Investigating the impact of the Covid-19 outbreak on stranger sex offender behaviour and victim vulnerability

In times of crisis, we know that offenders continue to commit crimes, and do so in a manner afforded by the new context (Thornton & Voigt, 2012). Sex offenders are versatile (Lovell et al., 2019), and change their offending behaviour in accordance with the opportunity to offend (Woodhams & Komarzynska, 2014). The Covid-19 outbreak is a crisis that will alter offender behaviour, as well as who is vulnerable to sexual violence and in what circumstances. Our research is highly urgent because, in the UK and internationally, the police and other stakeholders need to know now how to protect people from new vulnerabilities to sexual violence created by Covid-19, and support those victimised. Sexual violence is a shadow pandemic that should be a key priority in planning a Covid-19 response (UN Women, 2020). We are in a unique position to fill this research gap, documenting the 'who, what, when, where and how' of stranger sexual offending (Leclerc et al. 2016), pre-, peri-(and potentially, post-) Covid-19, and across shorter time-periods defined by differing local/national restrictions. Our project partner, the Serious Crime Analysis Section (SCAS) of the National Crime Agency, has a unique, large dataset of serious stranger sex offences that will be subject to repeated, multi-level analyses using our complementary expertise in analytical techniques from the social and engineering sciences. As well as being of urgent relevance to stakeholders, our research will bring new insights to the sparse literature on situational crime prevention and sexual offending (Chiu et al., 2020).