ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to offer a concise account of how modern sentencing law in England and Wales, together with associated court orders, have sought to give effect to contemporary concerns that sexual offending, particularly against children, often demands special measures and safeguards. Those concerns have been grounded in beliefs that the pursuit of sexual expression and gratification is so fundamental to an individual’s fulfilment of self and so open to conditioning and reinforcement that deviant sexual interest will not be readily deterred but may well be pursued repeatedly and deviously over a lifetime, causing considerable psychological harm, particularly for children, with less likelihood of readily attained, reliable, lasting desistance, thus prompting greater anxiety centred on continuing risk and consequent justification for public protection. Accordingly, additional measures of social defence have been considered justified where qualifying criteria are met in:
detaining sexual offenders for extended periods of custody beyond the demands of retribution or the constraints of commensurability for the purposes of incapacitation, correctional intervention and rehabilitation;
maintaining extended supervisory oversight and monitoring of sexual offenders in the community;
restricting sexual offenders’ freedom of movement and exercise of autonomy.
Measures of this kind have not been exclusive to sexual offenders, usually also being aimed at those considered prone to perpetrating non-sexual violence, though the thrust of such controls can be applied more keenly to the sex offender.