5: Social work assessment of sex offenders

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The assessment of those who sexually offend has developed during the previous decades, with ever-increasing methods, technologies and approaches designed to ensure that we are able to respond effectively to this damaging behaviour, thus preventing further harm to victims. In seeking to understand how this behaviour came about and to formulate plans for managing it, some differences have developed from the more usual social work approaches to assessment. This is partly due to the dominance of this area by psychology, as discussed earlier in the book, but is also due to an understandably increased focus on ‘risk’. There is a difference in assessing someone who has sexually assaulted a child to assessing someone who requires an adaptation to their home due to their physical impairment, not least the different feelings both generate, but there are also some similarities, which we will explore. Clearly, the key questions when assessing someone who has sexually offended are: ‘Are they going to do it again?’ and ‘What will it take to prevent them doing it again?’ (Shlonsky and Wagner, 2005). In this chapter, we look at current social work approaches to assessment and how they might engage with sexual offending. We look at the development of specialist assessment tools and protocols for sexual offenders and discuss how these are located within particular ways of thinking that direct practice. Risk assessment is identified and the need for approaches that recognise and respond to complexity is highlighted.

Assessment is a key task and activity of social work and social workers as they are required to seek to understand the circumstances of those that they are working with in order to intervene in ways that are helpful to the individual and society.

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