The needs of people with learning disability and offending behaviour pose a huge challenge to service providers. There is anecdotal evidence of significant unmet need in this area, which was the main impetus for the formation of the Forensic Learning Disability Psychiatry Working Group. The international literature in relation to people with learning disability who offend is limited.
Underreporting of offending behaviour is partly due to the overlap with the paradigm of ‘challenging behaviour’. Such underreporting makes it difficult to define and measure this population.