Social Work with Sex Offenders. Cowburn, Malcolm
feminist analyses of sex crimes, located in a wider analysis of women’s oppression in which women are construed as victims of male society, recognising women as sex offenders becomes problematic (Harris, 2010). It is generally accepted that female sex offenders are an under-researched phenomenon, with large gaps in knowledge about why women offend, whom they offend against and how often they do this (Williams and Bierie, 2015). The dominant image (both lay and professional) is that such offending is uncommon, and that when it does happen, it is less serious than offending by men (Mellor and Deering, 2010). Indeed, in his book Physical and Sexual Abuse of Children: Causes and Treatment, Walters (1978) felt able to categorically deny that women were capable of sexually offending against children, and asserted that the problem did not exist. Perceptions have changed, but slowly. There have been reports in the press of adult women school teachers sexually abusing their young male students where this has been presented almost as a ‘rite of passage’ of masculine socialisation through ‘seduction’, rather than abuse through breach of trust. This narrative makes it very difficult for victims to recognise that they have been abused.
Sexual coercion by women appears to be subject to processes of social denial and minimisation. Essentialist explanations of women’s violence have tended to start with the premise that women are non-violent (except in extreme circumstances, where they are using self-defence against their abusive male partners), and that women who perpetrate aggression outside the stereotype are either ‘mad’, ‘bad’, ‘evil’ or ‘victimised’; all of which deny and minimise personal agency and culpability (Allen, 1998). In short, both traditionalists and some feminists take the view that the violent behaviour of women deviates from expected ‘normal’ gender characteristics, whereas non-essentialised, postmodern feminist explanations stress that violence is neither inherently masculine nor feminine; it exists in a context of politics, economics, power relations and gender dynamics of the specific act of violence (Renzetti, 1999).
We now consider the issue of age in relation to sex offending, in particular, those crimes committed by young people, defined by the UK Ministry of Justice as people under 18. More refined definitional issues related to this population are addressed later in the chapter when we consider the offenders themselves. In England and Wales in 2013–15, there were 1,653 sexual offences for which a young person was convicted; this was 2% of all youth offences (Ministry of Justice and Youth Justice Board, 2015). In relation to the sentenced prison population of young offenders, sex offenders made up approximately 5% of the under-18 population from 2009 to 2014 (Ministry of Justice and Youth Justice Board, 2015). As with the adult sex offender population, this group has a low reconviction rate, with young sex offenders having a ‘re-offending rate of 15.0 per cent, compared with those with robbery offences which have a 41.5 per cent re-offending rate’ (Ministry of Justice and Youth Justice Board, 2015, p 57). It is noteworthy that in these statistics relating to the overall young offender population, BME groups are over-represented in relation to the proportion of their ethnic group in the overall national population (Ministry of Justice and Youth Justice Board, 2015, p 28).
In the US, using data from the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS), Finkelhor et al (2009, pp 1–2) found that:
• Juveniles account for more than one third (35.6%) of those known to the police to have committed sex offences against minors.
• Juveniles who commit sex offences against other children are more likely than adult sex offenders to offend in groups and at schools and to have more male victims and younger victims.
• The number of youth coming to the attention of police for sex offences increases sharply at age 12 and plateaus after age 14. Early adolescence is the peak age for offences against younger children. Offences against teenagers surge during mid to late adolescence, while offences against victims under 12 decline.
• A small number of juvenile offenders – 1 out of 8 – are younger than 12.
• Females constitute 7 per cent of juveniles who commit sex offences.
• Females are found more frequently among young youth than older youth who commit sex offences. This group’s offences involve multiple-victim and multi-perpetrator episodes, and they are more likely to have victims who are family members or males.
In seeking to understand, sociologically, the phenomenon of sex offending by young people, the work of James Messerschmidt (1993, 2000, 2011, 2012) is of central importance. Messerschmidt’s work is based on a series of 30 life history interviews conducted with ‘thirty 15–18 year old White working class boys and girls: 20 violent (10 assaultive and 10 sexual offenders, each equally divided by sex) and 10 nonviolent (likewise equally divided by sex)’ (Messerschmidt, 2011, p 207). The methodology here is important; he spent time listening to young people talk about their lives. The data was not gathered using ‘validated’ questionnaires, he allowed the young people to talk and subsequently analysed the data. He comments: ‘Through these life history interviews, I have uncovered detailed accounts of embodied gender interaction in three distinct “sites”: the family, the school and the peer group’ (Messerschmidt, 2011, p 207).
Throughout all of his work, he is concerned to understand the people that he speaks to as socially located human beings. He analysed the data using grounded theory and identified specific emergent themes and patterns relating to the experience of being bullied and the transition into being a sex offender.
Messerschmidt is critical of most conventional criminology for its failure to address gender and embodiment in its account of (sex) crimes. His ‘structured action theory’ (Messerschmidt, 2000, 2012) draws on insights from symbolic interactionism and structural and post-structural theory. His analysis (of life history transcripts and the committing of crimes) is based on the situated dynamic performing of gender (Messerschmidt, 2000). Gender is not a fixed element in social identity; it is enacted in different ways, at different times. Moreover, Messerschmidt recognises that gender interacts with other strands of identity (eg race and social class), which may be emphasised in different situations. His work strongly links with intersectional theory (referred to earlier). However, he is particularly keen to see identity as situational and fluid. In thinking about sexual and violent crime, he notes that ‘theory that connects social action (micro) with social structure (macro) is essential to the comprehension of adolescent … violence’ (Messerschmidt, 2000, p 8). Individual violence is not different from the ways of being a young man or woman; it is shaped by dominant social ways of being. The implications of this analysis are distinctly sociological and have significance for social policy; from his study of adolescent female sex offenders, for example, Messerschmidt (2011, pp 229–30) suggests that educational/school policies are needed to help prevent young people from committing sex crimes:
The suggested policies – school policy statements, gender-relevant and gender specific curriculum, and emphasis on empathy and pluralism in schools – obviously neither exhaustive nor comprehensive – argue persuasively that the topic of embodied heterogender is highly relevant to debates on bullying and eventual violent offending by victims. What these policies essentially aim to do is to ‘reembody’ youth by allowing them to recognise alternative and different ways of acting and through their body, thereby helping to develop embodied capacities other than those associated with bullying and interpersonal violence.
Understanding risk
Risk of being sexually harmed features in popular understandings of sex crime (as discussed in Chapter One). Sex crime is described as pervasive, and thus risks to particular populations (women and children) are portrayed as commonplace. Sociological perspectives on the nature of risk and risk assessment provide a counterbalance to news media perspectives by drawing attention to the limitations of the activity. Social anthropologist Mary Douglas (1985, 1992) suggests that risk is a political vehicle, used widely to legitimate the policies and practices of particular groups at specific times. This process of legitimation is achieved through utilising a quantitative paradigm in order to give risk a specious appearance of solidity. Mythen and Walklate (2006, p 1) comment: ‘In theoretical terms, risk has conventionally been approached as an objective entity, to be mastered by calculation, assessment and probability’. Bauman (1993, pp 199–200) suggests that ‘In the concept of “risk