About the project
Since the 1950s, sexual recidivism has been extensively studied to inform recidivism prevention. Most research has been quantitative, focusing on recidivism rates and risk prediction while treating recidivism as a binary outcome: people either commit a new crime or they do not. However, sexual recidivism is a complex, multifaceted issue that also reflects individuals’ lived experiences and realities. Overlooking these aspects provides limited insight into the individual, social, and narrative processes involved –processes that have received considerable attention in desistance research. Accordingly, this project employed in-depth, narrative interviews with men who had been repeatedly convicted of sexual offenses to explore these perspectives in greater detail.
Method
The project was based on double interviews with men who had recidivated to further sexual offending and who, at the time of the interviews, were serving either a regular prison sentence or a preventive detention sentence. Using a narrative life story approach, the interviews focused on participants’ life histories, their criminal careers and experiences of imprisonment and treatment, and their expectations and experiences of life after release, including desistance-related challenges.
Objectives
The main aim of the project was to generate new knowledge about the recidivism process by interviewing and learning from individuals with first-hand experience of sexual recidivism. The findings revealed a range of (unmet) needs among the participants and showed how experiences of recidivism, feelings of failure, and societal stigma can affect the self, thereby shedding new light on the relationship between sexual recidivism and desistance.
Publications
- Explaining the unexplainable: Balancing responsibility, expectations, and identity in narratives of sexual recidivism
- What works and what doesn’t? Responsivity from the perspective of incarcerated individuals with a history of sexual recidivism
- "I guess I need to say something about it at some point, maybe": Sexual recidivism and the narrative negotiation of anticipated stigma management
- "Too much, too little, too late:" Exploring the role of the criminal justice system within the narratives of men convicted of sexual recidivism in Norway and North America