"Sex Offender Treatment" Unmasked

Описание: The legacy of the 40-year-long sex panic in the U.S. is a vast regime of draconian penalties and “management” of “sex offenders” – a category including anyone from consensual teen lovers to armed rapists. Along with long prison sentences, the sex offender registry, and restrictions on residency, work, recreation, travel, and family life, a crucial element of the regime is “sex offender treatment.” Based on the notion that “sexual offending” is a unique, incurable disorder, which must be “contained” to protect the community, especially children, from predation, such treatment is anything but therapeutic. It is coercive, moralistic, often humiliating, sometimes endless, and practiced in nonconfidential collaboration with punitive authorities. In many states a diagnosed “sexually violent predator” may be detained indefinitely in a psychiatric facility after completing a prison sentence. Opponents of registries often promote treatment as a humane and effective alternative. But not only is the evidence of its effectiveness equivocal, “sex offender treatment” should be understood in a Foucauldian frame, as the criminalization of sexual deviance and the medicalization of crime, deployed to repressive ends from Salpêtrière to the Soviet gulags to gay “conversion therapy,” exported globally from the U.S., especially to Africa and Latin America. People who commit sexual violence are indeed psychologically troubled.

What responses address sexual harm-doing while upholding justice and nourishing diverse and free sexual cultures?

Source: https://lectures.owltalks.org/videos/...

Judith Levine is an American journalist, essayist, and author. She has published hundreds of articles and commentaries on sex, gender, justice, and feminism. This talk was given at the 24th Congress of the World Health Association for Sexual Health in Mexico City, October 2019.
Just Future Project has posted this video of the express permission of the speaker.