Re: Male vs Female Abuse towards children

[dick sobsey <dick.sobsey@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Andrew:

I partly agree with your criticism of considering time spent in caregiving
in assessing relative risk and I partly disagree.

 The fact is that we do know that opportunity and time spent in contact
with children does factor into risk, but it is not the only variable. It
would be wrong to adjust risk on the basis of contact minute for minute but
it would be equally wrong to ignore contact as a factor. People living in
prison for example who have no contact with children do not abuse them.

Similarly, if we compared people who have no chidlren with people who have
children we would find that people who have them are more like to abuse
children than people who don't. Unless we recognize the role of opportunity
or contact, we would have to conclude that people who don't have children
would be less abusive than those who do.

Taking that to an extreme we might conclude that all the wrong people have
children, take them away from their parents and give them to people who are
not parents.  Even though it may seem sometimes like all the wrong people
DO have children, it would be an unfair comparison. Therefore you can't
discount time spent with children in determining risk.

The babysitter situation provides another example, boys are much less
likely to babysit. This does not mean that they are lower risk, and a few
will find victims in other ways. In my view there are two kinds of
offenses. Some offenders plan and organize offenses. They seek out victims
and make their own opportunities. Contact time has little to do with these
offense unless it is reduced to zero.

The other offenses are unplanned and unorganized. These people succumb to
temptation or lose control  or use bad judgement or whatever.  The risk for
these offenses is probably pretty proportional to contact time. In my
experience these offenders and their offenses are more common and so I
believe that contact time remains important even when the two groups are
lumped together.

dick

Dick Sobsey, Director
JP Das Developmental Disabilities Centre
University of Alberta
6-123 Education North
Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2G5  Canada
phone: (780) 492-3755
fax: (780) 492-1318
dick.sobsey@ualberta.ca