This book is the first UK publication on circles of support and accountability (COSA) and their development in the UK over the past decade. A circle comprises a group of volunteers – trained and supervised – who provide structured support to a child sex offender in the community, and hold him to account for his behaviour. As the book states, COSA have at their heart a philosophy of restorative justice in which all people within a community are of equal importance, with an emphasis on healthy relationships and mutual responsibility.
Chapter one sets out the history of COSA, from its inception in the early 1990s by the Canadian Mennonites (a faith-based community) to its support by Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) and the Ministry of Justice in the UK in recent years. Chapter two provides some information about child sex offenders, their characteristics and motivation, as well as some detail about treatment approaches. Chapter three touches on public attitudes towards sex offenders and current community arrangements such as MAPPA. The book truly finds its feet with chapters four and five, which provide much more detail regarding the principles of COSA, the model of care and the way in which it is delivered; detailed interviews with four ‘core members’ (child sex offenders) and four volunteers are engrossing and illuminating. Chapter six devotes itself to the question of effectiveness and evaluation, for which there is some empirical evidence, albeit somewhat constrained by small sample sizes and low base rates for reoffending in sex offenders. The book concludes – arguably, in a rather random fashion – with a discussion of the role of the media in reflecting and influencing public attitudes regarding child sex offenders.
The book explicitly targets the interested lay person as its primary audience, and in doing so, achieves an easy conversational style and a refreshing absence of jargon throughout. Certainly, the intelligent public and the non-specialist professional (perhaps police or local authority staff) will find both the COSA model and this book interesting and informative. It is less successful as a basic text for learning about child sex offenders and their wider management, but to be fair, this is not its primary purpose. My own view is that the child sex offender accounts were well judged and sensitively portrayed, and would certainly provide a non-sensationalist and balanced glimpse of the emotionally complex world of the child sex offender which would be instructive to all professionals developing their understanding in this area of work.
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