Читать книгу Social Work with Sex Offenders - Cowburn Malcolm - Страница 29

It is important to recognise epistemological influences on how knowledge is shaped. Foucault (1977, 1984) highlights the relationship between power and knowledge, and suggests that in late 19th-century Europe, scientific (medicine and psychology) and social-scientific (criminology, social work and psychology) forms of knowledge replaced religion as the dominant way of understanding both sexuality and social responses to deviance. In his analysis, Foucault did not, however, utilise a structuralist perspective. Structuralist understandings of the operation of power identify hierarchical ‘divisions’ of societies, such as class, gender, race and sexuality (Lukes, 2005). Early feminist theory particularly focuses on the social division of gender and analyse(s) how men have maintained power in most global societies. Feminist epistemologists (eg Harding, 1991, 2006; Code, 2006; Fricker, 2007) focus attention on how male knowledge, specifically ‘scientific’ knowledge, has both embodied and maintained the hierarchy of gender while adopting methodologies predicated on ‘objectivity’ (Harding, 1991, p 81). Other structuralist critiques referred to in Chapter One highlight the privileging of ‘white’ forms of knowledge; black feminists in the US insisted on the importance of race in seeking to understand sex crimes. The strength of feminist analysis of sex crimes is that it locates the discussion in a wider analysis of women’s oppression; this ideological orientation, however, may have delayed the full recognition of females who sexually harm others and male victims of sexual harm. In scrutinising underlying epistemological assumptions of ways of understanding sex crime and sex offenders, we adopt a critical approach to the forms of knowledge we explore and describe.