Quality standards of expertise cocerning sexual offenders in Belgium

Abstract

In the aftermath of a highly mediatized sex offender case the Belgian authorities decided harsher legal rules for sex offenders and at the same time developed a comprehensive treatment pathway from prison to community. Forensic psychiatry needs tools for the measurement of outcome, quality and service evaluation.

Psychiatric Reports for legal purposes play a key role for the entry of sex offenders into the penal legal system and their orientation toward the treatment pathway, including their return to the community.

In order to improve the questionable quality of the Psychiatric Reports we are in the process of creating qualitative criteria for these Psychiatric Reports, a basic template for the report itself and an adapted training including an accreditation as ‘expert’.

The aim is to meet the quality standards of validity, reliability and comparability. Developing guidelines in this domain at a European level is desirable notwithstanding the diversities of penal laws.