Circles of Support and Accountability: Engaging Community Volunteers in the Management of High‐Risk Sexual Offenders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: The release to the community of a sexual offender is frequently accompanied by intense coverage in the news media. Too often, the type of coverage these releases receive serves only to force many offenders into hiding or out of one community and into another. Forced to move to another community, the scapegoating process starts all over again. It is well known that secrecy and isolation are critical elements in sexual offending behaviour. Thus, forcing offenders into hiding does nothing to increase community safety or offender accountability and, arguably, increases the risk that new victims will be created. The most problematic releases are those in which sexual offenders arrive in a community with few or no links, and with little access to appropriate treatment and supervisory services. This article outlines a restorative approach to the risk management of high‐risk sexual offenders in Canada using professionally‐facilitated volunteerism. The Circles of Support and Accountability model grew out of an ad hoc, faith‐based response to a situation much like that described above in South‐Central Ontario, Canada. The resultant pilot project has since reached its twelfth anniversary and the model has proliferated both nationally and internationally.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".