A meta-analysis of recidivism rates among individuals who commit child sexual exploitation material (CSEM) offending
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
A critical challenge for managing individuals with Child Sexual Exploitation Material (CSEM) offenses is addressing their risk of sexual recidivism, especially contact sexual offending. We report on a meta-analysis of 30 non-overlapping samples (total N = 25,978), with 26 samples identifying CSEM index offenses and subsequent recidivism using official sources (e.g., charges) and four samples identifying CSEM offenses and subsequent recidivism using self-report. Individuals with CSEM offenses based on official sources showed a fixed-effect recidivism rate of 5.9 % any sexual (95 % CI = [5.6, 6.3], k [studies] = 21, N = 19,112), 1.5 % contact sexual (95 % CI = [1.4, 1.7], k = 20, N = 18,543), and 4.1 % CSEM (95 % CI = [3.8, 4.4], k = 21, N = 13,522), after an average of 5-year follow-up. Based on official sources, the odds of contact sexual offenses among Mixed individuals (CSEM plus contact sexual offending) are 16 times higher than CSEM-Exclusive individuals (exclusively CSEM offenses in their sexual offending history) at 8.8 % versus 0.6 % (OR = 15.99), respectively. There were several other significant moderators: National sources of official recidivism data produced higher rates than local sources ( Q ∆ = 58.1, p < .0001, df = 1); official recidivism had lower rates than self-reported recidivism ( Q ∆ = 232.2, p < .0001, df = 1); longer follow-ups were associated with higher rates, unstandardized B = 0.01, Z = 75.8, p < .001; and more recent studies showed higher rates, unstandardized B = 0.002, Z = 68.0, p < .001. This meta-analysis establishes new recidivism base rates for individuals with CSEM offenses, which can be used to inform risk-driven policies and practices.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 it