Hostels provide sex offenders with haven from truth says academic

A Yorkshire academic has found that informal networking between sex offenders, including paedophiles, is taking place among people released on licence from prison to Probation Service hostels.

Dr Carla Reeves, a criminology lecturer at Huddersfield University, says this is an “unintended consequence” of a policy which concentrates the offenders in hostels well away from schools or areas with large numbers of children.

She is calling for new strategies and training to ensure that sex offenders do not rejoin society without challenging their behaviour. Her findings follow two years of research observing social groups at a hostel where high-risk offenders spend several months on licence after being released from prison. Some 75 per cent of the inmates had committed sexual offences, against either adults or children. She said: “The policy is totally understandable, because it is about keeping children safe, but it does mean that large numbers of sex offenders end up being accommodated together in one place and this has an unintended consequence.”

Although the hostel inmates had treatment groups outside of these times they developed informal social networks. Dr Reeves added: “It was a negative process. They developed a supportive attitude, telling each other that what they had done wasn’t really wrong or wasn’t that bad, that at least they weren’t taking drugs and being violent.”