Afterword

It has been a decade since the first edition of this book came out. Some important progress has been made in our understanding of pedophilia, hebephilia, and sexual offending against children.

This edition reinforces the distinction between sexual attraction and behavior, where what researchers know about one group cannot be assumed to apply to another group.
Definitions and classifications need to be carefully considered. Indeed, one of the biggest areas of progress since the first edition is research on non-offending persons with pedophilia or hebephilia and with individuals who have sexually offended but are not known to authorities.

At the same time, it is still the case that most of what is known is based on WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) men, with encouraging advances but much more work to be done with women, juveniles, and non-WEIRD societies (…).

Another major change since the first edition, partially captured in my 2013 book on Internet sexual offending, is the migration of sexual offending (and so much else in modern society) to online platforms. Important policy and practice issues to address include the extent to which online offending differs from offline offending in terms of origins, risk to reoffend, and intervention. It is unfortunate that the understanding of incest offending has not advanced very much; I hope that the chapter in this edition spurs interest in further research on this form of offending.

Risk assessment continues to make important advances, including recent research on the discrimination versus calibration of existing measures, whether combining risk measures can be warranted; the development of new tools, such as the Child Pornography Offender Risk Tool and JSOAP-II and revised Estimated Risk of Adolescent Sexual Offense Recidivism for juveniles, and growing interest in the translation of risk information to practice through risk communication and analysis of decision making. Low recidivism rates found for certain offender groups, including child-pornography-only offenders and female sex offenders, suggest the development of offender-specific tools for these populations will be challenging.

Last, this decade has seen advances in treatment in terms of identifying potential moderators of treatment effects in evaluation studies (…), evidence that RNR [Risk-Need-Responsivity] is an important and relevant framework, and more integration with general evidence-based criminal justice interventions.

The field seems to have moved from a vigorous debate about whether sex offender treatment works at all to more fine-rained questions about what forms of treatment, for who, and under what conditions. This does not negate the many questions regarding assessment and treatment for different juveniles.

I hope this book is a useful starting point for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in setting an agenda for further work on these important topics. I am looking forward to the next decade of progress.