ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which a sample of police officers working in an urban Canadian sexual assault unit constructed female sex offenders and their offences, and how they made investigative decisions on their behalf. Because professional discourses and decision-making practices do not exist in a vacuum, we cannot fully understand them without also studying the social context of police work. How police officers think about their work and how they make decisions is said to be influenced by the occupational culture (Fielding, 1988; Holdaway, 1996; Chan, 1997; Crank, 1998; Holdaway, 1999). Therefore, the first part of this chapter examines the police occupational culture and how this culture constructs sexual assault generally, and female sex offending more specifically. The second and third sections of the chapter explore police constructions, portrayals and decision-making practices with regard to female sex offenders. The notion of female sex offending appears to create varying degrees of discomfort for police officers. By adopting a gendered lens, police officers appear to transform sexual offences by women in ways that reflect traditional sexual scripts and culturally acceptable meanings of femininity. This ultimately leads to the denial of women as potential sexual aggressors. In exploring the factors which appear to contribute to and shape the police culture of denial, the analysis highlights the dialectical and interdependent relationship that exists between societal values, institutional values, and individual values, which, reflecting Giddens' notion of the duality of structure, simultaneously construct, sustain and reproduce notions of female sexual passivity and male sexual aggression.
