The Potential Role of Recovery Capital in Stopping Sexual Offending: Lessons from Circles of Support and Accountability to Enrich Practice

Abstract

The rehabilitation and reintegration of people who have committed sexual offences presents significant challenges. Current research and practice on desistance from offending behaviour discusses a harm reduction journey that is more multifaceted than the concept of social capital; it is, in fact, closer to recovery capital. This paper discusses how the framework of recovery capital is also useful in the rehabilitation and reintegration of people who have committed sexual offences drawing from the experiences of the Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA) model. It will consider the CoSA model as an example of recovery capital using its evidence base (especially McCartan, Kemshall et al., 2014 and McCartan, 2016) to frame it as a narrative for rehabilitation and reintegration. The paper will then provide practitioners with some recommendations as well as thoughts for effectively using recovery capital in practice.