Doctoral researcher, Zoe Stephenson (Centre for Forensic and Criminological Psychology) was an invited speaker in the symposium entitled Assessing Risk in Sexual Offenders at the Division of Forensic Psychology conference in Belfast in June. The aim of the presentation was to present research findings of a project commissioned by the Ministry of Justice into the Sequencing of interventions with violent and sexual offenders.
The research looked at the views of prisoners regarding the sequence in which they were required to participate in interventions and treatment programmes whilst in prison. Findings indicated that many prisoners do consider the sequence in which they participate in interventions to be of importance in terms of how effective interventions are as a whole in meeting their individual needs and, ultimately achieve behavioural change. Further projects have been conducted looking at the views of staff and looking at re-offending rates to ascertain the impact that the sequence in which interventions are delivered may have upon re-offending rates.