ABSTRACT
Currently, prison and the community treatment programmes for perpetrators of sexual crime are a relatively common feature of criminal justice systems across the world. In the United Kingdom, the Sex Offender Treatment Programme (SOTP) and the Community Sex Offender Groupwork programme are an established part of the criminal justice response to sexual crime, and in recent years numerous probation officers have accrued a repertoire of skills and expertise in providing that treatment. While specifically targeted treatment of this kind is relatively new, awareness of the problem of sexual crime is not. Although it is true that important aspects of sexual crime, such as child sexual abuse, were brought more into national consciousness by the attention of feminist writers and activists in the last quarter of the twentieth century, feminist reformers and social workers (through their child protection caseloads) were directly involved in the response to the problem much earlier (Brown and Barrett 2002; Smart 1999; Thomas 2000). Moreover, the background of moral anxiety (for example, the anxiety that followed W. T. Stead’s exposure of child prostitution in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1895) against which their work was undertaken was similar to that existing today. What differs is the language of anxiety, now expressed more in terms of risk, public protection and control than moral degeneracy and sin. The source of that anxiety – the child molester, the rapist, the flasher and, erstwhile, the homosexual – has always been a demon of some kind, but that demonisation has varied in intensity and effect. Moreover, the problem, whichever way it has been defined, has persisted through numerous, complex contextual changes encompassing sexual mores, cultural and attitudinal shifts, media attention, changing law, political responses and policy development. Within that broad context, this chapter will explore how the day-to-day work of probation officers with people who commit sexual offences has developed, and that exploration will be tinged with a curiosity about whether the probation service has been a shaper of practice and policy and a significant contributor to the knowledge base or whether it has been driven by more powerful political, cultural and theoretical agenda. In itself it will tell a story, but one shaped by the narrator. Like Plummer (1995: 170), this particular story teller has long since come to the view that ‘no stories are true for all time [and that stories are] aligned with time and the place of their telling’ and, accordingly, this story when told will offer a contribution to understanding and then rest on the page and wait for later re-telling.
