Staff attributions towards men with intellectual disability who have a history of sexual offending and challenging behaviour.
Secure staff view sexual offending by men with ID as fixed and out of the man's control, so replace that belief with data-driven assessment and skill teaching.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Matson et al. (2009) asked secure-service staff why men with mild intellectual disability commit sexual offences. They also asked how staff view ordinary challenging behaviour from the same clients. Staff filled out a short survey that rated each behaviour on cause, stability, and control.
What they found
Staff saw sexual offending as more outside the man's control than challenging behaviour. They thought the cause was stable and unlikely to change. The more serious the offence, the more staff felt it could happen again and could not be stopped.
How this fits with other research
van Vugt et al. (2011) looked at moral reasoning in teenage sex offenders with ID. They found the teens judged right and wrong at a lower level than peers without ID. The two studies seem to clash: one says staff view the act as uncontrollable, the other says the youth show immature moral thought. The gap closes when you note the 2009 paper studied adult men, while the 2011 paper studied adolescents. Age and setting explain the different lenses.
Poppes et al. (2010) built a risk-assessment tool that includes changeable environmental items. Their tool treats some risk factors as movable, which contrasts with the fixed view held by staff in Matson et al. (2009). Using the tool may help staff see more room for intervention.
May (2011) argues that aggression can feed itself through automatic reinforcement. If staff already see sexual behaviour as uncontrollable, they may miss automatic pay-offs that keep it alive. Combining both insights pushes you to test for sensory or internal rewards before deciding a behaviour is unchangeable.
Why it matters
If you supervise adults with ID in residential or forensic settings, check your own language. Calling a behaviour 'uncontrollable' can become a self-fulfilling label. Use data sheets to track what happens right before and after an incident. Share those data at team meetings so everyone sees what can be shaped, not just what must be contained.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Staff working within secure services for people with intellectual disabilities (ID) are likely to work with sexual offenders, but very little attention has been paid to how they think about this sexual offending behaviour. METHOD: Forty-eight staff working within secure services for people with ID were recruited and completed the Attribution Style Questionnaire in relation to the sexual offending behaviour and challenging behaviour of men with mild ID. Attributions towards challenging behaviour and sexual offending were compared and relationships between level of ID and seriousness of the sexual offence were explored. RESULTS: The results indicated that staff attributed sexual offending as more external to the staff group than they did for challenging behaviour. Sexual offending behaviour was also seen as more stable, and less controllable by people with ID than was challenging behaviour. Sexual offending was also attributed as more uncontrollable by the staff group than challenging behaviour. There was a significant negative correlation between general intellectual functioning and several attributional dimensions regarding sexual offending, but not challenging behaviour. Sexual offending that was coded as more serious was attributed as universal and uncontrollable by the staff group. CONCLUSIONS: The differences between staff attributions regarding challenging behaviour and sexual offending potentially relate to the decision-making processes involved in deciding whether or not to involve criminal justice agencies when someone with ID commits a sexual offence. Further research within this area is warranted.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2009 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2009.01194.x