He comments: ‘Through these life history interviews, I have uncovered detailed accounts of embodied gender interaction in three distinct “sites”: the family, the school and the peer group’ (Messerschmidt, 2011, p 207).
Throughout all of his work, he is concerned to understand the people that he speaks to as socially located human beings. He analysed the data using grounded theory and identified specific emergent themes and patterns relating to the experience of being bullied and the transition into being a sex offender.
Messerschmidt is critical of most conventional criminology for its failure to address gender and embodiment in its account of (sex) crimes. His ‘structured action theory’ (Messerschmidt, 2000, 2012) draws on insights from symbolic interactionism and structural and post-structural theory. His analysis (of life history transcripts and the committing of crimes) is based on the situated dynamic performing of gender (Messerschmidt, 2000). Gender is not a fixed element in social identity; it is enacted in different ways, at different times. Moreover, Messerschmidt recognises that gender interacts with other strands of identity (eg race and social class), which may be emphasised in different situations. His work strongly links with intersectional theory (referred to earlier). However, he is particularly keen to see identity as situational and fluid. In thinking about sexual and violent crime, he notes that ‘theory that connects social action (micro) with social structure (macro) is essential to the comprehension of adolescent … violence’ (Messerschmidt, 2000, p 8). Individual violence is not different from the ways of being a young man or woman; it is shaped by dominant social ways of being. The implications of this analysis are distinctly sociological and have significance for social policy; from his study of adolescent female sex offenders, for example, Messerschmidt (2011, pp 229–30) suggests that educational/school policies are needed to help prevent young people from committing sex crimes:
The suggested policies – school policy statements, gender-relevant and gender specific curriculum, and emphasis on empathy and pluralism in schools – obviously neither exhaustive nor comprehensive – argue persuasively that the topic of embodied heterogender is highly relevant to debates on bullying and eventual violent offending by victims. What these policies essentially aim to do is to ‘reembody’ youth by allowing them to recognise alternative and different ways of acting and through their body, thereby helping to develop embodied capacities other than those associated with bullying and interpersonal violence.
Understanding risk
Risk of being sexually harmed features in popular understandings of sex crime (as discussed in Chapter One). Sex crime is described as pervasive, and thus risks to particular populations (women and children) are portrayed as commonplace. Sociological perspectives on the nature of risk and risk assessment provide a counterbalance to news media perspectives by drawing attention to the limitations of the activity. Social anthropologist Mary Douglas (1985, 1992) suggests that risk is a political vehicle, used widely to legitimate the policies and practices of particular groups at specific times. This process of legitimation is achieved through utilising a quantitative paradigm in order to give risk a specious appearance of solidity. Mythen and Walklate (2006, p 1) comment: ‘In theoretical terms, risk has conventionally been approached as an objective entity, to be mastered by calculation, assessment and probability’. Bauman (1993, pp 199–200) suggests that ‘In the concept of “risk society”, “risks” enter the stage already appropriated and managed by science and technology – as their unquestionable domain’. The ‘risk analysis professional’ (Douglas, 1992) plays a significant part in sociological analyses; s/he operates within specialist sub-disciplines that develop their own technical language (ie inaccessible to the general public). Bauman (1993, pp 200–8) highlights how risk discourses, through technologised approaches to knowledge, create a self-perpetuating, highly technical form of knowledge as the only valid way to approach, understand, assess and manage risk. This has the effect of prioritising certain forms of intellectual activity (calculative and mathematical) and certain subjects for inquiry:
Technology’s miraculous powers are intimately related to the stratagem of close focusing: a ‘problem’ to become a ‘task’, is first cut out from the tangle of its multiple connections with other realities, while the realities with which it is connected are left out of account and melt into the indifferent ‘backdrop’ of action. (Bauman, 1993, p 194)
In reflecting on this analysis in seeking to understand sex crime, we can see how the activities of forensic disciplines contribute to the construction of risk. Much of the psychological literature on risk and risk assessment is expressed in esoteric and inaccessible (to the lay reader) language. The terminologies are derived from medical, psychological and statistical vocabularies, and together create a discourse that embodies what may be considered to be ‘expert’ knowledge. The names of some of the instruments of assessment imply an abstracted technical world, with processes and procedures only to be understood by technical ‘experts’ (eg Static-99, Static-2002 and Risk Matrix-2002, cited in Bengtson and Långström, 2007, p 138). This technical endeavour may be located in a context of knowledge, derived from meta-analysis, which indicates that:
most sexual offenders do not re-offend sexually, that first-time sexual offenders are significantly less likely to sexually re-offend than those with previous sexual convictions, and that offenders over the age of 50 are less likely to re-offend than younger offenders. In addition, it was found that the longer offenders remained offence-free in the community the less likely they are to re-offend sexually. (Harris and Hanson, 2004, p ii)
Sociological perspectives on the nature of risk and risk assessment draw attention to the limitations of the activity. Silver and Miller (2002, p 138) suggest that the main concern of an actuarial approach is the efficient management of resources, and that by focusing on aggregate populations identified on the basis of data from criminal justice systems, it contributes to further stigmatising populations that are already marginalised. The purely actuarial task potentially ignores both the socio-political context of risk assessment (eg remember Davis’s [1981] comments, cited in Chapter One, on the sentencing and execution of black men) and the significant population of people who perpetrate sexual harms that do not come into contact with the criminal justice system (see the discussion of attrition later in this chapter). The implications of this analysis of risk for social work have been highlighted by Pollack (2010), who sees the calculation of risk as a part of the neoliberal agenda designed to control socially marginal populations. Pollack (2010, p 1276) notes that Ferguson and Lavalette (2006) call for a ‘social work of resistance’ to neoliberal agendas: ‘Integral to developing such a framework is challenging standardized technologies of “managing risky behaviours”, since “a ‘what works’ agenda that does not address issues of process, relationship and structural oppression often simply does not work”’ (Ferguson and Lavalette, 2006, p 313). Sociological perspectives allow for a wider consideration of the socio-political implications of activities that are commonplace and rarely examined.
Understanding desistance
Much psychological research explores those issues that may prompt sex offenders to reoffend. An alternative way of looking at things is to consider what helps sex offenders to avoid reoffending – what helps them to ‘desist’ from offending. Willis, Levenson and Ward (2010, p 545, emphasis in original) note: ‘The process of ceasing sexual and general offending and becoming a productive member of society is called desistance’. In recent years, there has developed a considerable body of criminological research in relation to general desistance from crime. The available research indicates that if sex offenders released from prison are provided with the resources to access stable housing, establish pro-social support networks and create intimate relationships, and are presented with opportunities for employment, then they are less likely to reoffend (Willis et al, 2010, p 545). However, Farrall (1995, p 56) notes ‘that very few people actually desist as a result of intervention on the part of the criminal justice system or its representatives’. Ward and Maruna (2007, p 14) comment that it ‘makes considerable sense to develop models of rehabilitation
