ABSTRACT
The following two chapters will illustrate the changing attitudes to offenders, using sex offenders and young offenders as case studies. These two categories of offenders are not usually put together but the juxtaposition here is deliberate. Both the sex offender and the young offender have undergone a significant reconstruction within official discourse on crime and disorder. Both have been demonized but both (albeit in very different ways) have epitomized the contradictions that result from policies based on an inadequate understanding of the complexities of the issues involved. Sex offenders are constructed simultaneously as ‘strangers’ and ‘known’, as ‘monsters’ and ‘ordinary blokes’, but always as lying and manipulative recidivists. Young offenders are constructed simultaneously as ‘just boys being boys [sic]’ and ‘little monsters’, as ‘growing out of crime’ and being ‘persistent offenders’ but always as (ir)responsible offenders against society rather than as victims of its failures. And there are young sex offenders. Between a quarter and a third of alleged sexual abuse is estimated to have been committed by young people (Coombes 2003) although the ‘cycle of abuse’ theory (that abusers have been victims of abuse themselves) has been challenged by a range of studies that indicate rates of victimization among abusers of between 30 and 70 per cent (Harris and Staunton 2000; Bailey and Boswell 2004). Other factors perceived to contribute to sexual offending by young people are drugs and alcohol misuse and the influence of a male youth culture in which forcing young women to have sex remains acceptable to a significant 163minority of young men (Harris and Staunton 2000). The HM Inspectorate of Probation Thematic Inspection (1998) observed that, unlike other adolescent offending, sex offending is something that adolescents, once they start, tend to ‘grow into’ rather than ‘out of’. The same inspection report expressed concern about ‘the largest and most worrying gap in provision’ for adolescent sex offenders (HM Inspectorate of Probation 1998: 12).
