Understanding the behaviour of child sex offenders

Investigations into the sexual abuse of children are often all too common and can be challenging to deal with. In a bid to better understand the nature of this crime and the people who commit these offences, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre has recently launched the Behavioural Analysis Unit (BAU) – a specialist unit that provides intelligence support to forces dealing with investigations into serious sexual offences against children. Police Professional talks to Graham Hill, head of the BAU, about how the unit works. Saskia Welman reports.

“If you are working in child protection or child abuse investigation then you’ll know this: child sex offenders know no social, class or cultural boundaries, geographical locations or indeed, age or gender differences. You can’t tell from looking at someone if they have a sexual interest in children and without a doubt, the perception of the middle aged man in the dirty mac outside the school gates is an historical, if it were ever accurate, myth,” said Graham Hill, head of CEOP’s Behavioural Analysis Unit (BAU).

“Given all of this, how do we begin to recognise them? How do we start to understand what motivates a child sex offender to do what they do? Because if we don’t understand the threat, then how can we deal with it effectively?”

This is essentially the reason behind the creation of the BAU – to provide a focus for building as clear an intelligence picture as possible of offenders that sexually abuse children.

In order to do this, BAU analysts engage directly with convicted child sex abusers from within prison. Through recorded interviews, Mr Hill and his team of analysts are able to conduct a semi-structured interview with offenders. As they are all recorded, the BAU team can analyse these in slower time back at their offices in CEOP.

“We analyse information that is given to us directly from offenders,” said Mr Hill. “They will often talk about the motives behind their actions and how they carried out various aspects of their crimes, from ‘grooming’ children online to ascertaining more personal details from their victims, including geographical locations.”

Analysts listen to all of the information, deciphering useful intelligence from the wealth of knowledge that they gain, as well as any clues to certain aspects of sex offender behaviour.

“It is difficult to sit and listen to it all,” said Mr Hill. “And we’re not naïve enough to think that every offender is telling us the truth all of the time. Of course, they will minimise and justify their behaviour to a certain extent and in some cases they will talk the talk of therapy, but we have to be able to look through this and match this up with what we know about their crimes.

“We also know that the motivations and methods used by child sex offenders change all the time. The use of new technology, for example, impacts on the way offenders operate. It’s critical that our knowledge is up to date.”

Mr Hill is keen to stress that by agreeing to the interview, the offender does not receive any special treatment, ‘bargaining chip’, or any negotiation on jail terms. So why would an offender agree to the interview at all?

“They talk for a number of reasons,” said Mr Hill. “We give them an opportunity to put something back into the system and give them the reassurance that this material will only be used in a law enforcement context.”

Another issue that the unit has encountered is the amount of information that has been recorded. Literally thousands of hours of recordings need to be listened to in detail, yet only part of this is relevant to a BAU analyst.

“As an analyst, you could sit and listen to an offender talk for four hours, but actually perhaps only five minutes of the tape may be significant,” said Mr Hill.

However, there is no way of predicting when an offender will say something that is useful for analysis and therefore there is no way to shorten the process of assimilating intelligence; this is