Criminal Law
Sexual violence is a crucial public health concern today. With the efforts to reduce the crime, legislators passed regulatory laws for reducing and convicting the offenders (Jewkes, Sen, & Garcia-Moreno, 2002). The year 2007 was recorded the year when the rate at which sexual violence rose to an alarming ceiling (Greenfeld, 2007). Various states entered into cooperative agreements aiming at building and enhancing the capacity to prevent sexual violence from primarily happening by avoiding first-time perpetration and victimization. For instance, various nations with collaboration with their Department of Health entered into a universal agreement with other Cooperative Agencies in order to: a) develop personal, organizational and societal dimensions for prevention through the use of effective prevention measures, b) execution of the principles of and an assessment of the prevention measures and programs implemented as part of sexual crime reduction and, c) develop a broad statewide sexual violence reduction strategy that uses public health method to support an inclusive prevention program. However, the rate of sexual offenses negligible reduced. This paper aims at developing and proposing a plan that reviews a data related to the incidences of sexual offenses, and prevalence of sexual violence. The plan will include the crime of sexual offenses, review some current laws and programs, present the most effective proposed plan for its reduction and finally give a description of the strategy’s pros and cons.
Introduction
A crime prevention strategy is one of the key components of the national security policy that aims at reducing global crime, eliminating the offenders and the pathological phenomena. Sexual crime prevention refers to an offensive measure to combat sexual violence crime. The incidence of sexual occurrences in the US is worrying. According to statistics (Greenfeld, 2007), around 250000 women and girls are raped and sexually abused, and nearly 2 million are challenged with unwanted sexual activity every year. Moreover, it is approximated that nearly 800000 children undergo abuse every year, and approximately 10% are sexually assaulted. Undisputedly, the mental and physical ordeal the survivors of sexual abuse goes through makes it more than just a criminal offense but rather a public health worry too. As ascertained by Black et al., (2011) and concurred by Krug et al., (2002), for the last 15 years, various legislation, and laws have been implemented to focus on the assault reduction. However, the effectiveness of these laws in sex crime prevention is still debatable.
Sex Crime Legislations and Programs
As the rate of sexual assault increased since the 1990s concurrently, the local, federal and state legislators passed the Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act and Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children act in a pursuit of reducing the frequency of sexual crimes. The two acts of law were passed to assist the law enforcement officials to trace the criminals and hence supposedly reduce the possibility that they would fall back (Lewis, 1996).
On 27th of July, 2007, President George W. Bush signed the Adam Walsh Protection Act (AWA). The act was a federal legislation that was passed with the aim of registering state requirements in regards to the spiteful occurrences by the vehement predators of sexual violence. The initial chapter of AWA – Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act – focused on ensuring that the nation is provided with a minimum registration and community notification measure in their urge of controlling the registered sexual offenders (Caldwell, Ziemke, & Vitacco, 2008).
However, it is still complicated to make constructive conclusions about the rate at which the sex criminals repeat their crimes, besides the clear idea that most sexual crimes go unreported or solved. According to Lee et al., (2007), the rate of sexual crimes are higher now than ever, given that it is hard to operationalize because there are no formal steps for reporting sexually based crimes with forcible rape an exception. These laws and programs may be limited by their emphasis on the prevention of sexual victimizations, especially by strangers.
The Social and Ecological Framework
I propose a Social and Ecological Framework that regards the difficulty in the interaction between a person’s behavior, relationship, the public and the societal factors. I propose this framework because it provides the fundamentals that address the elements that put the people into the threat for undergoing the sexual offense (McArthur, & Baron, 1983). The crucial belief of the framework emanates from the fact that human behavior never happens in a vacuum, and thus theoretically, the behavior is a complicated relationship between the person, their families and relatives, and their societies (Margalef, 1968).
This framework instills a prevention strategy that involves a range of tasks that displays its distinct levels. These tasks should, therefore, be developmentally appropriate and steered across the lifetime. This strategy is more probable than any single intervention to maintain sexual prevention determinations over a duration of time.
The qualities and levels of this framework are elaborated below:
- The person’s behaviors are believed to be biological and thus involves personal past experience factors that incline and increases the probability for the person to be a victim or offender.
- Relationship’s impacts are the elements that incline and increases the threat resulting from the relationships with their peers, close partners and family, and The individual’s closest circle of people may influence the person’s range of existence and behavior.
- Public’s impacts are the elements that increase the risk regarding the community and the social environment. The community and environment also include the person’s experiences with learning institutions, workstations and quarters.
- Societal factor’s impacts are the largest – the macro level elements, that influences sexual assault involving religious belief systems, societal norms and standards, gender inequality, and social, economic and political programs that develop and maintains tensions amid groups.
How the Framework Operates
The framework operates through a prevention model called a Spectrum that develops the goals and objectives of the plan. The Spectrum offers a strategy for reasoning through certain sets of preventive methods and displays that the avoidance of sexual crime needs more than just a single strategy, according to Protection and Safety Act (2006). The prevention determinations need to simultaneously occur on all levels as the Spectrum proposes in the table below.
| Enhancing Societal Education | Can be achieved by reaching out to the public with the information and resources that are leveled to preventing sexual crime and thus promotes safety. |
| Enhancing Individual Skills and Knowledge | Can be achieved through establishing people’s ability to prevent crime and promote societal safety. |
| Enlightening Providers | Can be achieved through educating the providers of individual skills and knowledge awareness initiative to the public and model positive principles. |
| Adjusting Safe Organizational Practices | Can be achieved through adopting various regulations and modeling organizational principles to curb sexual crime and thus enhance safety in workstations. |
| Influencing Laws and Legislations | Can be achieved through governmental urge of enacting laws and legislations steered towards supporting safe community norms and a sexual violence-free community. |
| Nurturing Coalitions and Networks | Can be achieved by putting together individuals and groups with the aim of broadening goals and objectives of the society. |
The above Spectrum involves measures and strategies that develop a comprehensive approach to accountability for every crime. The plan involves a user- friendly approach to planning, executing, assessing and sustaining societal norms and principles that tend to focus on evaluation and continuous improvement (Stokols, 1996).
The Pros and Cons of the Framework
The proposed plan is regarded an effective approach to reducing sexual crime as it involves a diversity of skills and knowledge and, communities and agencies in collaboratively working in nurturing a safe community for all. The plan incorporates the state law in coming to terms with the community in strategizing on the prevention of sex offenses. It also enhances educational outreach in every part of the country if adopted in various learning institutions, making a primary goal in prevention. The plan also ensures that sexual violence prevention capacity is actively engrossed.
However, the plan lacks general adequacy of understanding of the term primary prevention, which statistics (Krug, 2002) proves that prevention is certainly overlapped with intervention for too long. There is also lack of sufficient resources, tools, and strategies in primary prevention. The plan also incorporates the significance that there exists a low degree of knowledge of how to appropriately execute the framework plan.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, the past and recent policies enacted to curb the cases of sexual crime has just resulted in the development of laws that are backed with firm evidence base deficiencies. Certain research has also instigated many questions of how the laws and legislation tend to bring light to this phenomena. The proposed provides the fundamentals that address the elements that put the people into the threat for undergoing the sexual offense. Its implementation will surely shed the light and offer additional assistance to the elimination of victims of sexual violence.
References
Black, M. C., Basile, K. C., Breiding, M. J., Smith, S. G., Walters, M. L., Merrick, M. T., & Stevens, M. R. (2011). The national intimate partner and sexual violence survey: 2010 summary report. Atlanta, GA: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 19, 39-40.
Caldwell, M. F., Ziemke, M. H., & Vitacco, M. J. (2008). An examination of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act as applied to juveniles: Evaluating the ability to predict sexual recidivism. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 14(2), 89.
Greenfeld, L. A. (2007). Sex offenses and offenders: An analysis of data on rape and sexual assault (pp. i-39). Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs.
Jewkes, R., Sen, P., & Garcia-Moreno, C. (2002). Sexual violence.
Lee, D. S., Guy, L., Perry, B., Sniffen, C. K., & Mixson, S. A. (2007). Sexual violence prevention. The Prevention Researcher, 14(2), 15-20.
Lewis, C. L. (1996). The Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act: An unconstitutional deprivation of the right to privacy and substantive due process. Harv. CR-CLL Rev., 31, 89.
Margalef, R. (1968). Perspectives in ecological theory.
McArthur, L. Z., & Baron, R. M. (1983). Toward an ecological theory of social perception. Psychological review, 90(3), 215.
Protection, A. W. C. (2006). Safety Act of 2006. Public law, (109-248).
Stokols, D. (1996). Translating social ecological theory into guidelines for community health promotion. American journal of health promotion, 10(4), 282-298.
Krug, E. G., Mercy, J. A., Dahlberg, L. L., & Zwi, A. B. (2002). The world report on violence and health. The lancet, 360(9339), 1083-1088.