Our study "Sexual knowledge and attitudes of men with intellectual disability who sexually offend," published in Journal of Intellectual and Developmental Disability in June 2007 did not find that sex education made sexual offenders with an intellectual disability more dangerous.
Our study is based on a comparison of 43 individuals with an intellectual disability who committed a sexual offence, with 43 individuals also with an intellectual disability who did not commit a sexual offence. We did not conduct a comparison of individuals with and without an intellectual disability, and our findings cannot be generalized to sex offenders without intellectual disabilities.
We conducted the study because we wanted to examine the issue of how sexual knowledge may be related to sexually inappropriate or deviant behaviour in individuals with intellectual disabilities. It has been suggested in the past that there may be two subtypes of individuals with intellectual disabilities who sexually offend. The first subtype, whom we called Type I, is similar to individuals without intellectual disabilities who sexually offend: they have deviant ideas about sexuality, referred to as paraphilia or love of the unusual.
Type II are those individuals who commit sexually inappropriate behaviours for other reasons, such as a lack of knowledge about sexuality, or not knowing what behaviours are acceptable. This group may be seen as naïve offenders. A scientific term coined to describe such individuals is “counterfeit deviance.”