Handbook on Sexual Violence (95 page)

Since this
chapter was written, the coalition government has shown itself to be more interested in the topic of sexual violence than was at first feared. Their
Call to End Violence Against Women and Girls
is now newly published and is worth reading (available at http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/crime/violence-again
st-women-girls/). The choice of title alone suggests a vision which is at least aiming for real change.

Notes

1. These figures can only be indicative, given that the cases recorded as crimes in 2008–09 are not always going to get to trial in that same year. To allow for such built-in problems it is more usual to look at trends in recorded crime statistics, rather than at the detail of any particular year. The trend in rape conviction rates, measured against convictions for rape only, has been declining for many years, having stood at 35 per cent in 1974. The most up-to-date figure available shows a conviction rate of 7.6 per cent. (Home Office 2009a; Ministry of Justice 2008: Annex A; Cook 2005).
   

2. It is, however, interesting to note that the 57.7 per cent success rate is the lowest quoted, among the range of types of violence against women prosecution quoted in the CPS report.
   

3. It is acknowledged that there are likely to be arguments against this, from a civil liberties approach, and that this chapter is not the place to explore this suggestion further.
   

4. In recent years he gets called the ‘reasonable person’ in some attempt to allow for gender neutrality; however, this attempt leads to an entirely new discussion which is not pertinent here.
   

5. Actor and comedian Craig Charles was accused of rape by his ex-girlfriend in 1994. The trial did not result in a conviction (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/
   3055859.stm, accessed 18 June 2010).
   

6. Lead singer with Simply Red, Manchester pop band. He was accused of rape in 2000 but the police dropped the investigation (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
   uknews/1375942/Simply-Red-star-cleared-after-arrest-for-rape.html, accessed 18 June 2010.)
   

7. US baseball player Kobe Bryant was accused of rape in 2004. The criminal case fell apart after the police made a number of errors in handling the charges, which resulted in the complainant being unwilling to proceed (http://nbcsports.msnbc.
   com/id/5861379/, accessed 18.June 2010).
   

References

Anitha, S.
et al
. (2008)
Forgotten Women: Domestic Violence, Poverty and South Asian Women with No Recourse to Public Funds
. Manchester: Saheli.

Baird, V. and Campbell, A. (2010)
Interim Government Response to the Stern Review
.

London: Home Office.

Brownmiller, S. (1975)
Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape
. New York: Fawcett Columbine (1993 edn).

Brownmiller, S. (1999)
In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution.
New York: Random House. Buchwald, E.
et al
. (1993)
Transforming a Rape Culture
. Minneapolis: Milkweed.

Cook, K. (2005)
Rape, the end of the story: a study of rape appeal cases
(unpublished Phd thesis: Manchester Metropolitan University).

Crown Prosecution Service (2009)
Violence Against Women Crime Report 2008–2009
.

London: CPS.

Ginsberg, E. and Lerner, S. (1989)
Sexual Violence Against Women: A Guide to the Criminal Law
. London: Rights of Women.

Hall, R. (1985)
Ask Any Woman: A London Inquiry into Rape and Sexual Assault
. Bristol: Falling Wall Press.

Home Office (2009a)
Crime in England and Wales 2008–2009
. London: Home Office.

Home Office (2009b)
Together We Can End Violence Against Women And Girls: A Strategy
.

London: Home Office.

Jones, H. and Cook, K. (2008)
Rape Crisis: Responding to Sexual Violence
. Lyme Regis: Russell House Publishing Ltd.

Kelly, L. (1988)
Surviving Sexual Violence
. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lees, S. (1996)
Carnal Knowledge: Rape on Trial
. London: Hamish Hamilton.

MacKinnon, C. (1989)
Towards a Feminist Theory of the State
. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

MacKinnon, C. (1993)
Only Words
. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

MacKinnon, C. (2005)
Women’s Lives: Men’s Laws
. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Medea, A. and Thompson, K. (1974)
Against Rape: A Survival Manual for Women: How to avoid entrapment and how to cope with rape physically and emotionally
. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ministry of Justice (2008)
Criminal Statistics, England and Wales 2008
. London: Ministry of Justice.

Payne, S. (2009)
Rape Victim Experience Review
. London: Home Office.

Richie, B. (1996) ‘Young women and the backlash’, keynote address at the
International conference on Violence, Abuse and Women’s Citizenship
, Brighton, November 1996 (unpublished).

Russell, D. (1982) ‘The prevalence and incidence of forcible rape and attempted rape of females’,
Victimology
, 7: 81–93.

Safety4Sisters (2010)
Aims and Definitions
. Safety4Sisters (unpublished).

Stern, V. (2010)
The Stern Review: A Report by Baroness Vivien Stern CBE of an independent review into how rape complaints are handled by authorities in England and Wales.
London: Home Office.

Walby, S. (2004)
The Cost of Domestic Violence
. London: Women and Equality Unit.

West, R. (1987) ‘The difference in women’s hedonic lives’, in D. Kelly Weisberg (ed.) (1996)
Applications of Feminist Legal Theory to Women’s Lives: Sex, Violence, Work, and Reproduction
. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 162–83.

Women Asylum Seekers Together (WAST) (2008)
Am I Safe Yet? Stories of women seeking asylum in Britain
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The Crisis in Rape Crisis
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Web resources

Campaign to End Rape: www.cer.truthaboutrape.co.uk

End Violence Against Women:
www.endviolenceagainstwomen.org.uk Home Office: www.homeoffice.gov.uk

Ministry of Justice: www.j
ustice.gov.uk Rape Crisis: www.rapecrisis.org.uk

Southall Black Sisters: www.south
allblacksisters.org.uk Survivors UK: www.survivorsuk.org

Victim Support:
www.victimsupport.org.uk WAST: www.wast.org.uk

Women’s Resource Centre: www.wrc.org.uk

Chapter 20
‌

Public sector and voluntary sector responses: dealing with sex offenders

Hazel Kemshall

Meet Hazel Kemshall

Hazel Kemshall is currently Professor of Community and Criminal Justice at De Montfort University and a board member for the Staffordshire and West Midlands Probation Trust, an appointment she particularly values having spent her early career as a probation officer in that area. Her current Chair was the first in Criminal Justice at De Montfort, and the inclusion of ‘Community’ in the title is particularly important as it reflects both departmental and personal commitment to issues of community justice. All her career has been spent either working with or researching high-risk offenders. She has been privileged to be involved in the development of multi-agency public protection arrangements across the UK, and evaluations of alternative responses such as public awareness campaigns and environmental manage- ment such as Stop It Now! and the Derwent Initiative. She is particularly keen to see greater practical success in engaging the public in policy responses to the management of sex offenders, and in projects directly concerned with the community management of sex offenders such as Leisurewatch or Circles of Support. Such initiatives can reduce vigilantism and erode the unhelpful stereotype of the public as irrational, punitive and ‘media dupes’.

Introduction

This
chapter considers public health responses to sexual offending, and places these within broader reintegrative and restorative justice paradigms. In addition to reviewing key public health responses, particularly those delivered by the voluntary sector such as public awareness campaigns and preventative work with offenders, the chapter also considers the additional value that broader reintegrative approaches can bring to the effective community management of sexual offenders.

Sex offenders have become the offenders we ‘love to hate’, characterised as ‘monsters in our midst’ (Thomas 2005). There is substantial public anxiety about sex offenders (Thomas 2004, 2005) and considerable media fuelling of community fears (Piper and Stronnach 2008; Silverman and Wilson 2002). Such media coverage holds the ‘spectre of the mobile and anonymous sex offender’ as particularly demonic (Hebenton and Thomas 1996: 429). This has been exacerbated by the construction of the ‘predatory paedophile’, the spectre of an invisible stranger in our midst preying on vulnerable children, often linked to the fear of child homicide (Wilczynski and Sinclair 1999). In large part, this has been a media-constructed moral panic playing on ‘stranger-danger’ (Kitzinger 1999), in contrast to the research evidence that most women and children are abused in their own homes, extended families or by offenders they know (Gallagher 2009); and that grooming behaviours are extensive (Wortley and Smallbone 2006). These media and public misperceptions have also found their way into policy, with criminal justice policy in particular focusing on the reduction of ‘stranger-danger’ through increased legislation and restrictive conditions targeting sex offenders (see Kemshall 2008: ch. 1 for a full review). Such policy and legislative responses also reflect, to a degree, political anxieties around individual high-profile cases and public perceptions of risk management failures (for example the infamous case of Sydney Cooke, see Kemshall 2003, 2008). Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s this meshing of media and political anxieties on sex offenders, particularly paedophiles, resulted in a criminal justice policy approach characterised by surveillance, intensive measures of control and restriction, preventative sentencing, and containment, labelled ‘community protection’ by Connelly and Williamson (2000). Whilst the UK has not adopted this USA model totally, it is characterised by what Pratt (2000a, b) has called the ‘retributive fallacy’. In brief, this is the contention that penal policies based on retributive sentencing are mistaken as they result in higher prison populations and fail to provide effective crime management. ‘Public protection’ becomes a politicised justification for retribution (Kemshall 2003, 2008; Pratt 2000a, b).

In effect, public protection acts as something of a ‘veneer’ for increasingly retributive and emotive sentencing, particularly for sex offenders (Thomas 2004). This can result in burgeoning prison populations, increasingly intrusive and costly community measures that become difficult to maintain in the long term, and the constant spectre that one risk management failure can threaten the credibility of the entire risk management system of sex offenders (Kemshall 2008; Nash 2006).

To date responses to sex offending across the Anglophone countries have tended to be dominated by statutory criminal justice policy, with the UK and USA leading such developments (see Kemshall 2008 for a full review). This
chapter takes a different perspective by focusing on public health and voluntary sector responses to sexual offending, with a particular emphasis on public awareness campaigns, environmental risk management and community engagement in the management of sex offenders. Criminal justice policy has tended to focus on seriousness of harm, with attempts to grade harms and seriousness either by legislating that particular offences will receive mandatory life sentences or be considered for indeterminate public protection sentences (Kemshall 2008); or through risk assessment tools and procedures that identify

offenders who present a ‘significant risk of serious harm to the public’ (Ministry of Justice 2009). This policy focus has been on offenders and their risk factors, rather than on the subjective experience of victims (see Kemshall 2008 for a full review). However, drawing on the experiences of victims, Kelly has argued that how victims perceive and experience sexual violence is important (1988, 2002). Based on this research Kelly has argued for a ‘continuum’ as an analytic device through which to understand the range of victim experiences of sexual violence and the range of offences actually committed. This is not, however, a continuum of seriousness, rather it is a continuum of felt experience with a range of attendant impacts on the victims (Kelly 2002), and covers a range of offence behaviours without implying any necessary progression towards more serious acts. The notion of a continuum provides a number of helpful things: a refocus on the victim experience (discussed elsewhere in this volume); a reminder of the range of sexual offending and that public policy responses need to engage with them all; a reminder that not all sex offenders are monsters (nor indeed is our experience of them always as ‘monstrous’; and that media and political responses to sex offenders tend to ignore both the wide range of offences and victim experiences by over-focusing on ‘stranger-danger’ paedophilia (Kitzinger 2004). In the context of the present chapter, ‘continuum’ is an interesting device for ‘testing’ the fitness for purpose of public health and voluntary sector responses to sex offenders. For example: