Preventing sexual violence: can examination of offense location inform sex crime policy?

Recently, legislative initiatives to prevent sex crime recidivism include the passage of child safety zones (also called loitering zones) that prohibit sex offenders from lingering near places where children congregate. The ability of policies such as these or residence restrictions to curb sexual recidivism depends on the empirical reality of sex offender perpetration patterns. As such, the current study sought to examine locations where sex offenders first come into contact with their victims and whether sex crime locations differ among those who perpetrate offenses against children as compared to those who perpetrate offenses against adults. Further, this study examined actuarial risk scores and recidivism rates among offenders who met victims in child-dense public locations to determine if these offenders are more at risk of re-offense. Descriptive analyses, based on archival sex offender file review (N=1557), revealed that offenders primarily cultivated their offenses in private residential locations (67.0%); relatively few offenders (4.4%) met their victims in child-dense public locations. Further, offenders who perpetrated crimes against children were more likely to meet victims within a residence, while those who perpetrate crimes against adults were more likely to encounter victims in a more public type of location (e.g., bar, workplace). Though only 3.7% of all offenders in this sample sexually recidivated, those who recidivated were more likely to have met their victim in a child-dense public location than those who did not recidivate. Current sex crime policies that focus only on where offenders live may fail to focus on where offenders go and, further, may misdirect efforts away from the place where sex crimes most often occur, namely, in the home.