ABSTRACT
This study tackles one of the key aspects of the criminal career, the age of onset. In criminology and related disciplines, age of onset has become an important theoretical concept with growing policy and practical implications for criminal justice decision making. We claim here that the age of onset, as measured with criminal justice data, provides a distorted view on the actual onset of offending. We further argue that age of onset based on official data of offending does not take into consideration the offender’s ability to avoid and/or delay detection. To illustrate this, we examine the onset of sex offending in adult male sex offenders. Official data, police data, and victim’s account were analyzed to compare and contrast the official and actual age of onset. On average, it was found that there is a gap of about seven years between actual and official age of onset in sex offending. For the most part, while the actual age of onset does not vary across sex offender types, it does for the official age of onset, suggesting differential investment in detection avoidance across offenders. Further, the findings show that close to 20% of sex offenders have already desisted or are in the process of desisting by the time they are first charged for their sex crime.
