1. Whether a complainant has the capacity (i.e. the age and understanding) to make a choice about whether or not to take part in the sexual activity at the time in question; and
2. Whether he or she was in a position to make that choice freely, and was not constrained in any way.

The age of consent for heterosexual activities in England, Scotland and Wales was fixed at ten in 1285, raised to 13 in 1875 and to 16 in 1885, where it still stands (Sexual Offences Act 2003 s9). The age of consent for same-sex activities was fixed at 21 in 1967, lowered to 18 in 1994 and to 16 in 2000. The age of consent varies from country to country however, for instance in the Republic of Ireland the age is 17, in Poland, Sweden and Denmark it is 15, but 14 in Portugal and Italy. The age of consent in Germany is 14 but with qualifications attached; provisions protecting children against abuse apply until the age of 18. In the Netherlands the age is 12 but again with qualifications; complaints about sexual activity between 12 and 16 could still be the subject of investigation and prosecution if there was evidence of exploitation. At the time of writing, there appears to be no great political will in the UK to change the age from 16.

In the UK sexual activities, of whatever orientation, with young people below the age of consent is a criminal offence even if a form of consent – an ‘ostensible consent’ – has been given and, in the case of a child under 13, such activity may be defined as rape (Sexual Offences Act 2003 s5).

The laws covering images of children and adults are to be found in the Obscene Publications Act 1959, the Protection of Children Act 1978, the Criminal Justice Act 1988 s160 and the Sexual Offences Act 2003 ss45–51. The Obscene Publications Act 1959 makes it illegal to publish obscene material, including child pornography and so-called extreme adult pornography. The Act applies to any form of publication including internet publication; the latter brings with it clear jurisdictional difficulties arising from the availability of pornography from websites across the world coming into the UK.

The 1978 Protection of Children Act penalises the taking, making, showing, distribution, possession with a view to distributing, and publishing any advertisement of indecent photographs of children; the Criminal Justice Act 1988 penalises the offence of possession of indecent photographs of children.

The Sentencing Council has advised the courts that sentences should be based on three categories of appropriate sentences for offenders:

• Category A – images involving penetrative sexual activity including images involving animals or sadism;
• Category B – images involving non-penetrative sexual activities;
• Category C – other indecent images not falling within categories A or B.

(Sentencing Council, 2013: 76)

The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 recognised ‘extreme pornography’. This had been campaigned for after the death of Jane Longhurst in 2003 killed by a man said to have been influenced by watching such images. Extreme images are defined as those depicting life-threatening acts, acts which cause or could cause serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals, and acts of necrophilia or bestiality (Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 ss63–71).

Indecent exposure is another non-contact sexual offence and consists of a person intentionally exposing their genitals intending someone would see them and that that person would be caused ‘alarm or distress’. Voyeurism is also taken to be a non-contact offence involving as it does the offender observing another person carrying out a private act either by direct observation or through the medium of technology that records or photographs the other person. The offender knows they have no consent to do this and are doing it for their own sexual gratification (Sexual Offences Act 2003 ss66–68).

More recently, men have been convicted for the live-streaming of child sexual abuse (NCA, 2015) and ownership of a ‘paedophile manual’ was criminalised in the Serious Crimes Act 2015 s69. The new phenomenon of teenagers ‘sexting’ graphic pictures of themselves to their peers and the use of such images for so-called ‘revenge-porn’ are also increasingly being recognised as sexual offences (Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 ss33–35).

Responding to sexual offences and sex offenders

The police are involved at the start of the process of identifying the parties involved in alleged sexual offending by taking initial reports and starting an investigation of all sexual offences. The police have other non-investigatory work in connection with sex offenders including that of managing all the convicted and therefore ‘known’ sex offenders living in the community. This non-investigatory role is a relatively new role for UK police officers usually referred to as ‘public protection’ work and premised largely on their custodianship of the ‘sex offender register’ introduced in 1997. The supervision of offenders in the community has traditionally been the work of the probation service and continues to be so. This new role for the police is distinguished from the work of probation officers by being referred to as ‘assessment of risk’ and the ‘management’ of that risk.

The police are seen as gatekeepers to the criminal justice system where they are the first agency to take reports of alleged sexual offending and to investigate them as crimes. This reporting, and the subsequent police recording of incidents as crimes, is followed by the police investigation of the allegations and the gathering of corroborative evidence to support the complainant’s initial statement. This work is carried out by the police in close cooperation with the CPS who take the case into co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The management and supervision of sex offenders in the community
• 3 Circles of Support and Accountability
• 4 From ‘containment’ to the ‘good life’
• 5 The Core Members
• 6 The volunteers
• 7 The professionals
• 8 Communication, collaboration and information exchange
• 9 Conclusions
• Annex: methodology
• Bibliography
• Index