Abstract
“Sex offender” is a legal concept: he or she is a person who has violated statutes prohibiting improper sexual contact. Most of the conversation about sex offender statutes such as Megan’s Laws and Sexually Violent Predator Acts are about this legal category. Although the types of sexual offenses vary, as do the types of sex offenders, child sexual abuse is the predominant category of sex offender in the popular imagination and in the legislative conversations because child sexual abuse (assumed to be perpetrated by an adult male against a very young child) is generally regarded as the most monstrous conduct imaginable. Criminal statutes draw age distinctions, both with respect to the offender and the victim, but Megan’s Laws and SVPAs refer only to contact offenses and thereby lump all offenders in a single category for legal purposes. So for the general public, the term “sex offender” is usually assumed to describe a person who sexually abuses children, because child sexual abuse triggers moral panic more than any other category of sex offense.
Social groups create deviance by making rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders. From this point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender.’
Howard S. Becker
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Douard, J., Schultz, P. (2013). The Child Sex Abuser. In: Monstrous Crimes and the Failure of Forensic Psychiatry. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 53. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5279-5_6
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