ABSTRACT
We don’t have ethnic cleansing here. It is social cleansing. These campaigners have a list of twenty names of people they say have committed crimes against children. But no-one knows where the list comes from, who has written it or what evidence it is based on. Now four innocent families are in hiding because of it. (Father Waddington, local priest, as reported in Perry (2000), during the paedophile demonstrations at Paulsgrove, Portsmouth)
Introduction
The above statement was made at a moment in time in the ‘history’ of the development of risk-based community management strategies for sex offenders. It is perhaps inevitable that this is an emotive subject, especially for those communities within which such offenders are ‘managed’ by the authorities. But notwithstanding the strategic approach to community based risk management which has generated the concerns reflected in the Paulsgrove example (and elsewhere), it has been said that current strategies represent a ‘narrow range of responses which are defensive and focused on risk rather than on treatment and rehabilitation’ – effectively ‘the demonization of sex offenders’ (Matravers 2003b: 3).
