Test for Identifying Child Sex Offenders
Posted by: TheForensicNurse in Education, Forensic Nursing Terms, Prevention, Resources, Statistics, tags: Child Predators, Child Sexual Abuse, Prevention, The Diana ScreenChild Sex offenders can be exceptionally resourceful at finding ways to place themselves around children in settings that may allow them to abuse their position and sexually assault children.
While most agencies, and places of employment targeted toward children (like day care centers, foster child homes, etc) are mandated to conduct a background screening for past child sexual assault (or any sexual assaults for that that matter), this type of arrest history check is ineffective at stopping child predators.
A simple arrest record check in most cases will come back clean. Study statistics vary from study to study, but in general they indicate that less than 1-5% of child sex abusers have a prior criminal record. Unfortunately, most child sexual abusers have dozens of victims before they are ever arrested for their crimes.
But what if there was a way to help detect these people before allowing them to commit their crimes. While this may sound like a far fetched hollywood movie idea like “the Minority Report“, a company called Abel Screening claims to be able to do just that for detecting child sexual predators.
They call it The Diana Screen. This two part computerized test is used to determine the risk of the test-taker having sexually abused a child in the past. According to their website:
The Diana is a pass / fail test, it goes beyond a simple questionnaire to include objectively measured sexual interest in children. The technology that identifies sexual interest, which is a major part of The Diana Screen® formula, is empirically validated and has been used by therapists and criminal justice professionals more than 100,000 times.
The website further claims The Diana Screen®identifies over 50% of actual child sexual abusers.
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