Project Impact

Throughout our lives we are, from time to time, confronted with information that challenges our conventional way of thinking. For example, our changing attitudes about “second hand smoke” has changed public policy regarding smoking in public areas. Public education has also helped Americans understand that AIDS is not a “homosexual disease,” but one that can infect everyone through a variety of sexual behaviors and through intravenous drug use. Consider the following.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the federal agency responsible for the prevention of health problems, has been working on violence prevention for more than 12 years. The CDC’s focus has been on changing the way people think about preventing violence. On November, 6,1996, the American Medical Association (AMA) issued a statement calling sexual assault a public health problem, labeling sexual assault a “silent violent epidemic in the United States today.” The World Health Assembly (WHA) also considers violence, and the prevention of violence as a public health priority. WHA has declared that violence is a leading worldwide public health problem. The American Psychological Association (APA) has also declared violence to be a serious societal problem and recognizes the need for addressing the violence problem from a different perspective. The APA states; “Societal attitudes and practices regarding violence also have an influence on the risk of family violence.” The Oregon Department of Human Services in their Recommendations to Prevent Sexual Violence in Oregon: A Plan Of Action 2006 report strongly recommends that more needs to be done to prevent sexual violence before it occurs, that we need to reduce the risk of sexual violence to our vulnerable populations, as well as create a climate where sexual violence is not tolerated. These efforts by these esteemed organizations are a wake-up call to America.

Legislators and the public repeatedly turn to the criminal justice system to solve sexual violence in America. However, the series of tougher laws padded each year to address sexual violence, passed each year to guide the criminal justice system, do not address the underlying causes of violence or sexual abuse. The continued rise in sexual abuse suggests that our over-reliance on the criminal justice model for preventing and public health epidemic is akin to us attempting to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS by simply locking up and attempting to provide supervision to everyone who suffers from this condition.

During the past decade, we have seen legislation regarding sexual offenses that 1) mandates public notification of when sex offenders are released back into our communities, 2) requirement that mandate that convicted sexual offenders must register their residency with law enforcement every year, 3) lifetime incarceration for third time offenders, and 4) Residency restrictions and GPS monitoring for offenders on supervision. Unfortunately what we are know finding out is that we do not have sufficient resources to effectively apply and enforce these laws and therefore community safety is compromised.

For example each year law enforcement agencies spend millions of dollars in an attempt to verify sex offender registrations to only find out that anywhere between 10 and 30% of the information contained on an individuals registration is inaccurate or that an individual did not comply with registration, resulting in us not knowing where these offenders are, or what they are doing.

Residency restrictions might make us all feel better, but decades of criminological research have concluded that stability and support increase the likelihood of successful reintegration for offenders, and public policies that make it more difficult for offenders to succeed may jeopardize public safety (Petersilia, 2003). In Colorado, it was found that sex offenders who had a positive support system in their lives had significantly lower recidivism and less rule violations than those who had negative or no support (Colorado
Department of Public Safety, 2004). Sex offenders who maintain social bonds to communities through stable employment and family relationships have lower recidivism rates than those without jobs or significant others. “Offenders can do quite well in the community within the confines of supervision, treatment, and stable employment” (Kruttschnitt et al., 2000, p. 83).

Global Posititioning Systems (GPS) let us monitor where the offenders are in our community, but it does not tell us who the offender is with. Therefore it is likely that a convicted child mollestor could look compliant on the GPS monitor and not draw attention to himself, but he/she could easily be at home with a minor and no one would know.

Some suggest that these laws have resulted in a decrease of sexual abuse in our society while others will raise the concern that it has been widely publicized that sexual abuse has always been one of the least reported of all crimes (it is estimated that only 1 in 10 sexual assaults ever get reported to law enforcement, and approximately only 10-30% of those reported to law enforcement ever end in prosecution of the offender).

These mandates, and in some cases unfunded, laws are examples of “feel good” legislation and have been shown to be only partially effective with all sexual abusers. Occasionally, these laws may cause more harm than good as they drive the sexual abuser further into secrecy and minimize the opportunity for successful rehabilitation and reintegration into our community.

The AMA states, “Society as a whole must become better informed about the problems and realities of sexual assault. Special attention must be directed to correcting misconceptions and myths about rape and sexual assault.”

Now is the time for all of us to begin changing the way we think about sexual abuse and how to prevent it form happening in the first place. From a prevention standpoint we can do several things.

First, the most important action we can take to prevent the sexual abuse in our community it to educate ourselves and not minimize the seriousness of the issue and inform educate others about the dynamics of this serious social problem.

Secondly, we must be willing to challenge the the current practice of having the Criminal Justice System be our primary fix to preventing sexual abuse in our communities.

Thirdly, we must look outside the box and find ways to create sound policies and standards that expand on our current pre-employment / volunteer and supervision screening process for offenders and look at the current research on effective ways to objectively identify those who have a sexual interest in children and/or violence, and provide intervention services to those who have managed to escape detection.

Current practices for agencies and organizations is to require individuals to undergo a ‘Criminal Background Check’. These criminal background checks are a good first line of defense, however, they are not without their limitations and high error rate. Based on low reporting and prosecution rates for sexual offenses, these Criminal Background Checks have shown that they will only be able to identify 3 to 10 out of 100 child sexual abusers. Therefore the Criminal Background Checks only provide agencies or organizations very limited information or opportunity to best protect themselves and their clients from those 80 to 90 child sexual abusers that have not been caught.

Few people disagree with the statistics that suggest that criminal sexual abuse has reached epidemic proportions in our country, however, there is much disagreement and debate about what are the most effective ways to address this serious social problem and how we can best prevent it in the future.

I encourage you to look at the past twenty or thirty years and decide for yourself if our current methods and strategies of creating tougher laws and punishing sexual abusers are resulting in a decrease in criminal sexual abuse. I believe the answer to this question is “no,” and therefore, I believe we must rethink what directions we need to take in the future.

What we must keep in mind is that punishment is not prevention. I believe the criminal justice system must play a role in holding offenders accountable after the fact, however the criminal justice system is limited in it’s ability to prevent a sexual offense from happening or identifying those who have a sexual interest in children who have not been caught yet.

We must educate ourselves about the dynamics of sexual abuse and sexual violence, its origins, and figure out ways to best get at the root of the problem. We should be looking at ways to support services that provide opportunities for individuals who have a sexual behavior problems and their families to come forward and receive appropriate resources and referral information without the worry of being turned into the authorities. Prevention is not punishing a behavior after it occurs. Prevention is stopping the problem before it occurs.

At Project Impact we specialize in providing primary perpetrator prevention services that include

• Empirically Validated, Non-Invasive Sexual Interest Assessments

• Community Education

• Intervention and Support Services