Assessing the Risk of Australian Indigenous Sexual Offenders Reoffending: A Review of the Research Literature and Court Decisions.

The assessment of offenders' risk of reoffending, particularly sexual reoffending, is a core activity of forensic mental health practitioners. The purpose of these assessments is to reduce the risk of harm to the public, but they are controversial and become more contentious when Australian practitioners who want to undertake such assessments in an ethically responsible way must use reliable validated instruments, disclose the limitations of their assessment methods, instruments and data to judicial decision-makers and understand how decision-makers might use their reports. The purpose of this systematic literature review was to explore the practices of Australian practitioners and courts in respect of the assessment of Australian Indigenous male sexual offenders' risk of reoffending. We could not identify an instrument that has been developed for the assessment of this population group. Australian courts differ in whether they admit and give weight to practitioners' evidence and opinions based on data obtained with non-validated instruments. We could only identify three possible predictor variables with enough quantitative support to justify including them in an instrument that could be used to assess Indigenous sexual offenders. There is a need for research regarding the validity of the instruments that practitioners use.

Forensic Experts' Perspectives on Australian Indigenous Sexual Offenders and Factors Important in Evaluating the Risk of Recidivism.

Law and ethics require that risk assessment should be cross-culturally valid and fair, but Australian research in this regard is underdeveloped. A logical first step in progressing the work required to build a strong evidence base on culturally sensitive risk assessment in Australia is to determine the expert views of those in the field. We interviewed 13 Australian evaluators who assess Indigenous sexual offenders' recidivism risk to determine their perceptions of the risk assessment instruments they use and the attributes they believe evaluators doing cross-cultural assessments should have. Our central findings are that evaluators use the available instruments because they believe that the same factors predict sexual recidivism for Indigenous and non-Indigenous offenders, but that they do so cautiously knowing the limitations of the instruments. Evaluators nevertheless want more research data to guide them when they use the available instruments to assess people from cultures that differ from those of people in the normative sample. Participants acknowledge that the unique challenges of assessing Indigenous sexual offenders require non-Indigenous evaluators to be culturally competent and confident. These findings should be valuable to evaluators and those who train or supervise evaluators and/or intend to establish or improve the validity of risk instruments in Australia.