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The relationship between accessing indecent images online and the perpetration of contact child sex offences remains unclear. The purpose of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the offence process of offenders who have both such convictions.

A total of eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with older adult males who had downloaded indecent images and also had a history of contact sex offences against children. Data analysis involved thematic coding based on guidelines suggested by Braun and Clarke (2006).

Themes which emerged suggest some similarities (offence process behaviours), but also some differences (developmental factors) between the eight offenders. Data relevant to developmental factors formed two primary themes: childhood attachment difficulties and experiences of childhood abuse, both of which appeared to influence the offence process. Escalating factors generated a further three themes: adult relationships, personality problems and substance use. Five main categories also emerged with regard to offence behaviours: sexually deviant interests, lack of self-control, opportunity, the role of the internet (availability, easy access and anonymity), and cognitive distortions (justifications: interest in challenge and sexual frustration; denial: accidental access and denial of a victim, normalisation; blame: blame on the victim, new technologies and authorities and blame on other factors; and minimisation).

A better understanding of the offence process would inform clinical practice with such offenders and aid in the process of prevention.

This is the first research to date which explores the rationale provided for their behaviour by those convicted of both internet and contact child sex offences.

Recently researchers working on criminal behaviour have interested in elder offenders as the population is getting older. Crime statistics showed that the number of offenders over the age 55 is increasing each year. These statistics revealed that older people engage not only in minor crimes but also engage in serious crimes. One of this kind of crimes is sexual abuse which is defined as sexual offending against the individuals who are incapable of giving consent. Although public view regarding to elder people sexuality is seen as they are incapable of this kind of acts because of their age, the statistics showed that contrary. Yet the reasons behind the offending behaviour of these elderly people is explained little by the researchers. The aim of this chapter is to review the psychological perspective including neurobiological, psychiatric, cognitive and behavioural perspective. Neurobiological and psychiatric approach mainly focused on disease that lead to criminal conduct like dementia or paedophilia. Cognitive approach emphasises the cognitive distortions regarding to sexual abuse behaviour. Behavioural approach proposed that the learning process based on classical conditioning and operant conditioning determine the sexual abuse behaviour. Yet none of the theories alone not enough to explain the sexual abuse behaviour in elderly people. There is a need for more studies on sex offending behaviour of elderly people in order to have comprehensive understanding of their behaviour and to put forward new theoretical models.

Purpose – The crime of child sex offending or child sexual abuse is a serious social problem. Since the 1990s, it has been popularly conceptualised as a ‘paedophile threat’ and has become one of the most high-profile crimes of our times. This chapter examines the social construction of paedophiles in UK newspapers and its impact on official regulation of child sex offenders.

Methodology/approach – Discourse analysis is used to establish how newspaper language produces common discourses around child sex offenders. Documentary research of government legislation and law enforcement helps analyse the ways in which official regulation is informed by media discourses.

Findings – Newspaper discourses around child sex offenders construct the paedophile as a distinct and dangerous category of person. This media figure informs government legislation and law enforcement in several ways. For example, discourses around paedophiles necessitate and legitimate punitive legal trends regarding child sex offenders and facilitate the conceptualisation of specific laws.

The conceptual shift towards understanding child sexual abuse through the figure of the paedophile has several detrimental consequences. This chapter offers a critique of contemporary media and governmental/legal discourses, pointing to misrepresentation, sensationalism, demonisation and insufficient child protection.

Value – This research indicates that discourses and conceptual shifts around child sex offenders are driven by the media but have come to be accepted and perpetuated by the government and the law. This dynamic not only illustrates the power of the media to set agendas but raises questions regarding the adequacy of official governance informed by media discourses.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the dark figure of crime among federal sex offenders from the USA to quantify crime victims and sex crime events among those with no official criminal record.

Using data on 119 offenders selected from a five-year census of sex offenders selected from a federal probation jurisdiction in the Midwestern United States, descriptive, partial correlations, and ROC-AUC models were conducted.

In total, 69 percent of offenders self-reported a contact sexual offense during polygraph examination. In total, 34 offenders had zero official record of sexual abuse but non-zero self-reported history of sexual abuse. These 34 clients offended against 148 victims that potentially denoted a minimum number of 148 sex crime events, a median number of 1,480 sex crime events, a mean number of 32,101 sex crime events, and a maximum number of 827,552 sex crime events. Total paraphilias were not predictive of self-reported sexual offending but were strongly associated with prolific self-reported sexual offending.

The dark figure of sexual offending is enormous and the revelation of this information is facilitated by polygraph examination of federal sex offenders. Ostensibly non-contact sex offenders such as those convicted of possession of child pornography are very likely to have a history of contact sexual offending. Consistent with the containment model, polygraph examinations of the sexual history of offenders convicted of sexual offenses should be required to facilitate public safety.

This review aims to focus on men who access, download, and circulate child abuse images across the internet as the most frequently occurring type of internet sex offender.

Some of the misconceptions associated with this behaviour are outlined and the extent to which internet offenders display some of the criminogenic factors thought to be associated with the multi‐factorial theories of sexual offending are reviewed.

One conclusion from this is paper is the general impression that internet offenders show many of the characteristics of paedophiles. Their theoretical importance is that they appear to be “desisters” from acting out their sexual interest in children by hands‐on offending.

It is argued that there is a need for more research to stimulate our understanding of this type of offender. Furthermore, what of those who both download material and offend directly against children? They present a dilemma for the literature as some research would suggest that they are not entirely like the internet or the contact sexual offenders in their psychological make‐up; they are the group most in need of reappraisal.

This study explored the attitudes of prison officers, forensic staff and members of the public towards and male and female sex offenders. Participants were provided with a vignette depicting a specific sexual offence committed against either an adult or a child, by either a male or a female perpetrator, and were then asked to complete a scale assessing attitudes to sex offenders based on the offender depicted in the vignette. Forensic staff emerged as having the most positive attitudes to sex offenders, viewing them as individuals who could be rehabilitated. Prison officers emerged as having the most negative attitudes, in that they were supportive of harsh and untrusting attitudes. Overall, females emerged as viewing sex offenders in more positive terms, whereas males were more supportive of harsh attitudes to sex offenders. Respondents did not have a more negative attitude to female sex offenders than to male sex offenders.

The objective of this study was to investigate attitudes towards individuals who commit different types of sex offence, with subsidiary aims of exploring the influence of respondent sex and the influence of personal experience of sexual abuse. The sample comprised 139 participants (49 students and 90 forensic staff). All were provided with a vignette depicting a specific type of sex offence, and asked to complete a scale assessing attitudes towards sex offenders (Hogue, 1993). Forensic staff were more likely than students to view sex offenders in positive terms, viewing them as individuals who could be rehabilitated. Participants who reported being victims of sexual abuse, or that someone close to them had been abused, viewed sex offenders less negatively than non‐victims. Men demonstrated less positive attitudes towards child incest and child indecent assault offenders than to stranger rapists. Women held more positive views towards sex offenders than men, and this was consistent across offence type.

The present study investigates the use of two actuarial assessment measures ‐ Risk Matrix 2000 (Thornton et al, 2003) and Static 99 (Hanson & Thornton, 2000) ‐ with individuals convicted of downloading child pornography on the internet. A UK community‐based sample of convicted internet sex offenders (n = 73) was assessed using both a standard and a revised version of RM2000 and Static 99 and assessed for rates of reconviction. None of the offenders in the sample were convicted of a further sexual crime between a one‐and‐a‐half and fouryear follow‐up. These results suggest reconviction rates for internet sex offenders are lower than for contact child sex offenders. It was found that both the standard version of RM2000 and Static‐99 overestimate the risk levels posed by internet offenders and that an adapted version of RM2000 may be a more realistic measure of risk level in this population. In addition, it was noted that a higher frequency of low‐risk offenders appeared to be accessing images of younger children and images depicting more serious victimisation than high‐risk offenders.

Sex offenders and the laws concerning them represent a highly controversial and emotionally charged issue. Current efforts of legislation in the United States to manage the increasing number of sex offenders being arrested and eventually released back into communities are inadequate to manage such a large population of offenders, and the effects of registration and notification laws are more detrimental than beneficial to the communities they intend to protect. This paper discusses the notion that a significant cause of the problem relates to the overly broad standards that are used to define who is to be charged as a sex offender. The term “sex offender” needs to be reserved for those individuals who best represent the meaning of the term, and the resources available for this issue should be directed towards the effective management of those offenders instead of being spread so thin amongst so many offenders who do not pose a serious threat to society that none of them are sufficiently supervised after release from incarceration. Furthermore, laws and federal guidelines regarding sex offender legislation needs to be based on empirical research findings instead of uniformed public pressure.