Sex Fiends, Perverts, and Pedophiles
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Sex Fiends, Perverts, and Pedophiles

Understanding Sex Crime Policy in America

Chrysanthi S. Leon

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Sex Fiends, Perverts, and Pedophiles

Understanding Sex Crime Policy in America

Chrysanthi S. Leon

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About This Book

From Megan's Law to Jessica's Law, almost every state in the nation has passed some law to punish sex offenders. This popular tough-on-crime legislation is often written after highly-publicized cases have made the gruesome rounds through the media, and usually features harsh sentences, lifetime GPS monitoring, a dramatic expansion of the civil commitment procedures, and severe restrictions on where released sex offenders may live. In Sex Fiends, Perverts, and Pedophiles, Chrysanthi Leon argues that, while the singular notion of the sexual boogeyman has been used to justify these harsh policies, not all sex offenders are the same and such 'one size fits all' policies can unfairly punish other offenders of lesser crimes, needlessly targeting, sometimes ostracizing, citizens from their own communities.

While many recognize that prison is not the right tool for every crime problem, Leon compellingly argues that the U.S. maintains a one-size-fits-all approach to sexual offending which is undermining public safety. Leon explains how we've reached this point—with a large incarcerated sex offender population, many of whom will be released in the coming years with multiple barriers to their success in the community, and without much expertise to guide them or to guide those who are charged to help them. Leon argues that we cannot blame the public, nor even the politicians, except indirectly. Instead, we might blame the institutions we charge with making placement decisions and with the experts—both those who have chosen to work in the field and those who have caused its marginalization. Ultimately, Leon shows that when policies intended for the worst offenders take over, all of us suffer.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2011
ISBN
9780814753132

1
Punishment Stories

A … man accused of raping as many as 20 women, and convicted in June of nine counts of first-degree rape, was sentenced to life in prison plus 136 years Friday.… According to prosecutors and police, Sahin picked up a series of women, primarily prostitutes, between February and October 2007. And in almost all the cases the pattern was identical—Sahin would pick up a prostitute, drive her to a dark, isolated dirt road along the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal, display a knife and often hold it to her throat, and force sexual relations. At least one woman, who admitted she planned to have sex for money with Sahin, said he forced sex at the outset when she asked for payment up front. Sahin allegedly told police that sometimes he just “needed” sex, but didn’t have the money to pay for it.… [Judge] Jurden … highlighted one victim’s testimony who said she pleaded with Sahin to think about if he had a daughter facing such a situation. Sahin responded that if he had a daughter “who did what you do for a living, she’d deserve it.”
—Sean O’Sullivan, “Knife-Wielding Rapist Gets Life
Sentence,” Delaware News Journal, August 15, 2009
The stories we tell through our media and in other public venues are important. In Governing through Crime, the sociologist Jonathan Simon tells the story of how the problem of crime became an influential template for reshaping governmental authority in America since the 1960s and describes the consequences for the way American institutions operate in the early years of the twenty-first century. As part of this argument, Simon describes the cultural work that is inspired by crime in predetermining certain roles and scripts: “Crime is a genre, in the dramaturgical sense. It comes with certain kinds of roles: vulnerable victims, willing offenders, vigilant prosecutors, and harsh but fair judges (and all the deviant variations those set up). When we govern through crime we pass out these scripts to hundreds if not thousands of real people with little in the way of an audition and no accountability for the consequences.”1
The story above of the knife-wielding rapist sent to prison for life is not a typical story for many reasons. Stories about violence against women, aside from the occasional heinous murder, are not nearly as common as stories that offer more sensational appeal. More often than not, over the long term, typical stories are about child victims, not about rape and other assaults on adults.
In addition, we expect punishment to achieve multiple and often contradictory goals. I highlight the story of Sahin’s punishment in order to attune readers to the tensions among symbolic approaches to punishment that use a single case to achieve a social goal and those that individualize punishment to the individual offender and crime. In fact, as I sat in the courtroom to hear Sahin’s sentence, I noted reactions in myself that exemplified at least two goals of punishment: my gut reaction was to celebrate the messages sent to Sahin, a Turkish transplant to the East Coast of the United States, about the value of women. That life sentence told Sahin’s victims that they mattered and that their bravery in testifying against him was worthwhile. But after my internal “hurrah” at the judge’s words, I began to wonder whether anyone else received that message. The court translator had to give Sahin and his family the judge’s message secondhand, and the translator likely focused on the details of the sentence rather than on the judge’s framing. Being sentenced to life in prison will not in itself change Sahin’s view of women, and it probably will not change anyone else’s either. His family and community will more likely focus on his lengthy punishment as being unjust rather than as a social message they could internalize, especially since some have wondered if Sahin’s Muslim affiliation played a role in the severity of the charges brought against him. I became further concerned about locating the tangible effects of this message when I realized that there was no major news coverage of the sentencing, despite the fact that the crimes had been featured daily in the local print and television news while they remained unsolved. Neither Sahin and his family nor the local community likely heard the punishment message, although his victims probably did.
The lack of interest in Sahin’s sentence by the media reflects the reality that crime fears are more newsworthy than the denouement of the plot that comes at sentencing. In the following text, I examine the expectation that sex crime policies will send symbolic messages, and I contrast symbolic displays through public statements and public policies with the measurable changes in criminal justice responses to sexual violence that can be identified through institutional changes and through exploring the way institutional decision makers put these symbolic policies into practice. Many criminologists would argue that the public and policy response has become disproportionately focused on sex offenders, perhaps out of fears about homosexual pedophiles and other pariahs.2 Both perspectives—one that sees a successful crackdown or a symbolic victory such as Sahin’s sentencing, and one that sees a fruitless panic—make assumptions about the nature of criminal sexual offending, about cultural and scientific beliefs over time, and about the character and quantity of punishment. Too often, scholars, advocates, and even community members focus on one punishment goal and ignore the others. Those who try to pass reforms that consider just one of these perspectives tend to misunderstand the motivations of those who oppose the reforms. Instead, we must look carefully at how we have responded to specific categories of sexual offending over time in order to understand the implications of our current approach and to correct them where necessary.
Sex crime stories have had a vast appeal for many decades. As Philip Jenkins documents in his book on the changing conceptions of the child molester, advocacy claims makers have made child molestation a staple of news media.3 Organizational constraints and the pressures to sell papers have also helped keep certain kinds of sex crime stories in the public view.
As the criminologist Christopher Greer argues based on his study of more recent print media in Northern Ireland, “the press representation of sex crime, particularly in the tabloids, is becoming a source of (a certain kind of) entertainment … a cultural form designed to shock rather than educate, reinforcing existing stereotypes.… At best, representations give an inaccurate and misleading impression of the nature and extent of sex crime in society.”4 Greer sees this entertainment value as a relatively recent phenomenon that can be explained by the combination of changing commercial pressures on media, increased social awareness, and populist punitiveness.5 But the longer historical view suggests that this entertainment value is not new.
Even more important, sensational coverage skews public beliefs. As the historian Paula Fass writes about the Leopold and Loeb case in 1924, “When it finally left the front pages months later, the newspapers, which had started by sensationalizing an unusual kidnapping, had succeeded in normalizing a truly sensational case.”6 Fass demonstrates through this case the way that repeated exposure to sensational tales ends up obscuring statistical “normality” in favor of the story most often repeated.
As someone who is both a researcher and advocate, as well as someone who can bridge the divide between “offenders” and “victims,” I am therefore concerned with the impacts of the stories we tell about sex crimes as well as the punishment of sex crimes—both in discourse and practice. Salient characteristics of such stories have changed dramatically over time, and these changes can be connected to legislative and policy implementation changes.

Images of the Sex Offender

Today, public perceptions of sexual offending reveal a paradoxical combination of a moral, will-based model of criminality with a biological, disease-based model; this combination in effect covers all bases, inviting any therapeutic or punishment technique and simultaneously denying that anything could ever possibly work. Throughout the twentieth century, the monolithic notion of the sexual bogeyman, whether it is called a “sex fiend,” “sexual psychopath,” or a “sexually violent predator,” has justified control strategies that have assumed individuals who are quite distinct from that monstrous image to be from the same mold. By the containment era, which spans from 1980 through the present, the psych experts who offered more nuanced accounts, differentiating among types of sex offenders, are largely unheard by those who determine most penal outcomes, as demonstrated in the discussion of Jessica’s Law. Rather than calling for a complex response that draws upon multiple fields and strategies, today the most prominent experts are advocates who call for “closing the loopholes” to enable indeterminate punishment, as in the quote from Jan Scully, at the beginning of this book’s introduction. In subsequent chapters, I will more deeply investigate the trajectories of what I identify as the three most salient images of sex offenders, which appear across time: the monster, the patient, and the nuisance. I introduce them briefly here, followed by a set of related fallacies that together set the stage for my study.

The Monster

In a 2002 casenote, psychiatrists report on a subject they called “Mr. A,” described as a fifty-six-year-old married man, who was referred for treatment of pedophilia. “He reported that his fantasies were repetitive, and while he experienced a sense of shame, he felt unable to control his fantasies: ‘I’ve become a monster.’ Despite his impulsive behaviors, he had never been arrested, and he reported no other paraphilic behaviors, such as exhibitionism.”7
In popular culture, the idea that “sex fiends” lurk in the shadows has featured prominently in popular discourse about sexual violence since at least the 1930s, as I will describe further in the next chapter. This representation reflects many of the associations with sexual offending that continue to dominate: Deviant desires are so beyond control and so terrible that merely thinking about them must be a precursor to action. Even a contemporary man suffering from compulsive sexual fantasies about children puts his problem in these terms, despite the fact that he had not taken any steps toward achieving those fantasies.
The monster appears in slightly different forms, whether as a true stranger, an outsider known to the community but identified as deviant because of his class, lifestyle, or appearance, or as a familiar person who turns out to be a “monster among us.” Often, when the monster appellation is applied to a real person in the media, it is to a murderer—and this murderer’s sexual homicides implicate other sexual offending by association. The monstrous sex offender is either a confirmed murderer or a potential murderer, and any other kind of sexual offending is frightening in part because it may escalate into acts of murder. Although often cast as a stranger, the monster sex offender may also be an ordinary man who turns out to be an evildoer in our midst. This is one way in which the horror of child murder is hyped in the media as especially fearsome: It cannot be predicted or prevented. Despite some variation, monsters have the following in common: sexual deviance, uncontrollable impulses, and the near certainty that they will cause harm and injury. As a result, the monster is not typically a candidate for therapeutic rehabilitation. Instead, the monster must simply be stopped.
Whether a sex offender is truly unknown or whether it is only his potential for violence that is unknown, the monster image represents a crucial way of thinking about the people who commit sex crimes, which has come to dominate not only popular fears but public policies as well. I investigate the origins of this notion and find that prior to the containment era, at least two other ways of thinking about perpetrators of sex crime have competed with the monster image: One (the patient) is located more in the psychiatric field and the other (the nuisance) is more often used in criminal justice.

The Patient

It may be difficult for some people to see why we adopt a whole hearted psychotherapeutic approach to the child molesters and exhibitionists who make up the majority of our patients. Some may feel that in so doing we are condoning their offenses.… But when we see a surgeon carefully repair a bank robber’s wounds, we do not conclude that he condones robbery.8
Those who treat sex offenders are tasked with carrying out one of punishment’s goals, yet they are often viewed as undermining the symbolic role of the law: By treating sex offenders, therapists may appear to be discounting the seriousness of the offending. As the psychologist quoted above notes, this seems to be a problem peculiar to the therapeutic treatment of criminal offenders, and it is especially troublesome for sex offenders. This creates an almost untenable position for such practitioners. In addition, the psychological disciplines cannot credibly claim to cure monsters; therefore, its experts (hereinafter psych experts, including professionals trained in counseling as well as doctors of psychiatry and psychology) must define a specific type of sex offender as their proper subject: The sex offender becomes the patient. The patient image suggests a person who has a pathology that is amenable to treatment and whose troublesome behavior is not a sign of terminal and permanent difference. While psych experts have always been invested in this construction, at times others have promoted it as well, including the popular media, criminal justice experts, and offenders themselves.
But inherent in the representation of the “patient” is defensiveness about whether citing therapeutic approaches to sexual offending is also a means of denying or evading criminal responsibility or just deserts under the law. This will be a recurring theme in this book, as public experts have missed several opportunities to handle this problem more effectively. The missteps (documented in chapters 3 and 4) are combined with the secondary stigmatization of those who work with sex offenders (chapter 7) to undermine the plausibility of the sex offender as a treatable subject.

The Nuisance

Interviews with judges, attorneys, psychiatrists, probation officials, and a study of the leading authorities lead to the conclusion that the adult consensual homosexual offender is not a menace to society and does not exhibit a proclivity toward children. When he engages in homosexual conduct in public he is simply a nuisance. Sentences imposed by the court indicate judicial recognition of this fact.9
Getting law enforcement officials to take sex crimes seriously is one of the great feminist victories of the twentieth century: Conduct that had been dismissed as being nuisances became criminality worthy of punishment. As referenced above, debate during the mid-twentieth century raged over whether homosexual conduct should be considered criminal; in some places criminal justice agents effectively decriminalized it in practice (see Chapter 5for an extended analysis). While the legal classification of consensual homosexual conduct was eventually resolved, questions evident in the early twentieth century about sexual assault that did not cause physical injury or involve force persist today. Thus, nuisances were once considered to be a larger group of offenders that included consenting homosexuals in addition to child abusers who coerced participation or who otherwise committed their crimes without overt force.
The difficulty in enumerating the harms of sexual violence and the dangers of sex offenders will be another theme throughout this book, as this reflects another area of unresolved debate that merits more explicit attention in order to move social policy forward. As will be shown, the nuisance category has shrunk dramatically both in popular conceptions and in legal classifications: More sexual offending is now viewed as intolerable. But the shadow of past tendencies to dismiss sexual predation as a mere “nuisance” continues to shape contemporary policies and practices, especially the efforts of advocates who seek signs that society takes sex crimes seriously.
Understanding this image as it applies to sex offender benefits from viewing other work on the social construction of danger. The anthropologist Mary Douglas contrasts the categories of purity and danger, and she describes the relational interpretations that cause objects to be placed in “pure” or “contaminated” categories. For example, a shoe on someone’s foot is neutral, but a shoe placed on a dining table is dirty and contaminating.10 The sociologist Ruth Simpson contrasts notions of danger and safety by describing three frameworks for viewing the world: the confident framework assumes safety and makes note of the dangerous; the cautious framework assumes danger and makes notes of the safe; and the neutral framework makes indepe...

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