Deviance, regulation and the sex offender. Perspectives on the regulation of sexual offending in Australia and Sweden

Abstract

Sexual offending legislation has undergone sweeping changes in the Western world in the past three decades, dramatically changing the conceptualization of women’s,children’s and victims’ rights and slowly doing away with the tradition of male sexual entitlement. The result is a shift away from the focus on violence in sexual violence, and towards a corresponding increase in the focus on victims’ sexual dignity. This thesis is a comparative investigation of how perceptions of deviance have influenced legislation pertaining to sexual offending and sex offenders in two countries over the past thirty-five years (1980-2015). Those two countries are Australia and Sweden. Though the manifestation of these values appears different between the various jurisdictions of Australia and the Scandinavian countries, there are also deep similarities that point to a merging of sexual mores across countries. The framing narratives are converging towards a similar approach to regulating sexual offending. There is a ‘globalization of sexuality’ that can at least in part be explained by greater mobility, transnational cosmopolitanism and the hegemony of Western culture. A driving force behind this has been global and regional conventions, including European Union directives and regulations concerning the criminalization and punishment of sexual offending. The rise of the ‘crime as politics’ discourse has had profound effects on how crime is regulated. The politicalization of crime policy shifts the knowledge basis for policy from politicians and experts to media and the community, and adjusting crime policy to ‘current values’ in society becomes an explicit political goal. The law can be thought of as a messenger and one means for framing threats, by first creating them, then legitimising them by the enactment of protective legislation, and finally offering a solution. The social construction of the sex offender and the political benefits of responding to the sex offender threat link together to produce symbolic forms of regulation that favour appearance over effectiveness and ethical considerations. A key component in this is media portrayals of sexual deviance. The legal shift towards more punitive responses to sexual offending goes hand in hand with an individualisation of deviance, where individual rights and responsibilities are paramount in establishing guilt and innocence. Individuals are given both the responsibility to avoid becoming victims of sexual violence and the responsibility to avoid committing such offences. To want to shield and protect one’s loved ones from danger is a strong, immediate human instinct, and so to fear and loathe those who sexually prey on children is a natural response to a threat. However, those who offend are statistically also likely to be persons known to and loved by the child. Moreover, the introduction of invasive, detailed and restrictive legislation to control, track and manage sex offenders in custodial settings and in the community is not unproblematic. The effects of these introductions will be discussed in this thesis and illustrate the complexities of relying on the law in order to keep communities safe. Show more