Expertise and Sexual Offending

Abstract

Rehabilitation and treatment perspectives and interventions have concentrated efforts on areas where perpetrators of sexual abuse are deficient, neglecting those where offenders actively seek and strategically plan sexual offence situations and scenarios. Whereas sexual offenders may display deficiencies in some aspects of their lives, there are domain-relevant competencies such as the selection and manipulation of victims, decision making and problem solving, and eluding detection, in which some individuals appear to excel. Semistructured interviews are conducted with 47 male child sexual offenders in New Zealand, and data are analyzed using grounded theory to generate a model of offence-specific decision making. The outcome of the research is a descriptive model of expertise-related competency (ERC) of child sexual offending. The model identifies and emphasizes the variability of knowledge and skill acquisition among offenders.