Sexual crime is increasingly recognised by practitioners and policy makers internationally as a significant global public health issue. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that one in three women worldwide experience either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime (World Health Organisation, 2013). Many first experiences of sexual violence occur in childhood, with around 19% of girls and 8% of boys worldwide experiencing contact sexual abuse by the age of 18 (Pereda, Guilera, Forns, & Gómez-Benito, 2009). The scale of the problem is vast: 1.8 million children worldwide are estimated to be sexually exploited every year (International Labour Organisation, 2015).

The issue of sexual violence experienced by both children and adults is as pressing now as it has ever been, with reported sexual crime in the United Kingdom at an all-time high and all national jurisdictions across the United Kingdom having ongoing or recently concluded public inquiries into historical abuse. Furthermore, the widespread use of the social media hashtags #TimesUp and #MeToo since late 2017 foregrounded, with a new-found urgency, questions about the prevalence of sexual violence and harassment and their relationship to gender inequalities within society. The cultural commentator Rebecca Solnit described this moment in the following way:

You could say a dam broke, and a wall of women’s stories came spilling forth – which has happened before, but never the way that this round has. This time around, women didn’t just tell the stories of being attacked and abused; they named names, and abusers and attackers lost jobs and reputations and businesses and careers. They named names, and it mattered; people listened; their testimony had consequence. (Solnit, 2018)

How we respond to sexual violence in its many forms is therefore increasingly becoming one of the key cultural questions in contemporary society. Central to this question is the recognition by those who have been affected by sexual abuse and violence that the approaches to tackling sexual crime offered by legal and statutory authorities often provide inadequate responses to a social issue of this nature, complexity and scale.

There is little controversy over the significant physical and psychological harm that sexual crimes can cause through the violation of personal physical and emotional boundaries. Although impact varies from individual to individual and can relate to factors such as age of onset, frequency, severity, and relationship with perpetrator, a range of studies show that sexual abuse in both childhood and adulthood is statistically associated with compromised mental and physical health outcomes that can be experienced across the life course (Irish, Kobayashi, & Delahanty, 2009; Sawyerr & Bagley, 2017). Sexual abuse in childhood in particular has been linked to a range of issues, including depression, anxiety, dissociation, low self-esteem, hyper-sexuality (Davidson & Omar, 2014), and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (Kisiel et al., 2014). Victims of sexual crime are statistically likely to have experienced other forms of maltreatment in their life, and some of these incidents may pre-date the experience of sexual crime. Accordingly, it is often polyvictimisation—the accumulative impact of a range of adverse experiences—that leads to poor outcomes in later life rather than being a victim of sexual crime in and of itself (Felitti & Anda, 2010; Finkelhor, Ormrod, & Turner, 2007). However, treating the experience of sexual abuse as a maltreatment on a par with other adverse child experiences obscures some of the particular sequelae characteristic of sexual violence: subsequent sexual re-victimisation, for instance, particularly in later adolescence and young adulthood, may be a negative outcome characteristic of sexual abuse that distinguishes it from other harmful experiences in childhood (Papalia et al., 2017).

There are significant economic savings to be made through the prevention of sexual crime. Considerable costs are accrued by law enforcement agencies in detecting sexual crime, by legal processes in prosecuting those who commit sexual crimes and by social work and other correctional agencies related to the punishment of offenders and the protection of the public from further harm. There are also significant costs relating to medical expenditure and the provision of appropriate therapeutic and mental health care for many traumatised by their experiences of sexual crime. Some studies have tried to quantify these substantial economic costs: the National Society for the Protection of the Child (NSPCC) estimated that the cost of childhood sexual abuse in the United Kingdom in 2012, once figures for the costs of health care and loss of earnings for adult survivors of abuse were added to costs of policing and prosecution, came to £3.2 billion (Saied-Tessier, 2014).

The prevention of sexual crime is particularly important because the majority of cases of sexual violence are never known to statutory service. Estimates suggest that only one in eight children experiencing abuse is known to the police or social services, with only a fraction of reported cases leading to the conviction of a perpetrator (Office of the Children’s Commissioner, 2015). This is congruent with media coverage in 2017/2018 of allegations concerning the sexual misconduct of celebrities both in the United Kingdom and the United States which highlighted that many who experience sexual violence in adulthood also do not report crimes against them until years after the event—if at all. The relationship with the perpetrator, feelings of shame and guilt, confusion, and perpetrator tactics (including their fears and anxieties being manipulated by the perpetrator) are all factors that contribute to the significant shortfall between reported sexual crime and actual prevalence (Allnock & Miller, 2013). If our social response to this issue does not extend beyond legal and statutory interventions that are only triggered after sexual crimes have been reported, our responses will only ever relate to a minority of those who actually offend.

All of these arguments suggest that we urgently need to address the root causes of sexual crime and refocus efforts on prevention. This chapter will look at how we define what sexual crime is before examining what we know empirically about the nature and dynamics of the heterogeneity of situations involving sexual crimes. It includes an appraisal of some of the theoretical concepts that have been used to inform sexual crime prevention activities over the last 40 years and concludes by considering issues relating to how theory links to the practice of prevention.

Sexual crime has been defined as ‘a crime involving sexual assault or having a sexual motive’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2007, p. 2777). However, there is no global standard about what constitutes a sexual crime and considerable regional variation: many sexual activities that are criminalised in one jurisdiction are not necessarily criminalised in another. The legal age of sexual consent for heterosexual activity varies between countries, for instance, while same sex relationships are criminalised in some jurisdictions such as parts of Africa, South East Asia, and the Caribbean. Furthermore, sexual motive is not always apparent in all sexual crimes, and not always relevant to whether someone is prosecuted. For example, a person who views child sexual exploitation material out of curiosity or because they are trying to make sense of their own experience of victimisation in childhood may be prosecuted in UK courts as having committed a sexual crime, even though motivation of a sexual nature is absent.

The term ‘sexual crime’ is therefore problematic, and the concept of a ‘continuum of sexual violence’ has been proposed in recognition of the fact that the experience of sexual harm cannot be contained within legal parameters that define sexual offences (Kelly, 1988). The term ‘sexual violence’ has in turn been defined in WHO’s 2002 World Report on Violence and Health as:

any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted sexual comments or advances, or acts to traffic, or otherwise directed, against a person’s sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting, including but not limited to home and work… coercion … (can include) a whole spectrum of degrees of force. Apart from physical force, it may involve psychological intimidation, blackmail or other threats. (Krug, Mercy, Dahlberg, & Zwi, 2002 p. 149)

The report goes on to describe a range of acts that would be covered by this definition, including rape within marriage or dating relations, unwanted sexual advances or sexual harassment (including demanding sex in return for favours), sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults, violent acts against the sexual integrity of individuals (including female genital mutilation), and systematic rape during armed conflict (p. 149).

The ECPAT ‘Luxembourg Guidelines’ on terminology relating to the protection of children from sexual abuse and exploitation states that the term ‘sexual violence’ has been used mainly with reference to adults, ‘often in relation to gender-based violence… and… often associated with rape’ (p. 12). The term ‘sexual violence’ is increasingly used in international policy contexts with reference to children who have experienced sexual crimes. However, there remains a tension when applying this term to the abuse of children, and in many domestic legal systems, the use of violence can represent an aggravating factor in a sexual crime against a child (Greijer & Doek, 2016). The terms sexual abuse and exploitation are, therefore, preferred terms in many jurisdictions for describing sexual crimes involving a child victim, and these terms are referenced in several international protocols such as Article 34 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNICEF, 1989).

Sexual crimes therefore cover a wide range of different behaviours perpetrated by a variety of kinds of individuals towards a range of different types of victim in a diversity of contexts. The heterogeneity of situations that can be labelled as sexual crimes means that caution is necessary when examining what empirical research has to tell us about sexual crime. Nonetheless, there are some clear messages from research that have significant implications for prevention efforts. Understanding the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, and ‘when’ of sexual crime is necessary if prevention efforts are t...