Identifying Criminal Career Patterns of Sex Offenders

Abstract

Intense social and political changes in the past decades led to changes in crime rates and the way the public perceives crime. Although there is a concern about crime in general, there seem to be some types of offences that cause more distress to the general public than others, for example, sexual offences. They seem to receive significant amounts of public condemnation and represent the focus of many punitive policies. In order to understand criminality as an individual and a social problem, researchers began to study crime through the concept of criminal career. One of the ways of getting insight into this type of offenders is by exploring their criminal career referring to a longitudinal series of offences committed by a person which has a noticeable series of offences. The study of the criminal career of sexual offenders has the potential to bring new information to experts and legislators, contribute to a greater understanding of the continuity of transgression from adolescence to adulthood and ensure better knowledge of the occurrence of sexual misconduct, how it begins, how it develops over time and how it ends.