Social Work with Sex Offenders. Cowburn, Malcolm
its complexity and its relevance to social work with sex offenders. Many years ago, Ahmad (1992) and Robinson (1995) recognised the importance of (white) workers being confident in addressing issues related to diversity, particularly when challenging people of different ethnicities. Components of confidence are self-knowledge, awareness of values, ongoing professional knowledge (Bhatti-Sinclair, 2011) and an ability to engage with both the intellectual and emotional aspects of social work practice. By the end of this book, we hope that readers’ confidence in working with all sex offenders will have developed, and that their professional confidence will have grown.
Structure of book
The book is structured, first, to provide a context for social work practice with sex offenders and then to address specific practice-related issues. Chapter Two introduces readers to theoretical approaches to understanding sex crimes and sex offenders. In Chapter Three, we consider issues relating to sentencing sex offenders and highlight contrasting approaches to punishment and associated penal responses. Chapter Four provides an overview of policies relating to safeguarding and managing sex offenders in the community. Chapters Five and Six address assessment and interventions, respectively. The final chapter draws the themes of the book together by presenting an account of reflexive social work practice with sex offenders.
Summary
• Language, through the expression of values and various forms of knowledge, creates different ways of understanding sex crimes and the people who commit them.
• The value base of the book and how language is to be used throughout the book was clarified.
• News media create distorted and inaccurate understandings of sex offenders (folk devils); social work knowledge extends beyond media representations.
• Denial of the nature and extent of sex crimes is to be found at individual worker, individual offender and societal levels.
• Working with sex offenders affects workers emotionally, physically and psychologically. Potentially, it can affect workers’ personal and professional relationships. Awareness of these impacts is a key component in developing strategies for effective work with sex offenders.
• White constructs of black and Asian sex offenders potentially create racial folk devils. Racial folk devils potentially prevent (white) social workers from engaging constructively with BME communities.
• BME offenders’, victims’ and communities’ engagement with processes of criminal justice appears to be minimal.
• Social work engagement with BME offenders, victims and communities is complex. There are cultural inhibitors that may make it difficult for some social workers to engage with their own ethnic community. Sensitive engagement with the nuances of these issues is essential.
Notes
1 By ‘practice’ in this instance, we are primarily referring to psychologically oriented therapy, but it also crosses over into social work with sex offenders.
2 This term requires some explanation; we use it to refer to Western Europe, North America and Australasia.
Chapter 2 Understanding sex crimes and sex offenders
Introduction
The aim of this chapter is to outline and explore the contribution of key academic disciplines to understanding sex crimes and sex offenders. Sociological, biomedical, theological, legal and psychological perspectives are considered. In identifying individual disciplines, we recognise that each discipline is heterogeneous, and that forms of knowledge may be contested within each discipline. Moreover, knowledge within each discipline may be developed from differing epistemological positions (eg an evolutionary psychology account of sex crime differs significantly from a feminist psychological account).
The chapter initially considers victim perspectives. Victims’ experiences are individual, and although a range of studies identify common impacts of violation, no systematised knowledge of sex crimes has been generated from such experiences. These accounts, however, make an important contribution to understanding sex crime and developing law and penal practices via victims’ organisations. This has been particularly important in articulating and asserting victims’ experiences of sex crime. We then move on to academic accounts of sex crimes. Sociological understandings of sex crime move beyond legal definitions (eg feminist accounts of sex crimes, which focus on patriarchy and the problem behaviours of the general population of men), but also analyse the behaviour of convicted populations (eg in studying what helps sex offenders desist from offending). The term ‘theological’ is used to recognise that, through history, various (theocentric) religions in different parts of the world have made statements about the nature of various sexual behaviours; proscribed behaviours are defined as sins. In secular societies, crimes are defined by law, which is often influenced by dominant theological frameworks and, according to one’s epistemological position, either represents the ‘moral consensus’ or the interests of dominant groups (eg think about the criminalising and decriminalising of ‘homosexual’ activity). Biomedical understanding of ‘sexual deviation’ is independent of the law, defining some sex offences as the result of (mental) illness. However, as with the law, the viewpoint generally embodies dominant moral values but uses ‘scientific’ language to define a variety of sexual predilections, including those that inflict harm on non-consenting victims. These definitions focus on the acts deemed to be wrong, illegal or deviant. Psychological perspectives tend not to define particular acts (other than to recognise that they may be illegal and harmful) within an overall schema; rather, the focus is on individuals manifesting problematic behaviours (as defined by themselves or the criminal justice system). Forensic psychology has developed a range of classificatory systems for people who have sexually harmed children and adults; these systems carry implicit or explicit aetiological assumptions about the behaviours.
Figure 2.1 illustrates the interrelated nature of these perspectives, with individualised concerns nearer the centre of the circle. Societal responses to sex crimes are embodied in penal policy and the practices of the criminal justice system; it is within (and beyond) these that social workers primarily operate.
Figure 2.1: Understandings of sex crimes
The third part of the chapter is concerned with exploring issues relating to sex offenders. We register three caveats. First, we recognise and discuss ‘unconvicted’ sex offenders in the second part of this chapter; in the third part of the chapter, the discussion focuses on convicted sex offenders. Second, the generic term ‘sex offender’ conceals the heterogeneity of the sex-offending population; in our statement of values in Chapter One, we recognise that sex offenders are a diverse population, and, where appropriate, we highlight and discuss issues of difference. The final caveat recognises that discussion of the ‘individual’ sex offender potentially ignores group offences (eg gang rapes, paedophile rings, ‘sex’ trafficking and rape in conflict and post-conflict settings). The making and viewing of child pornography is both an individual and a group offence (see Henshaw et al, 2015). Group offending dynamics are largely beyond the scope of this book and we refer readers to the following sources as starting points for further study: on gang rapes, see Chambers et al (2013); on females in gangs, see Wijkman et al (2015); on trafficking, see Breuil et al (2011); and on rape in conflict and post-conflict settings, see Sexual Violence Research Initiative (2014).
A note on epistemology
It is important to recognise epistemological influences on how knowledge is shaped. Foucault (1977, 1984) highlights the relationship between power and knowledge, and suggests