Protective Factors Related to Desistance in Sexual Offending: A Scoping Review

Although most offenders who have committed a sex crime will not reoffend, an excessive amount of attention has been paid to the process that leads a minority to commit a new offense. What are the protective factors that contribute to the absence of recidivism among most of these sex offenders? This scoping review provides an overview of the current state of the literature on desistance among sex offenders as well as a list of the empirically tested protective factors that contribute to it. Peer-reviewed articles and grey literature were retrieved through database searches and reference harvesting following the elaboration of an internal grid composed of approximately 20 keywords and specific inclusion criteria. Articles were included if the majority of each study’s sample had committed a sex offense, factors explaining desistance from sexual offending were explicitly addressed, and all participants in the various studies were still considered desistors at the time of our search. From a database of 6,556 articles published between 1985 and 2022, 26 studies were retained, and more than 150 different protective factors were identified and grouped into 32 distinct subcategories. Our analysis revealed that the selected studies conceptualize desistance differently and that this choice not only affects the protective factors identified but could also influence ideas about how to intervene with sex offenders.