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A Life of Grief: an Exploration of Disenfranchised Grief in Sex Offender Significant Others

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Abstract

In criminal justice, researchers have identified disenfranchised grief, or the denial of empathy and social support during the grieving process, in family members who have lost relatives through imprisonment and execution. Although both of these situations involve the physical removal of the offender from the family members’ lives, non-physical losses may also prompt the grieving process. One of these non-physical losses is a psychosocial loss, in which the person the family members knew is now gone. Given the public stigma of the label “sex offender” and the collateral consequences that occur as a result of that label, it is possible that sex offender significant others experience a psychosocial loss. The current research is an exploratory study that used qualitative interviews with 29 spouses and significant others of convicted sex offenders to explore if and how disenfranchised grief impacts sex offender partners. Findings support both the existence of and the detrimental impact of disenfranchised grief on sex offender partners.

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Notes

  1. The sample contains sex offender spouses who were currently or formerly married to a convicted sex offender as well as significant others who were currently or formerly engaged in long-term relationships with convicted sex offenders. For brevity, the term “spouse” is used throughout this paper to refer to both populations.

  2. To ensure confidentiality, all participants were assigned a pseudonym and all additional identifying information provided during interviews such as family member names, locations, or police departments, were changed/removed from final transcripts. All quotations in this article have had the names and locations changed for confidentiality purposes.

  3. Transcripts from family member blogs, newspaper articles, emails, and other written documents were taken verbatim. Spelling and grammar errors in these quotations were included in the original.

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  1. University of Texas at Tyler College of Arts and Sciences, Tyler, TX, USA

    Danielle J. S. Bailey

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Correspondence to Danielle J. S. Bailey.

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Bailey, D.J.S. A Life of Grief: an Exploration of Disenfranchised Grief in Sex Offender Significant Others. Am J Crim Just 43, 641–667 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-017-9416-4

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