Sex Offender Treatment Services Collaborative - Intellectual Disability
SOTSEC-ID is a collaborative group of professionals engaged in providing group treatment to men with intellectual disabilities who are at risk of sexual offending. Initially this group involved professionals from south-east England, but interest is now from across the UK, in Ireland, and other parts of Europe, as well as further afield, like New Zealand, Australia and Japan.
The core group exists in order to provide:
- A forum within which clinicians who are treating this client group may discuss the treatment issues and ethical issues, which this type of work raises.
- Appropriate basic training for treatment group facilitators, and dissemination of the SOTSEC-ID cognitive behaviour treatment (CBT) approach for this client group.
- SOTSEC-ID also arranges occasional seminars and conferences, on cognitive behaviour group treatment for sex offenders and related topics.
- A data set of sufficient size to allow a valuable test of the effectiveness of CBT for this client group (new data is not currently being collected).
A research grant from the Department of Health was awarded to the convenors of SOTSEC-ID, Professor Glynis Murphy and Neil Sinclair, to evaluate this form of treatment for men with intellectual disabilities at risk of sexual offending in the early 2000s. Further funding was provided by the Baily Thomas Foundation. The report to the DoH at the end of the grant is available from this website. Published papers have appeared in JIDR and in JARID. These papers are available to download from the research page.
SOTSEC-ID currently runs facilitator training events in London, which take place over three days and are relevant to clinicians working with men with intellectual disabilities and/or autism who have harmful sexual behaviour. Details of our next training event can be found on our events page. A treatment manual has been developed to provide a common framework for treatment with this group of clients. The treatment manual provides some assurance of standardisation and model fidelity for comparative research purposes. It is provided alongside the training.