The Great Policy Gap: Toward More Sex Offending Research

Sexual offending is a complex, multidimensional phenomenon. It encompasses a wide range of manifestations that can carry extremely harmful consequences to victims. To date, policies tackling the issue of sexual offending have been mainly reactive and constructed around high-profile and extremely violent acts. However, such high-profile cases are the exception rather than the rule when it comes to the types of cases handled by the criminal justice system. Criminal justice policies have been based on simplistic and biased conclusions, which in turn have reinforced myths, misconceptions, and erroneous conclusions about the causes of sexual offending and characteristics of perpetrators of sex offenses. Researchers have had a hard time keeping up with these policy developments and, rather than taking a proactive leadership role in policy development, research has been relegated to the examination of flawed and misguided criminal justice policies. In effect, researchers have been quick to point out flaws in policies surrounding sex offending while offering relatively little with respect to what sex offender policy should look like or at least failing to influence policy developments. This chapter provides an overview of some of the book’s key observations and their implications for future research and policy development. Of importance, we call for a more proactive research and policy approach to tackling sex offending that integrates a developmental life course prevention perspective.