Criminal career duration is one of the least studied and lesser known parameters of criminal careers
(Farrington, 2019). In part, this is due to the long follow-up periods required to keep track of offenders
until older age. In this article, the focus is on the duration of official criminal careers of sex offenders,
i.e. offenses that led to a conviction in the Belgian national conviction records. All persons in the study
have at least one conviction in or after 1995 (until the end of 2020), had at least one conviction for a sex
offense throughout their entire criminal career and reached at the very least the age of 70 years. This
unique dataset contains well over 5000 persons.
How long is the criminal career of sex offenders? How long is their sexual criminal career? These questions are the focus of the article.