Sexual offending is a social concern that affects all levels of society. In the UK, sexual offending has also become a mainstay of our news bulletins and, whether it is offences against individual adults in the form of rape and sexual assault, or child sexual abuse within families, and Asian gangs grooming teenage children for sexual exploitation, the headlines about sexual offending have become pervasive.
Sexual offending covers âhistoricâ or ânon-recentâ offending by well-known celebrities and entertainers and by teachers and care workers in residential childcare settings. It covers offending by priests and others in religious roles in church settings. It covers the apparent widespread use of indecent images of children exchanged on the internet.
Many agencies work with sex offenders and that work has exercised probation officers, social workers, doctors, psychologists, prison officers, magistrates, judges, and even lay volunteers in their âcircles of support and accountabilityâ for sex offenders.
This book is about the work of the police with people who are suspected of committing or have committed sexual offences. The police are involved at the start of the process of identifying the guilty parties by taking initial reports and investigating all sexual offences at the point they are alleged.
The police have other non-investigatory work in connection with sex offenders, including that of managing all the convicted and therefore âknownâ sex offenders living in the community. This non-investigatory role is a relatively new role for UK police officers, usually referred to as âpublic protectionâ work and premised largely on their custodianship of the âsex offender registerâ introduced in 1997. The supervision of offenders in the community has traditionally been the work of the Probation Service and continues to be so. This new role for the police is distinguished from the work of probation officers by being referred to as âassessment of riskâ and the âmanagementâ of that risk.
Another non-investigatory role for the police is that of providing information on sex offenders both to members of the public and to employers on the backgrounds of job applicants. This dissemination of information held to employers is to stop, for example, people with recorded sexual offences against children being able to obtain future work with children. It is part of a screening exercise to make sure that âunsuitableâ people are not allowed to work with children or other vulnerable people.
This book seeks to guide the reader through these different aspects of policing sexual offences and sexual offenders. The first part of the book approaches the subject from the position of the police as gatekeepers to the criminal justice system, where they are the first agency to take reports of alleged incidents of sexual offending and to investigate them as crimes. This reporting, and the subsequent police recording of incidents as crimes, is followed by the police investigation of the allegations and the gathering of corroborative evidence to support the complainantâs initial statement. This work is carried out by the police in close cooperation with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) who take the case into court.
The wide variety of behaviour that may be recognised as sexual offending has been alluded to in my opening paragraphs. The number of different sexual offences that lead to inclusion on the sex offender register is now over 35 in England and Wales, and even more if we add in the different offences that can be committed in Scotland and Northern Ireland (Sexual Offences Act 2003 Schedule 3). Later, we consider just a few of these offences and how police work approaches them.
All of these police activities take place at a local level, but the police today have clear national and international duties placed on them in relation to sexual offending. Various national initiatives have opened up and, in particular, the role of the police Child Exploitation and Online Protection Command (CEOP) of the National Crime Agency (NCA). These initiatives in turn tie in with international demands on policing through co-operative information exchanges with the police forces of other countries through mechanisms such as INTERPOL or EUROPOL.
The first part of this book looks at the initial work of the police when possible offending is brought to their attention.
The second part of the book examines police work at a local level when the people convicted of sexual offending and thereby confirmed as sex offenders come back to their notice after serving a sentence. Since the introduction of the âsex offender registerâ the police have the task of assessing the risk of the offender and managing that risk when they live in the community; this may follow a period in prison or resume immediately after the court has given them a community sentence. This regulatory and managerial role is very different from the traditional investigatory role of the police and can involve them in applying to the courts for restrictive civil orders to assist them in their managerial role.
Further regulatory work takes place when the police make use of the considerable amount of personal information they now collate on the people who commit sexual offences. This work includes the dissemination of that information to parties outside the criminal justice networks that the police work within, to employers and other third parties, in the interests of crime prevention and public protection. This use of personal information is also dealt with in the second part of the book.