Profiling the sexually abusive behaviour of men with intellectual disabilities

Of a total of 120 men with intellectual disabilities who were referred for sex education, 75 had allegedly perpetrated some form of sexual abuse. Presented here is a statistical analysis of the offences that these men committed and the responses they received. The most common victims are shown to be people with intellectual disabilities, women staff, children and women in the general public. Variation is found between the nature of the offences across victim groups, with people with intellectual disabilities being on the receiving end of the most serious forms of assault. Seriousness of the assaults was also found to be dependent on the ability of the perpetrator. The responses to the men were not found to be correlated with the nature of the sexual abuse but to whom was abused: the abuse of children and women in the general public giving rise to the strongest responses. Protection of victims from subsequent abuse was also related to this specific variable: here people with intellectual disabilities and women staff gained the least protection. Attempts to isolate predictive factors of abusive behaviour proved unsuccessful. For example, abusers and non-abusers within the sample had experienced sexual abuse themselves at similar rates. The study draws attention to the high proportion of men receiving intellectual disability services who appear not to have intellectual disabilities and the poor level of risk management of men with histories of sexually abusing.