Kari Davies, Miranda Horvath, Ruth Austin
Reconceptualising repeat sex offending
Workshop Abstract
This workshop covers findings on repeat sex offending generated from Operation Soteria Bluestone, a national project designed to improve the way the rape and serious sex offending is responded to by law enforcement in England and Wales.
Collaborating with five forces in Year 1 of the project, the researchers were granted unprecedented access to these forces’ data records, culminating in the creation of a dataset of 37,916 criminal incidents committed by 28,543 unique identified suspects against 31,698 unique victims across a four-year period, and including criminal history data for all named suspects.
The workshop contains presentations of four papers, each conceptualising repeat sex offending in a different way: Exploring repeat offending outlines the different types of repeat sex offending that occur in the dataset, using a framework that conceptualises repeat sex offending by both victim choice and offending period; The trajectories of sex offence suspects investigates the differential pathways manifested by sex offence suspects, and their association with risk of subsequent reoffending; Exploring victim crossover by repeat sex offence suspects highlights the breadth of sex offending perpetrated by sex offence suspects, when considering their choice of victim based on victim sex, age, and relationship to the suspect; The characteristics of generalist versus specialist repeat sex offence suspects explores the prevalence of generalists and specialists within the cohort of repeat sex offence suspects, highlighting their similarities and differences in sex offence types perpetrated, victims targeted, and number of offences committed.
Throughout the workshop the workshop facilitators will provide opportunities for discussion and reflection about the ways the findings can be best applied to policy, practice, and future research.
About the Speakers
Dr Kari Davies is the Associate Head of School and Principal Academic in the School of Psychology at Bournemouth University. Her primary research interests lie in forensic behavioural and investigative psychology.
Her recent work has looked at how repeat sex offence suspects are identified and investigated, and how behavioural crime linkage is conducted at an international level. Much of her work has been conducted through secondments into practitioners’ workplaces, and she has collaborated with both the Home Office, the National Crime Agency, and multiple UK and international police forces.
Professor Miranda Horvath is Director of the Institute for Social Justice & Crime at the University of Suffolk. Miranda’s research focuses on violence against women and girls (VAWG) and the professionals and agencies who work with victim-survivors and perpetrators.
Between 2021-2023 she was the Pillar 1 lead for Operation Soteria research on the improving the investigation of rape and serious sexual assaults funded. Miranda is the co-editor of the second edition of the Cambridge Handbook of Forensic Psychology (2021, Cambridge University Press) and Rape: Challenging Contemporary Thinking (2022, Routledge). Miranda founded the VAWG Research Network in 2019.
Dr Ruth Spence is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies at Middlesex University. She works across various projects that focus on trauma experiences and their psychological sequela and collaborates across disciplines to develop online assessment and intervention approaches.
Ruth has worked in partnership with charities, industry, and third sector organisations, including working on Operation Soteria Bluestone. Recently, she led on a project developing the RUDI framework which practical guidance to support forces considering the use of complex machine learning algorithms and co-founded herEthical.AI, a business that uses AI solutions to reduce gender-based violence.