1 23 DYNAMIC RISK FACTORS 1.1 INTRODUCTION Sexual offending has major social and health-related implications. Sexual offending can be defined as any attempted or completed sexual act committed against someone without a person’s freely given consent, which might include both contact sexual offenses (e.g., rape, sexual coercion, and/or unwanted sexual contact) as non-contact offenses (e.g., sexual harassment, exhibitionism, voyeurism), whether in person or online (cfr. World Health Organization, 2021). Survivors may experience multiple longterm negative psychological, sexual, relationship, and physical health problems, further compounded by the financial costs associated with treatment, and with professional and educational difficulties (Baker et al., 2016; Dworkin, 2020, Golding, 1994; Stein & Barrett-Connor, 2000; van Berlo & Ensink, 2000). These negative consequences are not only often severe, but highly prevalent. Based on a systematic review of 32 articles, reporting on a total of 45 studies from 29 countries outside North America, Dworkin and colleagues (2021) found that prevalence rates of being survivor of sexual offending for the period from adolescence onward ranged from 0.6% to 77.6% for women, 0.3% to 65.5% for men (Dworkin et al., 2021). While The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, an epidemiological study conducted annually in the United States of America, indicates that 54.3%,[95% confidence interval (CI): 52.9%, 55.7%] of the women and 30.7 % [CI: 29.3%, 32.1%] of the men had a lifetime history of surviving an attempted or completed contact sexual offenses (Basile et al., 2022). Unlike large-scale national or epidemiological studies on the prevalence of having experienced and survived sexual offenses, research on sexual perpetration is more sporadic (Anderson et al., 2021). An indication on the prevalence of perpetration of sexual offending can be obtained from studies on sexual perpetration in college men. In their systematic review of empirical studies on self-reported lifetime prevalence in Canadian and American male college students (including 78 independent samples, N= 25,524), Anderson and colleagues (2021) found a prevalence rate of any sexual perpetration and rape of respectively 29.3% (SD = 16.8) and 6.5% (SD = 6.3). Crime statistics based on official records are in sharp contrasts with these self-reported prevalence rates of sexual perpetration. For example, Långström and colleagues (2015) found that 0.5% of all men living in Sweden, who were and 30 to 45 years old in 2009, were convicted for any sexual crime. Once convicted for sexual offending, long-term recidivism studies show that desistance from sexual reoffending is the norm (Hanson et al., 2018). A meta-analytic review combining the results of 20 independent scientific studies (N = 7,225) on sexual reoffending found that the sexual reoffending rate was 9.1% at 5 years, 13.3% at 10 years, 16.2% at 15 years, 18.2% at 20 years, and 18.5% at 25 years (Hanson et al., 2018). This meta-analysis showed that not only desistance is most probable, but also that the hazard rates for sexual reoffending predictably declines the longer men with a history of sexual offending remain offense-free in the community
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