Child services organisations need policies that minimise the risk of sexual abuse of the children in their care. In particular, managers (and the public) are justifiably concerned when abuse is perpetrated by individuals who should not have been working with children in the first place. Unfortunately, there has been relatively little work on…

Criterion-referenced measures, such as those used in the assessment of crime and violence, prioritize predictive accuracy (discrimination) at the expense of construct validity. In this article, we compared the discrimination and incremental validity of three commonly used criterion-referenced measures for sex offenders (Rapid Risk Assessment for…

This review compared the accuracy of various approaches to the prediction of recidivism among sexual offenders. On the basis of a meta-analysis of 536 findings drawn from 118 distinct samples (45,398 sexual offenders, 16 countries), empirically derived actuarial measures were more accurate than unstructured professional judgment for all outcomes…

Objectives: Since the late 1980s, there has been a strong theoretical focus on psychological and social influences of perpetration of child sexual abuse. This paper presents the results of a review and meta-analysis of studies examining risk factors for perpetration of child sexual abuse published since 1990. Method: Eighty-nine studies published…