News

This summer saw the closure of the only residential treatment facility for child sex offenders. Wolvercote Clinic in Epsom, Surrey, stands on government land earmarked for development and no alternative site has been found despite government reassurances. Since the clinic's work was suspended in July, the 11 resident offenders have been treated by Wolvercote staff in the community.

But if a well-respected treatment facility can be closed down before an alternative site is available, what does this say about the government's belief in the effectiveness of treatment for child sex offenders? Can their behaviour be successfully treated?


It is ironic that on the day the Wolvercote's suspension was announced, Home Office minister Hilary Benn announced a review of residential treatment for sex offenders by the National Probation Service.

There are several treatment options for a child sex offender - professionals working with them are careful not to use the term "paedophile" which they say is misleading. It reinforces the "stranger danger" myth and implies that child abusers cannot be "ordinary" men living in any family or neighbourhood. The National Probation Service in England and Wales is the main provider of community treatment programmes. There are three accredited sex offender treatment programmes and each probation area runs one of them. Twenty-seven prisons have treatment programmes for sex offenders, including one for women at Styal Prison, Manchester. A few health services also run programmes as does the NSPCC, in partnership with the probation service.

Research indicates that cognitive behavioural therapy is most successful in working with sex offenders. This involves teaching offenders to re-evaluate their attitudes to victims and offending, and providing them with behavioural controls to avoid further offending. Treatment programmes challenge an abuser's reluctance to accept responsibility for his behaviour, look at cycles of offending, relationships and attachment, self-management and interpersonal skills, the role of fantasy, victim empathy, prevention and lifestyle changes.

The Wolvercote Clinic was opened in 1995 by child protection charity the Lucy Faithfull Foundation. It offered a residential assessment service as well as a treatment programme for men with or without convictions for sex offences against children.

Donald Findlater, deputy director of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation and manager of the Wolvercote Clinic, says while the clinic's work is suspended the work done by his staff in managing and learning about sex offenders' behaviour will cease and "as a society we will be less well armed and less cautious". He feels the closure of Wolvercote is a child protection tragedy.

The year-long residential programme was more intense than any other treatment in the country, so the clinic accepted men assessed as high risk or of high deviance. Out of the 305 men who were assessed or treated, the clinic is aware of six who have been reconvicted of sexual offences.

But the Wolvercote has been operating for less than a decade, and Findlater is the first to admit this is not long enough to know what is really going on. Stephen Shute, professor of criminal law and criminal justice at the School of Law, University of Birmingham, agrees that a large group of child sex offenders need to be monitored over a long period of time to gauge whether there has been any treatment effect. But, in the UK there is little long-term research into reoffending or reconviction rates of child sex offenders following treatment, so whether treatment can permanently change behaviour is still unknown. However, there are optimistic results particularly in Canada where large-scale, long-term research found that well-designed cognitive behavioural therapy schemes reduce convictions by 40 per cent.

In the UK, the longest timescale covered by research is six years. In a follow-up of men undergoing probation-based treatment programmes, "a clear treatment effect was found" in that only 10 per cent of the men who were classified as benefiting from treatment were reconvicted after six years, compared with 23 per cent of men classified as not responding to treatment.¹

Shute and his colleagues recently carried out research for the Home Office on reconviction rates of sex offenders who had served long prison sentences.² It followed a sample of 192 sex offenders, 60 per cent of whom had committed offences against children. None of those imprisoned for an offence against children in their own family were reconvicted of a sex offence after six years. But more than a quarter who had committed a sexual offence against a child not in their family were reconvicted of another sexual crime.


Findlater is sceptical about these results. "Our experience is that many men do not stay put within the family. Out of 10 incest offenders, I would expect up to six to have committed offences outside the family. It does not mean they've been convicted of it."

Reconviction numbers over such a short timeframe will never tell the whole story, he says. Some men in the lower risk, lower deviance group may not have stopped, they may just not have been caught. Or, they may have put their offending behaviour on hold or be waiting for the next generation, their grandchildren, so they may not be caught for another 15 years.

Dave Matthews, acting children's services manager at the NSPCC Dove project in Derby, agrees: "We know that reconviction is not a full guide to reoffending. It's a largely hidden problem and we know that about 75 per cent of children who are abused don't tell anyone about it. It's about risk management. Knowing puts us in a better position to deal with it."

The project has run a treatment programme since 1993, but started running a Home Office-accredited community sex offender group work programme in partnership with the West Midlands probation service this year. Like the Wolvercote, it also has a risk assessment service.

Offenders undertake the programme either as a condition of a community sentence or as a condition of a post custody license. High-risk offenders undertake a 240-hour cognitive behavioural treatment programme and low-risk offenders a 100-hour programme. As a two-year course, it's too early to predict effectiveness, but Matthews says: "The more we know about what adults do that is abusive to children, the better able we are to protect them. That's why it's important to put this in a child protection perspective."

There is still a lot of uncertainty as to the effect that treatment programmes have on reconviction or reoffending rates. While it may work for some, others will be resistant to it. The difficulty is knowing the right ones to select, says Shute: "It should be an option, but the jury is still out - this is an area in which more research is called for."

Findlater says that the public's wish for child sex offenders to be locked up for life is unrealistic because only 23 offenders out of the whole prison population, which reached 72,000 this month, will not be let out. So surely treatment and monitoring play a vital role in protecting children.

Findlater adds: "If we can work with people who would have been in the community anyway, if we can reduce reconvictions, that's worth having surely."

Meanwhile, 11 more child sex offenders are now living in the community rather than in the secure confines of the Wolvercote Clinic. That doesn't sound like a very good child protection plan.

¹ Anthony Beech et al, Home Office Findings 144, 2001, from 020 7273 2084

² R Hood, S Shute et al, "Sex offenders emerging from long-term imprisonment", British Journal of Criminology, 42, 371-394, 2002