Dynamic risk and sexual offending: the conundrum of assessment

ABSTRACT

The potential to reduce sexual victimisation, promote community safety, and decrease incarceration costs has resulted in considerable progress in terms of how we understand and predict sexual recidivism. And yet, the past decade has seen a degree of fragmentation emerge as research attention has shifted away from relative risk prediction (with its focus on static risk factors) to the identification of factors capable of reducing risk through intervention (i.e. dynamic risk). Although static and dynamic risk are often treated as orthogonal constructs [Beech, A. R., & Craig, L. A. (2012). The current status of static and dynamic factors in sexual offender risk assessment. Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research, 4(4), 169–185. doi:10.1108/17596591211270671], there are arguments to support a claim that the two are in fact functionally related [see Ward, T. (2015). Dynamic risk factors: Scientific kinds or predictive constructs. Psychology, Crime & Law (in 22(01–02), 2–16); Ward, T., & Beech, A. R. (2015). Dynamic risk factors: A theoretical dead-end? Psychology, Crime & Law, 21(2), 100–113. This discussion clearly affects how we assess dynamic risk. This review considered several commonly used methods of assessment and the evidence offered for their predictive accuracy. Of note were differences in the predictive accuracy of single psychometric measures versus composite scores of dynamic risk domains and the conventions used for establishing effect sizes for risk assessment tools.

KEYWORDS:

• Dynamic risk
• assessment
• predictive validity
• sexual offenders
• psychometric measures

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Deteriorated: demonstrates reliable change but in the undesired direction; Unchanged: no reliable change; Improved: demonstrates reliable change but not within the range of normal functioning post-treatment; Recovered: demonstrates reliable change and clinical significance; Already okay: individuals whose scores were in the desirable range both pre- and post-treatment.

2 Note: Time 1 = SOTIPS score at 0–3 months after client started treatment; Time 2 = 4–9 months; and Time 3 = 10–15 months.