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Popular responses towards sex offenders ignore their humanity and are generated and sustained by ‘common-sense’ aspects of most cultures. In most societies, the sex offender is a pariah, a social outcast. Social workers may take on many of these attitudes without giving them critical scrutiny. These attitudes are not a sound basis for professional social work. The first reflective exercise helps readers explore and understand how they feel and what they think about sex offenders.

Reflective exercise: What do you know about sex offenders, victims and sex crimes?

This exercise is designed to help you identify what you know and what you feel about all parties involved in sex crimes. It does not need any prior preparation, but it does require you to answer the questions quickly and honestly. Use a blank piece of paper.

1. Using all types of language to capture how you feel about sex offenders and what you know about them, complete this sentence as many times as you can in 60 seconds: ‘Sex offenders are …’

2. Using all types of language to capture how you feel about victims of sex offenders and what you know about them, complete this sentence as many times as you can in 60 seconds: ‘Victims of sex offenders are …’

3. Using whatever language seems to be appropriate to capture how you feel and what you know about sex violence, complete this sentence as many times as you can in 60 seconds: ‘Sexual violence is …’

4. Where do you find information about sex offenders?

We will return to this piece of work later in the book, when we will ask you to begin to analyse your attitudes and knowledge.

Most people start to develop an understanding of sex crimes and sex offenders from the media (social media, newspapers and television). However, this may be problematic because of how the media, predominantly, represent these issues. Willis et al (2010, p 551), in their study of how public attitudes help or hinder sex offenders refrain from offending, note that the less aware people were of relevant issues, the more likely they were to subscribe to stereotypical beliefs disseminated by news media. In a US study of the attitudes and beliefs of lawmakers, Sample and Kadleck (2008) found that US politicians’ main source of information about sex crimes was the media. Clearly, the news media is both powerful and influential, and requires further consideration.

Since 1991, when Soothill and Walby published Sex Crime in the News, there has been regular academic interest in how sex crimes are reported in the media (Jenkins, 1998; Kitzinger, 1999, 2004; Cowburn and Dominelli, 2001; Critcher, 2002, 2003; Silverman and Wilson, 2002; Greer, 2003; Jewkes, 2011). A common theme in these studies is how the use of stereotypical images, whether the ‘rapist’ of the 1980s or, more recently, the ‘paedophile’, obscures considered discussion of sexual harm and how to reduce it. Academic critique of media representations can be understood through what Garland (2008) calls the ‘study of social reaction’. A key contribution to this considers ‘Folk devils and moral panics’. The concepts ‘folk devil’ and ‘moral panic’ were first coined and brought together by Stan Cohen in 1972. A ‘folk devil’ is ‘A condition, episode, person or group of persons [that] … become defined as a threat to societal values and interests’ (Cohen, 1972, p 9).

A key phrase here is ‘societal values and interests’; Rohloff et al (2013, p 8) point to ‘the deployment of morality to obfuscate dominant ideological interests; to act as a veil over the workings of power’. Society is not homogeneous, but the social construction of the ‘folk devil’ is part of the ‘veil’. The ‘folk devil’ is construed as ‘other’, as apart from and a threat to respectable (middle-class) society. A recent edited collection (Cree et al, 2015a) following an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (2012) seminar series identifies a range of folk devils. Here, we select a few: the ‘spatial folk devil’, defined as problematic because of where they originate from and live (Mannay, 2015); ‘feral families’ – welfare-dependent, prone to violence and predominantly Maori (Beddoe, 2015); ‘teenage mothers’ (Brown, 2015); child traffickers (Westwood, 2015); ‘radicalised’ minority groups (McKendrick, 2015); ‘Chavs’ (Le Grand, 2015); and Roma people (Clark, 2015). Additionally, ‘paedophiles’ of various types (Furedi, 2015; Quayle, 2015) are identified. While these groups are diverse, they share the following characteristics in media reportage: they are outsiders; they lack moral worth; they do not subscribe to ‘societal’ values; and they are negatively portrayed. Such ‘folk devils’ are represented as marginal and threatening to ‘society’. ‘Society’s’ response to these groups is orchestrated through the deployment of a ‘moral panic’, which is presented ‘in a stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right thinking people’ (Cohen, 1972, p 9).

Garland (2008, p 9) offers this succinct summary of the term moral panic: it is a ‘way of saying “no” to the forces of hyperbole’. To characterise a social reaction (eg media reportage of sex crimes) as moral panic is to question the seriousness of the reaction. Thus, Cree et al (2015b, p xii) comment:

The lens of moral panic highlights the ways in which social issues that begin with real concerns may lead to labeling and stigmatizing of certain behaviours and individuals; they may precipitate harsh and disproportionate legislation; they may make people more fearful and society a less safe place.

The concepts of folk devil and moral panic, used analytically, highlight oppressive social dynamics in relation to marginalised and oppressed groups by challenging both how these groups are described (as ‘folk devils’) and the social reaction to them (‘moral panic’), which, in some cases, is used to justify draconian laws, and sometimes the denial of human rights.

Reflective exercise: Reflections on media portrayals of sex offenders

1. What type of news media do you engage with (eg newspapers, television, internet, Twitter, etc)?

2. In the next month, note how often sex offenders are reported on and how they are described.

3. What information does this provide you and how does this influence how you think about sex offenders and sex crimes?

4. How does this information relate to your responses to the first reflective exercise earlier in this chapter?

In considering media representations of the sex offender, we note that he is generally an atypical man who is discovered to have a range of ‘deviant’ and sexually dangerous preoccupations. Where the offender is a woman, they are also portrayed as being ‘odd’, ‘abnormal’ and deviant. Offences discussed are outside of the home – in public space or within institutions (Greer, 2003; Kitzinger, 2004; Jewkes, 2011). In recent years, representations have changed slightly to accommodate the ‘celebrity sex offender’, the ‘institutional’ sex offender (particularly members of organisations with responsibilities for children, eg, churches and residential schools) and the South Asian sex offender. The offenders remain ‘outsiders’: they operate outside of domestic space, but they use their status as a vehicle for both committing and concealing their offences (Terry and Ackerman, 2008; Cowburn, 2012; Gill and Harrison, 2015).

Hayes and Baker (2014) identified six ways in which female sex offenders (FSOs) were described through media reporting: demonisation; sensationalism and titillation; minimisation and mitigation; medicalisation and psychologising; romanticising; and women as nurturers. FSOs were demonised through language that was extreme and rejecting, using emotionally charged phrases to describe both them and their behaviour. Linked to this was a sensationalism in the reporting that seemed designed to entertain the audience through explicit descriptions of the behaviours in ways that were almost pornographic in their emphasis. The rarity of these cases added to the novelty of the described behaviours. Where the abuse was same-sex, there were high levels of anger and anxiety about transgressing roles. Within the reporting, there was a theme of viewing women as accomplices of men, either coerced or emotionally dependent, which minimised their responsibility and was seen as making them less culpable. The same outcome was seen in the description of the women as having emotional or psychological problems, usually stereotypically gendered, such as depression or maladjustment. They were ‘ill’ and this was linked to their offending, including reports that these adult women were so damaged that their male child victims were viewed as the powerful ones in the abuse. Abusive incidents were also reconfigured with a ‘romantic’ angle, particularly where the victim was a male adolescent, using terms such as ‘lover’ and ‘affair’ that would be hard to imagine in contemporary descriptions if the genders were reversed. This had the effect of making the male victim complicit in his abuse, minimising any harm that may have been done to him. This was not the case where the victim was female, where anxieties about the damaging impact were heightened due to homophobia. Hayes and Baker (2014) found that descriptors of the women emphasised traditional and essentialised gender roles, such as mother and carer, which emphasised nurturing and trust. These roles were challenged by the sexually abusive behaviour and compounded the response: the women were castigated for their behaviour and for transgressing their expected roles.

Media-constructed sex offenders are outsiders, deviant and social pariahs who threaten not only potential victims, but also the domestic structures of social life (Jewkes, 2011; Galeste et al, 2012). However, this way of presenting the sex offender as a folk devil has some flaws: it does nothing to develop understanding of sex offenders or the safety of individuals and communities in relation to sex crimes. Galeste et al (2012, p 4) note that media representation of child sex offenders in the US:

fuels the public’s morbid fascination with sex offenders who target children.… Such media reports have led to national moral panics surrounding the safety of children … that has, in turn, perpetuated the acceptance of myths that run contrary to empirical knowledge about sex crimes and sex offenders.

‘Empirical knowledge about sex crimes and sex offenders’ points to most sex offenders as being ‘ordinary’ members of many communities (eg workplace, faith and geographical). Most victims of sex crimes know the person who harms them (Home Office, 2007; Bonnycastle, 2012). Sex offenders are not a group of alien beings that stand outside ‘society’ posing a threat that ‘right thinking people’ must defend. They are part of communities and, in some cases, achieve national prominence within their chosen fields of work; they are an ever-changing and disparate group of people. We explore issues relating to knowledge about people who commit sex offences in Chapter Two.

There are many ways in which to understand sexually harmful behaviours. However, in this case, a moral panic perspective does not offer greater insights. Moreover, the ‘folk devil’ sex offender is clearly a ‘hyperbolic’ construction that conceals the more commonplace sex offender. Building penal policies and social work practice on the basis of moral panics caused by the sex offender as folk devil ignores the need for wider community safety/public health approaches to preventing sex crimes. In the chapters that follow, we show that ‘moral panic’-driven penal policies, such as the sex offender register and public notification, are not making much of a contribution to challenging the underlying causes of sex crimes and, thus, developing safer communities. Without critical interrogation, folk devil mythologies and moral panics in relation to sex crimes will continue to contribute to wider societal denial of the commonplace nature of sex crimes. It is to the phenomenon of denial that we now turn.