The development and piloting of internet sex offender risk assessment within Cleveland Police

The aim of the proposed research project is to use research surrounding evidence-based policing and offender desistance policing to enable a risk assessment to be used specifically with internet sex offenders (ISO) to be developed and piloted by Cleveland Police.

The Active Risk Management System (ARMS), alongside the RM2000 (Thornton et al, 2003) is currently used within Cleveland Police to assess reoffending. However, there is as of yet no risk assessment tool developed specifically for internet sex offenders (Henry, 2014). The current research therefore aims to adapt the ARMS, making it more suitable for the internet sex offender group.

There has been shown to be many differences between internet sex offenders and contact sex offenders, which supports the need for its own adapted risk assessment. Some research suggests that most internet sex offenders would be considered of low risk, due to no concrete link found between internet and contact, as well as internet offenders being reported to have achieved lower scores on sexualized attitudes towards children, emotional congruence with children and empathy distortions with regard to victims of child abuse. Hence, although they exhibited the kinds of general personality problems exhibited by other sex offenders, they did not support attitudes that explicitly endorse or condone the sexual abuse of children (Bates & Metcalf, 2007). However, the ideology that internet sex offenders are mostly low risk is not evidence-based, and therefore the development of this risk assessment will provide an evidence-based approach towards assessing risk in this offender group.