Turning a blind eye to crime: health professionals and the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

64 British Journal of General Practice, January 2010 As to the second case, sections 30–33 create offences involving sexual activity with people suffering from a mental disorder (Box 2). The touchstone is ‘sufficient understanding of the nature or reasonably foreseeable consequences of what is being done ...’ This begs three crucial questions: what is sufficient?; sufficient for what? and; what if one can understand the ‘nature’ of the act, but not the ‘reasonably foreseeable consequences’? What ‘for any other reason’ might encompass is anyone’s guess. Note that marital status is irrelevant. If the social worker’s assessment of capacity is correct, Y would have committed a crime even if he and X had been happily married for 50 years.