How victim age affects the context and timing of child sexual abuse: applying the routine activities approach to the first sexual abuse incident

The aim of this study was to examine from the routine activities approach how victim age might help to explain the timing, context and nature of offenders’ first known contact sexual abuse incident. One-hundred adult male child sexual abusers (M = 45.8 years, SD = 12.2; range = 20–84) were surveyed about the first time they had sexual contact with a child. Afternoon and early evening (between 3 pm and 9 pm) was the most common time in which sexual contact first occurred. Most incidents occurred in a home. Two-thirds of incidents occurred when another person was in close proximity, usually elsewhere in the home. Older victims were more likely to be sexually abused by someone outside their families and in the later hours of the day compared to younger victims. Proximity of another person (adult and/or child) appeared to have little effect on offenders’ decisions to abuse, although it had some impact on the level of intrusion and duration of these incidents. Overall, the findings lend support to the application of the routine activities approach for considering how contextual risk factors (i.e., the timing and relationship context) change as children age, and raise questions about how to best conceptualize guardianship in the context of child sexual abuse. These factors should be key considerations when devising and implementing sexual abuse prevention strategies and for informing theory development

How Might Crime-Scripts Be Used to Support the Understanding and Policing of Cloud Crime?

Crime scripts are becoming an increasingly popular method for understanding crime by turning a crime from a static event into a process, whereby every phase of the crime is scripted. It is based on the work relating to cognitive scripts and rational-choice theory. With the exponential growth of cyber-crime, and more specifically cloud-crime, policing/law enforcement agencies are struggling with the amount of reported cyber-crime. This paper argues that crime scripts are the most effective way forward in terms of helping understand the behaviour of the criminal during the crime itself. They act as a common language between different stakeholders, focusing attention and resources on the key phases of a crime. More importantly, they shine a light on the psychological element of a crime over the more technical cyber-related elements. The paper concludes with an example of what a cloud-crime script might look like, asking future research to better understand: (i) cloud criminal fantasy development; (ii) the online cultures around cloud crime; (iii) how the idea of digital-drift affects crime scripts, and; (iv) to improve on the work by Ekblom and Gill in improving crime scripts

Criminal investigation of sexual offenses

Sexual assault and abuse are among the most heinous crimes that can be committed. It is thus startling to realize how many sexual crimes go unreported every year, worldwide. In the United States (US), for example, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Justice Department estimate that only a third of all rapes will be reported to the police (FBI, 2015; Truman, & Langton, 2015). Although based on different legal and judicial definitions, Canadian statistics from the General Social Survey on Victimization are much lower, indicating that only 5% of sexual assaults were brought to the attention of police (Perreault, 2015). In their study based on over 90 empirical studies from Australia, Canada, England and Wales, Scotland, and the United States on the legal response to rape and sexual assault from 1970 to 2005, Daly and Bouhours (2009) found an average victim report rate of 14%. All of these numbers become even more critical when we realize that most sexual assaults that are reported to the police will not be cleared by arrest (Hazelwood & Burgess, 2017). In fact, of the sexual assaults reported to police, only a small percentage (as low as 5% in some cases) will result in the conviction of the offender (FBI, 2015; Perreault, 2015). Despite the increased focus on criminal investigations of sexual offenses in more recent years, these numbers have been relatively stable over the past four decades or so (Hazelwood & Burgess, 2017)