Risk assessment of child-pornography-exclusive offenders.

Abstract

Objectives: A sizeable percentage of federally sentenced child pornography offenders have no history of other criminal offenses (hereinafter "child-pornography-exclusive offenders"). There is a critical legal need to assess the recidivism risk of this population. The Child Pornography Offender Risk Tool (CPORT) is a commonly used actuarial instrument developed specifically to assess the risk of recidivism among child pornography offenders.

Hypotheses: We hypothesized that there would be a sound scientific basis supporting the use of the CPORT in the United States as well as research demonstrating its applicability to child-pornography-exclusive offenders, given that the instrument is currently being used in forensic settings.

Method: We critically examined all of the existing empirical studies that constitute the research base of the CPORT.

Results: The empirical studies of the CPORT suffer from at least three significant limitations: extremely small samples of recidivists, inordinate amounts of missing data, and potentially outdated samples. Further, none of the studies have tested the CPORT in a sample of offenders in the United States. An illustrative example of how the instrument has been misapplied in forensic settings and courtroom testimony is provided.

Conclusions: These issues make it inappropriate to use the CPORT on child-pornography-exclusive offenders in the United States at this time. We conclude by describing avenues for future research that can advance our understanding of this distinct and growing population of offenders. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).