this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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I've seen that debunked as a myth, so we shouldn't be so confident. A quick web search reveals a review of crime statistics finding lower than average recidivism rates & a comprehensive overview of the scientific literature finding the older studies that drew your conclusion to be fundamentally flawed & the concept of a base rate of sexual recidivism to be built on sand (unfounded assumptions driven by biased pseudoscience & government pressure rather than science). The latter includes gems like
It also points out that the definition of sexual offense is a moving target since research began, especially with conduct that was an offense before & is now legal.
Huh, well I took criminology in 2006 so I guess I'm out of date on that. I'm glad it's not as bad as expected; I still think the US in particular has a long way to go in regards to rehabilitation.
It's also strangely cultural, where it seems that some countries have substantially lower rates of offenders and others much higher. It just seems like the systems here perpetuate the crimes in a way; like the abuse of children is this curse inherent to capitalistic christian patriarchy.
The key word here is predator. Not everyone who commits a sex offence is a predator. You can be convicted of a sex crime for public urination.
A sexual predator is pretty much a serial offender by definition. So the claim that these people would have high recidivism rates should not be surprising.
Not much of one. Is there a reliable scientific definition for it & is there good quality scientific research supporting your claim that isn't outdated?
If your definition of predator is tautological (eg, those highly likely to reoffend), then why limit your argument to only sexual predators?
As pointed out by the comprehensive overview linked before, a problem with your claim is that there is no static & fixed propensity to reoffend even when narrowed by type of offense. The idea of a static & fixed propensity first began to unravel when researchers noticed risk to reoffend vary with offender age
Then they noticed rates vary by their developmental periods
Examining dynamic aspects of human lives led researchers to reconsider
Newer research finds these dynamic risk factors affect the rate of sexual recidivism, which can reach quite low, so it isn't simply a fixed, static rate.
Predicting who will be a sexual recidivist (if that concept is scientifically valid) isn't straightforward, so a tautological definition of predator doesn't get us far.
It wasn’t my argument. You originally replied to someone else. I think the statement is almost a tautology.