ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a comprehensive framework for preventing sexual crimes. It summarizes research findings on sexual offenders, their victims, and the settings in which sexual crimes occur. The chapter describes the public health model, which was originally conceived for the purposes of disease prevention, but has increasingly also been applied to a wide range of social problems. It suggests that universal prevention can also include place-based prevention. The chapter outlines a range of potential prevention strategies, illustrating how our proposed prevention matrix can be used to organise a comprehensive approach in terms of key targets across different levels of prevention. Sexual offenders are generally adolescent and adult males. Victims of sexual crimes are generally women and children. Sexual crimes occur in four general types of setting: domestic settings, organisational settings, public settings, and ‘virtual’ settings. The prevention matrix may be used by governments to map existing programmes and to identify gaps or areas requiring greater attention.
