Citation

Chopin J, Beauregard E. Child Abuse Negl. 2020; 106: e104521.

Affiliation

School of Criminology, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, British Columbia V5A 1S6, Canada. Electronic address: ebeauregard@sfu.ca.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.chiabu.2020.104521

PMID

32408021

Abstract

Over the last two decades, a number of empirical studies have shown that sex offenders behave in ways that are similar to other types of offenders, such as making rational decisions during the crime commission process (e.g., Harris, Smallbone, Dennison, & Knight, 2009; Lussier & Healey, 2009; Lussier, LeBlanc, & Proulx, 2005). The rational choice theory (Cornish & Clarke, 1986, 1987) assumes that an offender decides whether or not to commit a crime by weighing efforts, rewards, and costs involved in an alternative course of action. As a theoretical framework, this offers an interesting way to explain the perpetration of sexual assault by child abusers and also to better understand how these offenders’ make decisions throughout the crime commission process. For example, child sexual abusers will make a series of decisions during the commission of their crime, such as selecting an appropriate victim, choosing a location to interact with this victim, and determining how to exit the crime Moreover, these decisions are led by a cost- benefit analysis that is weighted both by the ability of offenders to maximize the payoffs and to minimize the costs associated with the crime commission (Beauregard, Leclerc, & Lussier, 2012; Chopin & Caneppele, 2019b; Leclerc, Proulx, & Beauregard, 2009; Leclerc, Wortley, & Smallbone, 2011; Leclerc, Smallbone, & Wortley, 2013; Leclerc, Chiu, & Cale, 2016). Thus, the rational choice perspective offers a systematic way to understand child sexual abusers based on patterns of decision-making throughout the crime commission process.

The crime script, based on the rational choice theory and developed by Cornish (1994), is an analytical framework aptly suited to investigate the set of decisions made during a crime. The purpose of the crime script is to break down the crime commission process into several distinct steps. This process allows for a more nuanced understanding of the different phases of a crime and provides a better understanding of the offenders’ decision-making, which in turn, can be used to adopt appropriate situational crime prevention strategies. Crime script analysis is fairly common in the criminological literature, however, studies focused exclusively on child sexual abuse (CSA) are scarce (Dehghanniri & Borrion, 2019)...

Language: en