Criminal achievement, criminal career initiation, and detection avoidance: the onset of successful sex offending

Abstract

This study tackles one of the key aspects of the criminal career, the age of onset. In criminology and related disciplines, age of onset has become an important theoretical concept with growing policy and practical implications for criminal justice decision making. We claim here that the age of onset, as measured with criminal justice data, provides a distorted view on the actual onset of offending. We further argue that age of onset based on official data of offending does not take into consideration the offender's ability to avoid and/or delay detection. To illustrate this, we examine the onset of sex offending in adult male sex offenders. Official data, police data, and victim's account were analyzed to compare and contrast the official and actual age of onset. On average, it was found that there is a gap of about seven years between actual and official age of onset in sex offending. For the most part, while the actual age of onset does not vary across sex offender types, it does for the official age of onset, suggesting differential investment in detection avoidance across offenders. Further, the findings show that close to 20% of sex offenders have already desisted or are in the process of desisting by the time they are first charged for their sex crime.

Keywords:

• age of onset
• detection avoidance
• sex offenders
• criminal careers

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Dr. Jean Proulx and the Correctional Service of Canada for granting access to the data. An earlier version of this study was presented at the 2011 Annual Conference of the American Society of Criminology, Washington, DC. The authors are also thankful to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for their financial support.

Notes

1. It is understood that detection could be operationalized in ways other than conviction date that could raise other methodological issues (e.g., date brought to the police station, date of arrest, date charged, etc.). The date the offender was convicted was the only indicator consistently coded across offenders. There is limited research, however, on the time gap between detection and conviction. The time gap between detection and conviction varies across sex offenders. One study conducted on child sexual abuse cases reported that the time between law enforcement report and disposition took less than one year in 12% of the cases analyzed but more than two years in 36% (Walsh et al. 2008). Case characteristics were found to be weakly linked to the criminal justice processing time. We hypothesize that this gap may be influenced by whether the offender confessed to the police, whether there was plea bargaining, if there was a trial, and the length of the trial. This information was not available for this sample.

2. Technically it could, in the case of a wrongfully convicted offender who would later commit a sex crime. This scenario, however, is unlikely and beyond the scope of this study.

3. Considering the heterogeneity of variance across groups in terms of detection avoidance, nonparametric tests (Kruskal–Wallis test) were performed and confirmed the association between official onset and detection avoidance.

4. Research studies on the criminal activity of sex offenders are generally based on highly selected samples of offenders which limits the generalizations of the study findings. Purposive samples of individuals recruited in treatment centers, inpatient/outpatient mental health institution, which is the norm in sex offender research, include offenders who were selected on several factors, such as recognizing a sexual deviance, motivation for sex offender treatment, the presence of a mental health problem, a high risk of sexually reoffending, a diagnosed paraphilia, etc.

5. Few empirical studies have documented the time gap between the true onset of sex offending and the age at detection. The average gap found across prior studies using polygraph testing range from three (Emerick and Dutton 1993) to 16 years (Ahlmeyer et al. 2000). Such heterogeneity across studies may be explained, at least in part by differences in sample composition (see Ahlmeyer et al. 2000). This can be illustrated by the wide range of detection time across offenders found in the current study, varying from a few months to more than 40 years.

6. Keep in mind that this gap does not take into account individuals who have not been charged, those who have been charged but not convicted, as well as those who have been charged, convicted but received a sentence other than a Federal prison term; a limitation also found in prior studies conducted with samples of incarcerated sex offenders.

7. Granted, our measure of early onset of sex offending is not a measure of general onset of deviance or criminal activity. However, if propensity toward crime and deviance leads to crime versatility, we would expect low self-control offenders to start their sex-offending career earlier than those with more self-control. For an application of the early-onset hypothesis to sex offending, see Harris and Rice (2007) as well as Lussier and Healey (2009).

8. At one extreme, of those whose actual onset occurred prior to age 24, about 37% were convicted within two years. At the other extreme, 17% of these early-onset offenders survived detection for more than 20 years. Such a contrast across early starters requires additional information to account for differential patterns of criminal success.

9. Detection avoidance for adult victims, in contrast, was within two years after the onset of offending. Keep in mind that this gap does not take into account the time it took to process the case throughout the criminal justice system. This two-year gap indicates that offenders were caught relatively soon after the offense. Recall that all offenders included in this study were convicted for a sex crime. Our results might also suggest that if they are not apprehended soon after the crime they might never be convicted for their offense.