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Through a combination of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, this paper looks at the hidden ideological discourses surrounding sex offenders in the British media. Corpus linguistics provides an excellent framework to discover such discourse patterns and the critical discourse analysis framework helps contextualise the findings. The specific aim of the paper is to discover and compare the discourse patterns surrounding the specific nominals rapist* and paedophile* in order to see how the representations differ. The analysis uncovered that the representation of both offenders was sensationalised and full of negative and emotionally loaded words. Furthermore, it was discovered that two differing discourses were prominent for each nominal: An animalistic and bodily discourse for rapist* and a discourse of deviance and the mind for peadophile*. Lastly, it is argued that these misrepresentations are problematic as they misinform both the public and the regulation of offenders.

When released from prison, sex offenders are typically required to register with designated law enforcement officials as a condition of their parole. These officials can warn local community members, organizations, and establishments of the offender's incoming presence. Research indicates that community notification can adversely affect sex offenders in terms of their interpersonal and family relationships, employment opportunities and housing, and can lead to offender harassment that extends to the family members of sex offenders (Burchfield & Mingus, 2008; Levenson & Cotter, 2005a, 2005b; Levenson, D'Amora, & Hern, 2007; Tewksbury, 2004, 2005; Tewksbury & Lees, 2007; Zevitz & Farkas, 2000b). The current analysis seeks to build on and extend the existing literature by investigating the consequences of sex offender registration and community notification from the perspective of registered sex offenders and sexually violent predators in Pennsylvania. Using multiple methods of data collection (i.e., survey and interview research) and analyses, the present study contributes to the current understanding of how sex offenders experience registration and community notification and focuses on the positive and negative effects (e.g., unintended and unanticipated consequences) of being labeled and subject to community notification. Data for the present study were collected in collaboration with four providers of sex offender treatment. These treatment facilities are non-profit mental health organizations that provide both outpatient examinations and treatment services for sex offenders. All treatment providers are located in Pennsylvania, and will remain anonymous in the current study. The survey sample consists of 200 adult male sex offenders. For the purposes of making comparisons, 181 of the sampled sex offenders were further classified as the following three subsamples: (1) registered sex offenders (RSOs) (n = 121), (2) sexually violent predators (SVPs) (n = 13), and (3) non-registered sex offenders (and non-sexually violent predators) (n = 47). Nine of the SVPs elected to participate in the face-to-face interview portion of this research where topics focused on the impact of active community notification, the process whereby the state police are required to mail out letters to community members about an offender's physical description and home address. The age of the interview sample ranged from 35 to 63, and the average was 49.22 years old. Descriptive results of the complete survey sample reveal that most sex offenders are White or African American, middle-aged, and not married, and have relatively little formal education. Most sex offenders are working in some capacity, self-identify as "working class," and earn less than $20,000 per year. The majority of the total sample of sex offenders has been convicted of indecent assault/indecent sexual assault (24.6%) followed by possession of child pornography (12%) and then rape (11.4%). Overall, most victims are minor-aged females who were known by - but not related to - the offender. Findings from the anonymous survey also indicate that over 40 percent of the sampled RSOs are restricted by a 1,000-foot-rule, have primary group members who sustained some type of harm, and have had meaningful, personal relationships severed. Sexually violent predators experienced job loss, denial of employment, loss of housing, and denial of a place to live, and were treated rudely in public, and had primary group members who experienced emotional harm and, separately, had personal relationships severed at a higher rate (i.e., at least 10 percentage points) than RSOs. None of the SVPs were physically assaulted, whereas six RSOs (i.e., 5 percent of 120 RSOs) were physically assaulted. Using only a combination of two of the three subsamples of sex offenders (i.e., RSOs and SVPs), the multivariate contingency table analyses assessed how sex offenders' selection of victim-type, relationship to victim, and race influenced the fifteen different economic, residency-related, and harassment outcomes. Specifically, if offenders victimized a child (i.e., victims from age 5 to 17), as opposed to an adult (i.e., 18 or older), they were significantly more likely to be restricted by a 1,000-foot-rule, as expected. Offenders who victimized children were also more likely than offenders who victimized adults (by at least 10 percentage points) to experience job loss and receive harassing telephone calls, and to have primary group members who sustained some form of emotional harm and, separately, have personal relationships severed. Findings gleaned from the interviews indicate that SVPs are experiencing several of the problems identified in the previous and related literature. Specifically, six of the interviewees (66.67 percent) indicated that, since the notification process began, they have had a difficult time locating and obtaining affordable housing. Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was used to examine the effect of sex offenders' socio-demographics, offender characteristics, victim characteristics, and negative experiences resulting from registration and/or notification on self-esteem (Rosenberg, 1965), mastery (Pearlin et al., 1981; Pearlin & Schooler, 1978), stigma (Link, 1987; Link et al., 1997), and depression using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). The multivariate regression results were quite unexpected. After controlling for sex offenders' sociodemographics, offender characteristics, and victim characteristics, none of the scales devised to measure the impact of registration and/or community notification significantly predicted any of the four outcomes. The significance of these findings for criminological theory, and offender rehabilitation and reintegration are discussed. / Criminal Justice

The federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA; 2006) established a uniform, offense-based registration system for sex offenders age 14 and older. The legislation created a hierarchical, three-tier classification scheme in which convictions of the most severe sex offenses result in Tier III assignment and convictions of the least severe offenses yield Tier I delegation. Juveniles are treated the same as adults when adjudicated of serious, Tier III offenses such as rape and aggravated indecent assault. Tier III assignment requires lifetime registration and notification for offenders in jurisdictions in which they live, work, and go to school. On December 20th, 2011, Governor Corbett signed Pennsylvania's version of SORNA and it was implemented exactly one year later on December 20th, 2012. The project, which focuses on Pennsylvania's version of SORNA, comes at a time when the impact of this new law has yet to be assessed. This study explores the system resources necessary for implementing this legislation, including personnel, costs, and enhancements to technologies necessary for creating and disseminating information on sex offenders. Although it has garnered much attention because it places unfunded mandates on states, opposition on behalf of jurisdictions is largely due to the inclusion of juveniles. Many researchers and legal advocates have argued against the policy due to the amenability of juveniles to treatment, low recidivism rates among sex offenders, and the negative consequences lifetime registration may have on youthful offenders. In fact, no previous research supports registration and notification as effective tools for deterring sex offending. While the aforementioned concerns brought to the attention of the government are credible, they have been unsuccessful in producing change at the federal level. These concerns were influential in drafting Pennsylvania's legislation that limited the number of offenses that triggered registration and withheld juvenile information from the public website. This dissertation employed a mixed-methods design to investigate SORNA's potential effects based upon the inclusion of juveniles. Research questions focused on the workload of agencies who work with sex offenders, the potential costs associated with SORNA requirements, the number of juvenile offenders now and in the future who may be implicated by the legislation, and the opinions and experiences of practitioners who work with juvenile sex offenders. Data collected by the Pennsylvania Juvenile Court Judges' Commission were analyzed to investigate the research questions. Descriptive and bivariate inferential statistical analyses were conducted, in addition to data-validated dynamic systems modeling to provide a prospective analysis into how many youth may face lifetime registration across the Commonwealth. Costs incurred as a result of SORNA's requirements were explored as well. Following the quantitative analyses, interviews with practitioners were conducted to obtain opinions and insight on the projected volume of juvenile offenders affected by SORNA and fiscal information relevant to juvenile sex offender supervision, management, and registration. / Criminal Justice

My dissertation addresses the phenomenon of stranger danger to children and tries to answer the question of how the category of sex offender has been produced to become the primary target in contemporary sex crime control. I examine the period from the 1960s through the 1990s, the period beginning with the rising awareness of child abuse and criminal and psychiatric patient rights challenges to preventive confinement and ending with institutionalizing the regime of sex offender risk management. I attend particularly to psychological techniques that were designed and used to produce sex offender categories, by focusing on three interconnected dimensions: first, the formation of a new discipline of forensic psychology in the crime control area; second, the methods of knowledge production about sex offenders; and third, the institutional aspects of crime control centered on repeat stranger offenders. This dissertation examines the shaping of risk as a value-laden cultural product, involving the identification of risks to be managed, the selection of risk factors, and the decisions of "acceptable" levels of risk. In engaging in conversation about ongoing policy issues, my work intends to go beyond the opposition between civil rights and public safety to understand how the politics of crime control came to center on the dangerous stranger, a center around which the two political values of rights and safety have collided and been negotiated. I provide a genealogy of actuarial risk management and situate its origins in relation to the civil rights revolution. By examining the shift from psychiatric dangerousness prediction to psychological risk management, I argue that the risk management regime is an outgrowth of psychologists' attempts to accommodate civil rights claims in a broader context where socio-cultural tensions over the changing family values have zeroed in on stranger danger. While psychologists initially promoted actuarial justice as a rational method of balancing conflicting social values, its implementation was dictated by institutional demands for efficiency in regulating an increasing number of sex offenders. Risk management technologies led to the mutual reproduction of crime data and criminal populations at risk of reoffense, which contributed to the expansion of populations under criminal supervision. / Ph. D.

In the past ten years or so there has been a growing concern that the treatment needs of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) sex offenders in prison are not being appropriately met. Underpinning this concern is the continued under representation of BME sex offenders on the Sex Offender Treatment Programme (SOTP). Although some research has been undertaken into how BME prisoners experience the SOTP and in to its ostensible effectiveness with BME sex offenders, little is known about why the take-up of the SOTP is poor with this group. In this paper we first consider some specific demographic issues that need to be understood in order to reflect more widely on the BME sex offender in prison. We then summarise what is currently known about effective practice with this group, thereafter we consider, in turn, current provision for BME sex offenders in England and Wales and suggestions for developing practice with this group of men. However, before we turn to these issues, it is important to consider briefly issues of terminology. Terminologies in relation to ethnicities and race are fraught with conceptual difficulties. Aspinall has highlighted the limitations of `pan-ethnic¿ groups, such as `BME¿; such groupings are `statistical collectivities¿ and `the groups thus defined will be nothing more than meaningless statistical collectivities that do not represent any of the constituent groups within the term.¿ . However, at the outset of this paper we use the collective term BME - this term is currently used by a number of Government Departments in the UK, including the Prison Service. Later we suggest that a more sophisticated understanding of ethnic cultures may be necessary to develop practice with BME sex offenders.

Submitted by admin tede (tede@pucgoias.edu.br) on 2018-06-20T17:56:44Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Julia Nunes de Souza Teixeira.pdf: 1102437 bytes, checksum: ba92bf6daf45c58fbe96e7ba4c524dab (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-06-20T17:56:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Julia Nunes de Souza Teixeira.pdf: 1102437 bytes, checksum: ba92bf6daf45c58fbe96e7ba4c524dab (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-10-26 / This dissertation is organized into two articles that aim to to understand psychopathic traits in sex offender against children and adolescents, as well as their relationship with the experience of victimization throughout life. The first article aims to systematically explore and synthesize the knowledge produced about the use of Psychopathy Checklist-Revised - PCLR in sex offender against children and adolescents. It was found a total of 19 articles through which it was possible to verify that PCL-R, in most cases, can be considered a useful and valid instrument to assess the psychopathy in SVA in the cultural contexts in which the instrument was applied, as well as as to predict criminal recidivism in this specific sample. The second article is an empirical study, whose main objective was to investigate the personality traits of SVA through PCL-R and the victimizations suffered by them through the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire - JVQ. Thirty SVA, male volunteers, serving a prison sentence in a state penitentiary in the state of Goiás, were divided into two groups: G1 AVS considered psychopathic (PCL-R≥30 points) and G2 (SVA (PCL-R <30) not considered psychopathics .The results indicated that 33.3% of the sample met the criteria for psychopathy (score> 30 in PCL-R). The results showed significant differences between groups: the younger the SVA, the greater the PCL-R score; the higher the PCL-R score, the greater the variety of crimes committed, the greater the number of victims, the more escapes and rebellions, the greater the number of cases responding and the longer the total time of punishment. The results also indicated a positive correlation between the PCL-R score and G1 malpractice, revealing that the higher the PCL-R score, the greater the number of victimizations suffered in the maltreatment screening. / A presente dissertação de mestrado está organizada em dois artigos que têm como objetivo compreender os traços de psicopatia em autores de violência sexual contra crianças e adolescentes (AVS), assim como a relação desses traços com a vivência de vitimização ao longo da vida. O primeiro artigo tem como objetivo explorar e sintetizar o conhecimento produzido sobre o uso do Psychopathy Checklist-Revised - PCL-R em autores de violência sexual. Foi encontrado um total de 19 artigos por meio dos quais foi possível constatar que o PCL-R, na maioria dos casos, pode ser considerado um instrumento útil e válido para avaliar a psicopatia em AVS nos contextos culturais em que o instrumento foi aplicado, bem como para prever a reincidência criminal nessa amostra específica. O segundo artigo trata de um estudo empírico, cujo objetivo principal foi investigar os traços de personalidade de AVS por meio do PCL-R e as vitimizações sofridas por eles por meio do Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire - JVQ. Participaram do estudo 30 AVS, voluntários, do sexo masculino, cumprindo pena em regime fechado em uma penitenciária do estado de Goiás, que foram subdivididos em dois grupos: G1 AVS considerados psicopatas (PCL-R³ 30 pontos) e o G2 (AVS não considerados psicopatas (PCL-R< 30). Os resultados indicaram que 33,3% da amostra preenchiam os critérios para psicopatia (pontuação > 30 no PCL-R). Os resultados mostraram diferenças significativas entre os grupos: quanto mais jovem o AVS maior foi a pontuação no PCL-R; quanto mais elevada a pontuação no PCL-R, maior a variedade de crimes cometidos, maior o número de vítimas, mais fugas e rebeliões, maior o número de processos que respondiam e maior o tempo total de pena. Os resultados apontaram também correlação positiva entre a pontuação no PCL-R e maus tratos para o G1, revelando que quanto maior a pontuação no PCL-R, maior o número de vitimizações sofridas no crivo maus tratos.