Abstract
“Sex offender” is a legal concept: he or she is a person who has violated statutes prohibiting improper sexual contact. Most of the conversation about sex offender statutes such as Megan’s Laws and Sexually Violent Predator Acts are about this legal category. Although the types of sexual offenses vary, as do the types of sex offenders, child sexual abuse is the predominant category of sex offender in the popular imagination and in the legislative conversations because child sexual abuse (assumed to be perpetrated by an adult male against a very young child) is generally regarded as the most monstrous conduct imaginable. Criminal statutes draw age distinctions, both with respect to the offender and the victim, but Megan’s Laws and SVPAs refer only to contact offenses and thereby lump all offenders in a single category for legal purposes. So for the general public, the term “sex offender” is usually assumed to describe a person who sexually abuses children, because child sexual abuse triggers moral panic more than any other category of sex offense.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Social groups create deviance by making rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders. From this point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender.’
Howard S. Becker
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bachman, R., and R. Paternoster. 1993. A contemporary look at the effects of rape law reform: How far have we really come? The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 84(3): 554–574.
Becker, H. 1963, 1973. The outsiders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Becker, J. 1994. The future of children. Sexual Abuse of Children 4(2): 176–197.
Beckett, K. 1996. Culture and the politics of signification: The case of child sexual abuse. Social Problems 43(1, February): 57–76.
Burke, K. 1966. Language as symbolic action: Essays on life, literature, and method. Berkeley: University of California.
De Francis, V. 1969. Protecting the child victim of sex crimes committed by adults. Denver: American Humane Association.
Finkelhor, D. 1984. Child sexual abuse: New theory and research. New York: McMillan.
Fisher, W.R. 1987. Human communication as narration: Toward a philosophy of reason, value and action. Columbia: University of South Carolina.
Fouault, M. 1978. The history of sexuality: An introduction. New York: Random House.
Foucault, M. 2004. Abnormal. New York: Picador.
Freedman, E.B. 1987. “Uncontrolled desires”: The response to the sexual psychopath, 1920–1960. The Journal of American History 74(1): 83–106.
Groth, N. 1979. Men who rape. New York: Plenum.
Hacking, I. 1988. The sociology of knowledge about child abuse. Nous 22(1988): 53–63.
Hacking, I. 1990. The taming of chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hacking, I. 1991. The making and molding of child abuse. Critical Inquiry 17(Winter): 253–288.
Hacking, I. 1995. Child abuse. In Rewriting the soul. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hacking, I. 1999. Kindmaking: The case of child abuse. In The social construction of what? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hacking, I. 2002. Making up people. In Historical ontology. Cambridge, MA: The Harvard University Press.
Janus, E. 2006. Failure to protect: America’s sexual predator laws and the rise of the preventive state. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.
Kempe, C.H. 1962. The battered child syndrome. Journal of the American Medical Association 181(1, July 7): 17–24.
Lancaster, R.N. 2011. Sex panic and the punitive state. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Langan, P.A., et al. 2003. Recidivism of sex offenders released from prison in 1994, 30–36. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. Available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/rsorp94.pdf.
Lundberg, E.O. 1926. Public aid to mothers with dependent children: Extent and fundamental principles. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor Children’s Bureau.
Masson, J.M. 1984. The assault on truth: Freud’s suppression of the seduction theory. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Nelson, B.J. 1984. Making an issue of child abuse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pickering, A. (1999). Constructing quarks: A sociological history of particle physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rush, F. 1974. Rape: The first sourcebook for women, by New York Radical Feminists, ed. Noreen Connell and Cassandra Wilson, published by New American Library in 1974.
Rush, F. 1980. The best kept secret. New York: Prentice-Hall.
Schultz, P. 2005. Not monsters: Analyzing the stories of child molesters. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.
Sgroi, S.M. 1975. Sexual molestation of children: The last frontier in child abuse. Children Today 4(3): 18–21.
Sutherland, E. 1950. The diffusion of sexual psychopath laws. The American Journal of Sociology 56(2): 142–148.
Thompson, S. 2006. Recidivism among sex offenders. Article may be found at http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/71876/recidivism_among_sex_offenders.html.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Douard, J., Schultz, P. (2013). The Child Sex Abuser. In: Monstrous Crimes and the Failure of Forensic Psychiatry. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 53. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5279-5_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5279-5_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-5278-8
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-5279-5
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawLaw and Criminology (R0)