MAPPA: the management of sex offenders

Since the early 1990s, sex offenders have presented a critical challenge to criminal justice agencies tasked with their effective and safe management in the community. As an offender type, they have been described as both ‘monstrous’ (McCartan 2004) and ‘predatory’ (Thomas 2005). As such they present significant reputational risk to criminal justice agencies should ‘something go wrong’. The 1990s in particular were characterised by an explosion in concerns with paedophilia, with ‘paedophile’ becoming a ‘household word’ – illustrated by a computer search of newspaper articles that revealed its use in ‘712 articles in six leading British newspapers’ in the first four months of 1998 (Cobley 2000: 2). This was against a backdrop of sexual offences constituting less than 1 per cent of all notifiable offences between 1998 and 1999 (Kemshall 2003: 87).