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Lawrence A. Greenfeld January 1, 1997 NCJ 163392 Draws on more than two dozen statistical datasets maintained by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and on data from the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program of the FBI to provide a comprehensive overview of current knowledge about the incidence and prevalence of violent victimization by sexual assault, the response of the criminal justice system to such crimes, and the characteristics of those who commit sexual assault or rape.

Contains tons of studies pertaining to sex offenders.

"A recent White House report found one in five female college students are sexually assaulted. Not exactly, says Wendy Kaminer. She takes issue with the language of the report, saying the Obama Administration is apparently, "oblivious to the difference between allegations, estimates and facts." (Elaine Thompson/AP) "Nearly one in five women have been raped in her lifetime," according to the White House Council on Women and Girls. Is that a fact? Or is it allegation or an estimate based on self-reporting surveys? Interestingly, the White House asserts that the same number of women, one in five, "has been sexually assaulted while in college." Is that a fact? Not exactly: It's a statistic derived from "a web-based survey of undergraduates," which means that one in five women has reported suffering a sexual assault. Maybe their reports are absolutely, unassailably accurate. Maybe not."

The public's panic about the fear of recidivism if adjudicated sex offenders are ever to be released to the community has not subsided, despite the growing amount of information and statistically-reliable data signifying a generally low risk of re-offense. The established case law upholding sex offender civil commitment and containment statutes has rejected challenges of unconstitutionality, and continues to be dominated by punitive undertones. We have come to learn that the tools used to assess offenders for risk and civil commitment are often inaccurate and that meaningful treatment for this population is often unavailable and ineffective. Yet, society continues to clamor for legislation confining this cohort of offenders for "treatment," and, ostensibly, protection of the community, and legislatures respond quickly to these calls. This "reform legislation" often includes strict and demeaning post-release restrictions that track offenders and curb their integration into society. These "reforms" continue to show no benefit either to the public or to the individual offender. The absence of meaningful and effective treatment during confinement, combined with inhumane conditions upon release, make it far less likely that this cohort of individuals will ever become productive members of society. Only through therapeutic jurisprudence, a focus on rehabilitation, and a dedication to treating sexual offenders humanely, will it be possible to reduce recidivism and foster successful community reintegration.

The public's panic about the fear of recidivism if adjudicated sex offenders are ever to be released to the community has not subsided, despite the growing amount of information and statistically-reliable data signifying a generally low risk of re-offense. The established case law upholding sex offender civil commitment and containment statutes has rejected challenges of unconstitutionality, and continues to be dominated by punitive undertones. We have come to learn that the tools used to assess offenders for risk and civil commitment are often inaccurate and that meaningful treatment for this population is often unavailable and ineffective. Yet, society continues to clamor for legislation confining this cohort of offenders for "treatment," and, ostensibly, protection of the community, and legislatures respond quickly to these calls. This "reform legislation" often includes strict and demeaning post-release restrictions that track offenders and curb their integration into society. These "reforms" continue to show no benefit either to the public or to the individual offender. The absence of meaningful and effective treatment during confinement, combined with inhumane conditions upon release, make it far less likely that this cohort of individuals will ever become productive members of society. Only through therapeutic jurisprudence, a focus on rehabilitation, and a dedication to treating sexual offenders humanely, will it be possible to reduce recidivism and foster successful community reintegration.

The National Criminal History Improvement Program (NCHIP) was initiated in 1995 to support state activities for the establishment of records systems and the collection and use of criminal history and related records. Since 1995, all states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories have received more than $530 million under the program, which is administered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). The goal of the NCHIP program is to "improve safety and security by enhancing the quality, completeness, and accessibility of criminal history record information and by insuring the nationwide implementation of criminal justice and noncriminal justice background check systems." In order to accomplish this goal, the program provides financial and technical assistance to the states to improve their criminal records systems and other related systems to support background checks.

A recent study of sexual offenders released from incarceration in Alaska shows that for the three years after the offenders left prison in 2001, the rates of recidivism for sexual offenders were, by most measures, no higher than for offenders in general. The study, which was done by the Alaska Justice Statistical Analysis Center, a subdivision of the Justice Center, compared recidivism for sexual offenders released from prison in 2001 with a random sample of non-sex offenders also released in 2001. The analysis used the three measures most commonly used to determine recidivism: incidents of remand to custody, rearrest, and reconviction on any new offense. The results are similar to those found in an earlier study done by the Alaska Judicial Council. (See Alaska Felony Process: 1999, Alaska Judicial Council, 2004.)

July 1, 2000 NCJ 182990 Presents findings from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) regarding sexual assault, especially of young children. The data are based on reports from law enforcement agencies of 12 States and covers the years 1991 through 1996. The report presents sexual assault in 4 categories: forcible rape, forcible sodomy, sexual assault with an object, and forcible fondling. Findings include statistics on the incidence of sexual assault, the victims, their offenders, gender, response to these crimes, locality, time of incident, the levels of victim injury, victims' perceptions of offenders' ages, and victim-offender relationships, and other detailed characteristics.

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) is committed to improving the justice system's response to crimes against children. OJJDP recognizes that children are at increased risk for crime victimization. Not only are children the vic-tims of many of the same crimes that victimize adults, they are subject to other crimes, like child abuse and neglect, that are specific to childhood. The impact of these crimes on young victims can be devastating, and the violent or sexual victimization of chil-dren can often lead to an intergenerational cycle of violence and abuse. The purpose of OJJDP's Crimes Against Children Series is to improve and expand the Nation's efforts to better serve child victims by presenting the latest information about child victimization, including analyses of crime victimization statistics, studies of child victims and their spe-cial needs, and descriptions of programs and approaches that address these needs.

This article argues that the new preventive law focus in sex offender laws is largely ineffective and too costly to personal liberty. The application of sex offender laws involving civil commitment, sex offender registration, and residency restrictions is often based on an individualized analysis of future dangerousness, i.e., the risk the defendant will sexually recidivate. In assessing future dangerousness, experts and courts place heavy emphasis on the use of actuarial tools, basically checklists that mental health experts use to derive statistical estimates of risk. This article provides substantiation that actuarial tools, while enjoying the imprimatur of science, suffer from significant empirical faults. Yet courts are largely abandoning their gatekeeping roles in accepting the experts' testimony using actuarial tool predictions of risk without critical review as required by the Daubert and Frye evidentiary standards. The paper theorizes that this is likely a pragmatic strategy considering the current political and public thirst for retribution against sexual predators. But, use of this empirically-challenged science exacerbates the practice of applying sex offender restrictions to inappropriately labeled individuals. Finally, this article takes advantage of the interdisciplinary trend of engaging social science with the law on expert evidence. More specifically, it offers an empirical assessment of future dangerousness opinions within the Daubert/Frye scientific evidence frameworks. The significance of the conclusion reached in this article is clear: if the law continues to rely upon suspect science that results in the wrong individuals being subject to liberty-infringing sex offender laws, then the drain on criminal justice resources will leave the truly dangerous offenders without sufficient supervision at the risk of public safety.

QUESTION: The number of juvenile sex offenders (JOs) -or- the number of registered juvenile sex offenders (RJOs) are both elusive numbers. So, here we gathered two sources which address those issues and contain numbers which reasonable assertions can be made from. As we searched for information we began to wonder why these numbers are not readily available? Guessing, lawmakers do not want them easily found because when addressing sex offender issues it is too easy for folks to feel sorry for these offenders, and rally around suggesting changes which lawmakers do not want to make, for fear they will be considered soft on sex offenders. Not good at election time. Initially we are not going to say much more than, the facts are below, use them as you wish.

Original Article05/14/2013By Andrew M. SeamanNEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The number of U.S. children who were exposed to violence, crime and abuse in 2011 was essentially unchanged from 2008, according to a new government survey. Researchers who...

In 1994, prisons in 15 States released 9,691 male sex offenders. The 9,691 men are two-thirds of all the male sex offenders released from State prisons in the United States in 1994. This report summarizes findings from a survey that tracked the 9,691 for 3 full years after their release. The report documents their "recidivism," as measured by rates of rearrest, reconviction, and reimprisonment during the 3-year followup period. This report gives recidivism rates for the 9,691 combined total. It also separates the 9,691 into four overlapping categories and gives recidivism rates for each category: - 3,115 released rapists - 6,576 released sexual assaulters - 4,295 released child molesters - 443 released statutory rapists. The 9,691 sex offenders were released from State prisons in these 15 States: Arizona, Maryland, North Carolina, California, Michigan, Ohio, Delaware, Minnesota, Oregon, Florida, New Jersey, Texas, Illinois, New York, and Virginia.

The technological phenomenon of "sexting" has seen such a dramatic increase in popularity that it is now defined in the Merriam Webster Dictionary: "the sending of sexually explicit messages or images by cell phone." Moreover, if you ask a high school student to describe sexting, you may be surprised to hear it is a social norm. In a 2009 survey conducted by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen & Unplanned Pregnancy, twenty percent of teens said they had sexted. That number has since increased to over twenty-five percent. What these students and many others do not know is that sexting could land them on a sex offender registry for life. As a result, their names and reputations could forever be ruined by the simple push of a computer key, or touch of an iPhone.

An Ohio prison intake report on sex offenders imprisoned in 1992 revealed that 2.2 percent of child molesters were strangers to their victims, and 89 percent of perpetrators had never been convicted before. In their 1993 textbook, The Juvenile Sex Offender, Howard Barbaree and colleagues estimated that teenagers perpetrated 20 percent of all rapes and half of all child molestations. A 2006 report for the Ohio Sentencing Commission said 93 percent of molestation victims were well known to their perpetrators, over half the offenders victimized close relatives, and 93 percent of molesters had never been arrested for a previous sex crime. A December 2009 study by David Finkelhor of UNH and colleagues for the US Justice Department analyzed national sex crime data from 2004. That year the estimated population of underage sex offenders was 89,000, and they had committed 35.8 percent of all sex crimes reported to police. One in eight juvenile sex offenders was under age 12. The study said that between 85 and 95 percent of young offenders would never face another sex charge.