Sexual offending in contemporary contexts: Community invisibility or institutional blindness?

Sexual abuse is widely held to be one of the worst kinds of offending, perhaps because it exploits and violates our cherished image of intimacy, and – in the case of child victimization – contemporary notions of the sanctity of childhood. Sexual abusers are, therefore, typically considered the worst kind of offenders. Alongside this widespread concern, considerable effort goes into understanding and explaining sexual violence, and our theorizing has improved markedly in sophistication. So, how do we account for this apparent failure of prevention? A significant factor in resolving this puzzle surrounds societal perceptions of sexual offending and the common narratives that we entertain with respect to its perpetrators. These discourses, I contend, are influential in directing our attention away from many of the contexts in which abuse occurs. Moreover, such discourses tend to funnel criminal justice policy-making and general societal responses into domains and strategies that are dominated by a paradigm based almost entirely on estimations of the risk of re-offending posed by identified perpetrators. In presenting this argument, I begin with a brief review of the history of theories about sexual offending and their relationship to the risk paradigm. I revisit the empirically-endorsed truism that perpetrators are usually not strangers, while, at the same time, I attempt to account for the persistence of public perceptions that give rise to an opposite impression. I illustrate these issues by scrutinizing the publicly-held trust in institutions such as home-and-family, the church, and “private” domains of late modernity. I go on to consider these contexts as potential settings of sexual abuse. Finally, in the light of all this, I consider recent rehabilitative responses to offenders and some directions for the future.