1.1 Preventing sexual assault
While there's no way to eliminate the chance that something may happen, there are strategies that may reduce your risk or give you the confidence to step in to prevent a sexual assault. Safety planning is about brainstorming ways to stay safe that may also help reduce the risk of future harm. It can include planning for a future crisis, considering your options, and making decisions about your next steps. Finding ways to stay and feel safer can be an important step toward healing, and these plans and actions should not increase the risk of being hurt. Become familiar with safe places. Learn more about safe places near you such as a local domestic violence shelter or a family member’s house. Learn the routes and commit them to memory. Find out more about sexual assault service providers in your area that can offer support. Stay safe at home. If the person hurting you is in your home, you can take steps to feel safer. Try hanging bells or a noise maker on your door to scare the person hurting you away, or sleep in public spaces like the living room. If possible, keep the doors inside your house locked or put something heavy in front of them. If you’re protecting yourself from someone who does not live with you, keep all the doors locked when you’re not using them, and install an outside lighting system with motion detectors. Change the locks if possible.
1.2 Psychotherapeutic treatment options
Psychotherapy is intended not to decrease or change sexual arousal, but to help the patient understand and control his or her behavior. Strategic interventions involve group members in taking responsibility for supporting each other's recovery, enabling the group therapist to create a safe environment that supports confrontation to achieving honesty, without making individuals feel defensive or attacked. The interventions diffuse power struggles, compelling sex offenders to move beyond defensive postures. One option is group psychotherapy, it has been more commonly used than individual psychotherapy. This type of therapy gives members the opportunity to share experiences, gain insight, learn to control unacceptable impulses, and find acceptance. The sex offender treatment program should administer polygraph testing and/or plethysmograph testing (when available) at least annually and this should be noted in the treatment plan.
1.3 Placing victims in separate housing
Surviving prison can be extra tough for a sex offender, especially if their offenses include possessing, distributing, or producing child pornography, or soliciting minors for sexual activity. Sex offenders face being ostracized or targeted by other prisoners and are subjected to enhanced monitoring to ensure they are not engaging in risk-relevant behaviors. In effect, this makes SOMP federal prisons easier for sex offenders, enabling them to stay at the prison without threat to their lives. By housing this specialized population in certain prisons, prison officials can also monitor them more effectively. The Federal Bureau of Prisons created the Sex Offender Management Program (SOMP) as a solution to sex offender management issues. Sex offenders housed at SOMP facilities don’t have much to worry about as far as prison politics and their safety are concerned. But those housed at non-SOMP facilities, particularly at the medium and high-security levels, do run the risk of being assaulted or otherwise harmed. At the lower security levels, being at a non-SOMP facility is less of an issue, as most prisoners simply ostracize sex offenders as opposed to actively causing them harm.
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1.4 Safety concerns
Some people believe all sex offenders are high risk and require the same supervision, but that is not the case. Treat each sex offender case on an individual basis to ensure the sex offender receives proper programing to develop the pro-social skills that may prevent them from re-offending. The problem of where to house the most serious of sex offenders is the issue that raises a concern of safety. Sex offenders do not molest children because they live near schools. They abuse when they can establish relationships with children and their families and misuse positions of familiarity, trust, and authority. Local laws tend to create a domino effect whereby neighboring cities enact equal or more restrictive laws to prevent exiled sex offenders from migrating to their communities. Lawmakers should rely on available evidence to guide criminal justice policies and avoid policies that deprive individuals of basic human needs. The process for determining adequate staffing for a jail facility, and making it defensible, is to conduct a staffing analysis on a facility by facility basis. There are simply too many variables such as physical plant design, level of security, level of programs and activities, state and local standards and statutes, etc. to recommend a specific officer-to-inmate ratio. Inmate-to-officer ratios can give a glimpse of how many correctional officers are staffing various facilities since there’s no one number that fits them all. When it comes to city and county jails, however, estimates of inmate-to-officer ratios can be more elusive due to many factors that need to be considered including different jail sizes, types of inmates, and the frequency at which inmates move through the local jail system. Applying the correct ratio of inmates to staff can lower the rates of those being abused by staff within the prisons.
1.5 Strategies for dealing with resistance to treatment
You can’t change anyone else; you can only change yourself. Many counselors have used this common bit of wisdom to help clients overcome problems, but it’s crucial that counselors internalize that idea themselves. The concept of counselors focusing exclusively on their interactions with clients and letting change happen on its own is key to the successful management of resistance and the pivotal point of effective therapy. Working with individuals with sex offense convictions is a specialized area of counseling. There are also “specialties within the specialty” when factoring in the different venues for treatment, including programs in prison, in private practice (often with those on post-prison supervision or probation), and in mental institutions. The individuals within this population are generally quite different, and the dynamics are made even more complex when considering whether the offenders are adult males, adult females, or juveniles. Research supports the best practice of sex offender therapy being conducted in groups whenever possible. Peer support, which includes challenging denial and other thinking errors, is invaluable in treatment and also lends itself to generally better outcomes. Part of the reason for this is that so many sex offenses are based in secrecy. Bringing offenses out into the open is generally conducive to discussion and to the cognitive elements that are so important to reducing recidivism.
1.6 Effect of incarceration on the offenders after their release Sex offenders in prison
The empirical literature has revealed that social isolation can affect the rehabilitation of sex offenders after serving their sentences. This process of social isolation can already start during incarceration due to strained relationships with fellow prisoners and correctional staff. Given that sex offenders often report feelings of loneliness and social isolation, these distinguishing features have been theoretically linked to the etiology and maintenance of sexual offending. Empirically, social isolation and loneliness even have been linked to higher levels of aggression in sex offenders, hence increasing the risk of sexual offending and reoffending. While social isolation can be an issue when sex offenders return to society after serving their sentence, the process of social isolation may already start during the prison sentence itself. Sex offenders may be stigmatized by fellow prisoners and correctional staff, resulting in, for instance, violent attacks and being treated in a negative manner. Sex offenders are often found to face difficulties forming meaningful relationships with other individuals. Several studies found that sex offenders refer to social isolation as perceiving their social networks or relationships as deficient in some way. For example, the sex offenders that do report having social contacts indicate that these relationships are often superficial. Moreover, child abusers also report being more fearful of intimacy in relationships than rapists, which leads to avoiding social contact that can lead to meaningful relationships. During imprisonment, social isolation could be caused by the inmates being cut off from their social networks on the outside. Moreover, if inmates are socially isolated within the prison, they will be deprived of their basic need for social interaction.
References
- Beech A. & Hamilton-Giachritsis C. Relationship between therapeutic climate and treatment outcome in group-based sexual offender treatment programs. Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment 2005;17(2):127-140
- Bumby, K. M., Talbot, T. B., & Carter, M. M. (in press). Sex offender reentry: Facilitating public safety through successful transition and community reintegration. Criminal Justice and Behavior.
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