Sex Offenses And The Men Who Commit Them

A surprising and provocative reevaluation of community efforts to police sex offenders on probation

Sex Offenses: Navigating Life After the Fall is an inside look at sex offenses and the men of commit them. It's based on the author's experience as a sex offender treatment provider. It answers questions such as: Why do sex offenders commit their offenses?What are the chances an offender will commit another offense?How can I keep myself or loved ones from becoming victims of sexual abuse?What do I do if I suspect a family member is the victim or perpetrator of sexual abuse?How can I help an offender get his life back on track? What happens when a person is found guilty of a sex offense?If I've been accused of committing a sex offense, what should I do?What happens in sex offender treatment?The author shares answers to these questions based on thousands of hours providing therapy to offenders. The book offers advice for victims, offenders, family member, and friends that can help people survive after the fall

This work is an exploratory examination of the experiences, motivations, and coping mechanisms of women who are involved in intimate relationships with registered sexual offenders. The study focuses both on women who were involved with an offender prior to the commission of his offense and who stayed with him post-conviction, and on women who became involved with a registered offender after his sex offense conviction. Like the offender himself, these women face a variety of challenges in responding to treatment of them by friends, family, the community, and the criminal justice system. Utilizing the results of intensive interviews, this work provides a unique look at the women who are one of the few sources of support for registered sexual offenders and assesses the effectiveness and wide-ranging implications of community notification and registration laws on public safety, policy, and practice. This work offers alternative approaches based on evidence and case studies and considers the significance of familial contact in buffering sexual recidivism. These women are the heretofore unstudied victims of sexual offending legislation. This book is essential reading for those in sociology, criminology, psychology, and social work. For undergraduate or graduate students, practitioners, researchers, or policy makers, this thought-provoking book will shed light on how to optimize the reintegration of sex offenders. It assesses the effectiveness and wide-ranging implications of sex offender legislation on public safety, policy, and practice and considers alternative approaches to reduce sexual violence.

Covers the main points surrounding legal precedent, constitutionality and options for punishment of sex offenders. Sidebars include important court cases, relevant laws, and history of the issues.

The 1990s witnessed a flurry of legislative initiatives—most notably, “Megan’s Law”—designed to control a population of sex offenders (child abusers) widely reviled as sick, evil, and incurable. In Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control, Diana Rickard provides the reader with an in-depth view of six such men, exploring how they manage to cope with their highly stigmatized role as social outcasts. The six men discussed in the book are typical convicted sex offenders—neither serial pedophiles nor individuals convicted of the type of brutal act that looms large in public perceptions about sex crimes. Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control explores how these individuals, who have been cast as social pariahs, construct their sense of self. How does being labeled in this way and controlled by measures such as Megan’s Law affect one’s identity and sense of social being? Unlike traditional criminological and psychological studies of this population, this book frames their experiences in concepts of both deviance and identity, asking how men so highly stigmatized cope with the most extreme form of social marginality. Placing their stories within the context of the current culture of mass incarceration and zero-tolerance, Rickard provides a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between public policy and lived experience, as well as an understanding of the social challenges faced by this population, whose re-integration into society is far from simple or assured. Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control makes a significant contribution to our understanding of sex offenders, offering a unique window into how individuals make meaning out of their experiences and present a viable—not monstrous—social self to themselves and others.

Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism uses queer theory as a hermeneutic tool with which to read against the grain of heterotextual narratives of the Holocaust and as a way of locating alternative pathways of meaning in dominant Holocaust research. Specifically addressing the racialization of sexuality, the book asks how the politics of sexuality can be more explicitly and systematically theorized, along with state-sanctioned homophobia under Nazism, with a clear recognition that homophobia seldom operated alone, but worked in conjunction with other axes of power, including race, gender, eugenics, and population politics. In theorizing gender and sexuality as entangled axes of analysis, the book allows the specificity of lesbian difference to emerge and challenges the received wisdom that lesbians were not as systematically persecuted under National Socialism. William J. Spurlin questions the wisdom of received scholarship that reduces Nazi fascism to latent homosexuality, and examines the possible implications of Nazi homophobia, and its imbrication with other deployments of power, for the study of contemporary culture where the homophobic impulse continues to reverberate, thereby challenging understandings of history steeped in notions of progressive modernity.