Sex Offender Risk Appraisal Guide (SORAG)
This procedure pays more attention to offenders’ characteristics and the violence in their background:
Indications of psychopathy.
Behavioural problems at school.
Diagnosis of personality disorder.
Age at time of most recent offence.
Evidence of mental disorder.
Alcohol problems.
Long-term intimate relationships (especially lack of them).
Violent criminal history.
Deviant sexual preferences.
Risk assessments, of course, aren’t foolproof. They give only general probability estimates that are based on samples drawn from the past of people who have been assessed and then followed up. Broadly speaking, these assessments predict correctly whether or not the offender will offend in the future in 60 to 70 per cent of cases. They don’t get it right in all cases, because they can’t take account of individual circumstances, such as a person losing a job, which may increase the risk, or finding a caring partner, which can reduce the risk.
Looking into the role of fantasies
Assessing offenders’ fantasies is crucial to being able to assess these people effectively. Some sex offenders do seem to have particularly deviant fantasies and a strong desire to act on them. It has also been claimed that some sexual crimes are carried out in order to feed a fantasy. The proposal is that the person commits the offence in order to be able to draw on the experience for later private sexual gratification.
Although attempts to control offenders’ fantasies haven’t been successful in reducing the likelihood of their re-offending, identifying and assessing what the fantasies are, can be useful in setting up other forms of intervention. The plethysmograph that I describe in the nearby sidebar ‘The penile plethysmograph’ has been found to be helpful in this regard.
A lot of normal, acceptable sexual contact between caring partners involves some sort of fantasy, about the context of the activity, the person involved or the activities associated with it. In a surprisingly high proportion of cases, these fantasies can include thinking about activities that may be considered paraphilias (flip to the earlier Table 15-2) or even violently deviant. Consequently, sexual fantasies in and of themselves can’t be regarded as the reason for sexual assaults.
