Child sexual abuse in youth‑oriented organisations: Tapping into situational crime prevention from the offender's perspective

Abstract

How to prevent child sexual abuse in youth-oriented organisations is a concern in our society for a number of reasons. One of these is that evidence indicates that sexual offenders, once they are recruited by a youth-oriented organisation, have the opportunity to abuse children for years before being detected and/or arrested. This phenomenon is also under intense media scrutiny, which is likely to lead parents and society in a direction of panic. In the tradition of offender-based research, and using a sample of 23 Canadian adult sex offenders who offended in a youth-oriented organisation (e.g., schools), we examined self-reported data from a situational crime prevention perspective. We specifically focused on information provided by offenders on three dimensions: (1) how to identify potential offenders during recruitment interviews; (2) what policies or regulations to implement in youth-oriented organisations to prevent child sexual abuse; and, (3) what parents could do to reduce the risk of sexual victimisation of their children. Then, the 25 situational prevention measures table is adopted to provide an organisational framework to map out suggestions made by offenders to inform prevention.