NCJ Number
224308
Journal
International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology Volume: 52 Issue: 5 Dated: October 2008 Pages: 499-519
Date Published
October 2008
Length
21 pages
Annotation
This article examines the spectrum of criminal justice and community responses to sex offenders between continental Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.
Abstract
Sexual offenders pose serious problems for contemporary societies. All the nations studied in this article were tightening their controls, although at greatly differing speeds, with the United States at one end of the spectrum, with continental Europe (notably, the Germanic societies) at the other, and with the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada somewhere in the middle. The exclusion-inclusion spectrum ranges from community protection measures on one end to therapeutic programs in the middle and restorative justice measures on the other end. In the United States, populist pressure resulted in a community protection approach utilizing sex offender registration, community notification, and civil commitment of violent sexual predators. Although the United Kingdom and Canada have followed the United States trend in utilizing community protection measures, albeit more cautiously, they have utilized significant community-based restorative justice initiatives. Although sex offender crises have recently occurred in continental Europe, a long-standing tradition of the medicalization of deviance, along with the existence of social structural buffers against the influence of victim-driven populist penal movements, has thus far limited the spread of formal community protection responses. Continental European and Anglo-American jurisdictions differ with regard to criminal justice and community responses to sex offenders. This article examines the range of responses on the exclusion-inclusion spectrum between the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and continental Europe. References