Newgon article needs correction

[galileo2333]

On the newgon article "Moral Panic" there's some inaccuracies:

https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/Moral_panic

2007-2016 - This was a period of relative calm, representing a slight relief in the news cycle as the problematization that commenced in the mid-70s belatedly burned out. Arrests and convictions for sexual offenses began a downward trend that continues in the 2020s.

Arrests and convictions for sexual offenses are at an all time high and continue to increase.

Media attention shifted to institutional forms of abuse, celebrity abuse scandals and generalized trends such as human trafficking, and later, right-wing conspiracy theories and the #MeToo movement.

All these factors, especially the appearance of the #MeToo movement, accelerated arrests and prosecutions for sex offenses, the vast majority of those for activities that shouldn't even be illegal. The celebrity abuse scandals were used to justify increased enforcement of sex crime laws and expanded definitions of sexual abuse. This directly contributed to more incarceration of ordinary people for sex offenses.

[Jim Burton]

Do you have a source for that?

It is widely accepted that the 1990s (in America, but also elsewhere in the western world) represented the peak in law enforcement activity, and accordingly, arrests and convictions for sex offenses peaked in the 1990s and started to fall, again increasing in negative velocity around 2007.

https://bjs.ojp.gov/national-incident-b ... stem-nibrs

See "crime data explorer".

[MemeticTheory]

Legislation regarding sex offenses is often passed swiftly with little to no evaluation of the effectiveness of such policies on preventing recidivism and protecting the public. Further, little criticism is raised despite overwhelming evidence that sex offender registration and community notification is ineffective and has many negative consequences. The societal reaction is created through moral panics resulting in views that are not always reflective of the nature of the problem. In effect, the policies put into place in the name of declaring war on the deviant behavior reflect these views and do not target the specific problem.

While the first two panics involved the identification of sexual offenses, offenders, and the causes of such deviance, the failure of these two time periods to eradicate the problem of sexual offending has caused an evolution in the third sex crime panic from focusing on the nature of sexual offending to a drive to control and contain the population of sexual offenders. Because U.S. society still has little understanding of the nature and cause of sexual offending, laws continue to be ineffective in the third panic and exacerbate the original problem. -Kruse, Lisa Marie, "Sex offenders, sexuality, and social control: A case study in the social construction of a social problem" (2007). Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations.

[Jim Burton]

That is somewhat interesting, since I wrote independently in 2021 that there had been 3 waves of the panic, the first which involved the identification of sexual offenders and the third involving the creation of niches and management of offending by professionals. The fourth involves this idea that pedophilic sexuality is being normalized.

[MemeticTheory]

Registry abolitionism could have multiple fronts from anticarceralism to liberationist to anarchist, femininst, queer, youth liberation, sexual radicalism, etc... using keywords in science archives such as "sex offense regime'' 'sex offender regime' 'exceptionalism and sex' 'sexceptionalism/regime'...
https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/ ... sequence=2

"Although in this introduction to the field of criminal psychopathology
Karpman did not launch into a full-scale discussion of sexuality and
psychopathy, a subject that would later preoccupy him in such works as
The Sexual Offender and His Offenses (1954)"

"Another aspect of this conviction entailed a more inclusive
understanding of the illness or maladjustment deemed to characterize sex
offenders. According to lawyer and psychologist Bertram Pollens, author
of The Sex Criminal, the problem of sex crime extended beyond the
incidents that reach courts and newspapers. Not only are there people
whose "sexual peculiarities" are confined to their homes, sheltered from
the gaze of the law, but
''we must also add the numerous individuals in whom the sexual
deviation is present in a latent form; those who have not expressed
their pathological tendencies in any overt abnormal sexual behavior
but who have expressed it in the language of the unconscious hysteria, neurosis, drug addiction, chronic alcoholism or
psychosis."' The Ungovernable Citizen: Psychopathy,
Sexuality, and the Rise of Medico-Legal
Reasoning

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 2708000204

Sexual psychopathy, public policy, and the liberal state
Abstract
This article addresses several interrelated issues. It strives to situate a class of offenders within the liberal state. The disposition of this class allows an analysis of the tensions in liberal theory. It highlights the ways liberalism attributes individual responsibility for criminal behavior and captures the limits of those attributions. It also reveals liberalism's shift away from models of responsibility toward the social control of deviancy. The disposition of this class points toward the therapeutic mask involved in the social control model. Further, the disposition of this class may well serve as a model for isolating and demonizing other disfavored classes, including political dissenters.
Introduction
Sexual psychopathy is a heterogeneous class that ranges from pedophiles to rapists. When defined within legal frameworks, the class presents boundary problems. For example, a young male may have consensual sex with an underage girl and find himself labeled a sexual psychopath. Rapists may be further divided into a category that finds some more sadistic than others.
This article addresses several interrelated issues. It strives to situate a class of offenders within the liberal state. The disposition of this class allows an analysis of the tensions in liberal theory. It highlights the ways liberalism attributes individual responsibility for criminal behavior and captures the limits of those attributions. It also reveals liberalism's shift away from models of responsibility toward the social control of deviancy. The disposition of this class points toward the therapeutic mask involved in the social control model. Further, the disposition of this class may well serve as a model for isolating and demonizing other disfavored classes, including political dissenters.
The class may, in that sense, provide a wedge away from liberal adversarial jurisprudence. Where that model depends upon notions of intent and individual responsibility, the alternative model calls for delegation of social control to behavioral scientists who will be charged to predict dangerous aggressive behavior and to use that diagnostic to preventatively remove the would-be offender from society.


https://oncefallen.com/history-timeline/ THIS PAGE IS PART OF A FOUR-PART SERIES ON “SEX OFFENDER” HISTORY.

PART 2: A CONCISE HISTORY OF THE “SEX OFFENDER”
PART 3: THE INFLUENCES IN CURRENT SEX OFFENSE LEGISLATION
PART 4: A CONCISE HISTORY OF THE ANTI-REGISTRY MOVEMENT
Timeline of Sex Offender History
Compiled by Derek W. Logue from various resources
26 Dec. 2012, Last Update 18 Sept. 2020

INTRODUCTION

This timeline is intended to provide a chronological guide to the major events that helped shape current sex offender legislation. The timeline is based upon the information contained in various resources, primary from of two comprehensive historical books, “Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America” by Philip Jenkins (1998), and “Sex Fiends, Perverts, and Pedophile: Understanding Sex Crime Policy in America” by Chrysanthi S. Leon (2011). However, some dates and events were extrapolated from other sources

https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/scien ... 4922000158 Libido, Psychic Eugenics and Abnormality


This article attempts to resituate the Greek regime of 4th of August 1936 within the wider context of interwar fascism in Europe and address it as fascist ideology and practice. It does so by pointing to the ways in which the biomedical discourse on gender and sexuality was pivotal in Ioannis Metaxas’s project in terms of playing a crucial role in normalising ideas of racial, class, sexual and gender hierarchy. The article has two areas of focus. The first approaches the eugenic discourse developed in Greece and Europe under liberal governments. This relied on the premise that the mental or psychic disorders it accounted for, identified mainly among the lower classes, were diagnosed as diseases of the ‘libidinous libido’ when it came to criminality, poverty, strikes, psychic diseases and brutal deaths. The second area of focus reveals how, once trained to detect biological and psychical anomalies, Metaxas’s regime managed to perform something that now gives the impression of a magic trick: by waving the wand of psychiatric technocracy over a scene of profound economic inequality, it cultivated an authoritarian, patriarchal, biomedical discourse on psychic normality.


https://notchesblog.com/2017/03/14/sexu ... alifornia/ Sexual Deviance and “Mental Defectiveness” in Eugenics Era California


Eugenic and sexual folklores and the castration of sex offenders in the
Netherlands (1938–1968)
This contribution questions the positive/negative eugenics dichotomy that typifies the historiography on
the eugenic movement in the Netherlands and the claim that this movement was mostly marginal
because only positive eugenics was pursued. From 1938 to 1968 in the Netherlands, after a decade of
debates, 400 sex offenders who had been committed to asylums for the criminally insane were ‘voluntarily’ and ‘therapeutically’ castrated. For political reasons debates on castration, meant to create consensus,
eliminated any reference to or connotation with eugenics, yet these policies were unthinkable without
them. This article shows that thinking about social and sexual problems and their solutions in the
1930s were permeated by eugenic folklore which in turn was informed by sexual folklore. Both eugenic
and sexual lore, as common sense, or as ways of knowing, were about individual and collective loss of self
control which was referred to with a catch-all phrase: ‘hypersexuality’. Although sexual classifications
used in diagnosing sex offenders suggested the existence of discrete sexual categories, homosexuality
for instance was not seen as a sexual alternative or as an identity but as the extent to which an offender
suffered from a form of hypersexuality that threatened the fabric of society

[urlhttps://archief.socialhistory.org/sites/default/files/docs/projects/eugenics.pdf][/url]

https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/401 ... phdBBK.pdf Curing sexual deviance
Medical approaches to sexual
offenders in England, 1919-1959


This thesis examines medical approaches to sexual offenders in England between 1919
and 1959. It explores how doctors conceptualised sexual crimes and those who
committed them, and how these ideas were implemented in medical and legal settings.
It uses medical and criminological texts alongside information about specific court
proceedings and offenders' lives to set out two overarching arguments. Firstly, it
contends that sexual crime, and the sexual offender, are useful categories for analysis.
Examining the medical theories that were put forward about the 'sexual offender',
broadly defined, and the ways in which such theories were used, reveals important
features of medico-legal thought and practice in relation to sexuality, crime, and
'normal' or healthy behaviour. This broad category has often been overlooked in favour
of research into much more specific sexual identities, acts, or offences. Secondly, this
thesis argues that clinical theories in relation to sexual offenders were remarkably
diverse, but that this diversity and resultant flexibility were key to their usefulness for
doctors and the judiciary alike. Doctors did not hold firmly to any single aetiological
model, nor claim that all sexual offenders could be cured. The legal and penal systems
could deploy medical approaches to justify extremely varied decisions, individualising
responses to sexual crime insofar as the legal system would allow. The ways in which
medical theories were incorporated and shaped by the legal system, and the flexible
nature of these theories themselves, extended the variety of possible outcomes for
sexual offenders without fundamentally altering their status. These medical approaches,
established over the early to mid-twentieth century in England, laid important
foundations for later years. This project opens up new ways of understanding medicolegal theory and practice as they relate to a wide range of human sexual behaviour.


[urlhttps://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=687165][/url] The Preventive State, Terrorists and Sexual Predators: Countering the Threat of a New Outsider Jurisprudence

In this Article, I argue that two powerful streams of contemporary American public policy are converging on a single idea. Using a phrase coined by Professor Carol Steiker, we are at risk of becoming a "preventive state," in which the paradigm of governmental social control has shifted from solving and punishing crimes that have been committed, to identifying "dangerous" people and depriving them of their liberty before they can do harm.

The impulse for prevention has taken its strongest form in two disparate areas: the anti-terrorism efforts since 9/11, and ongoing legislative innovations in the campaign against sexual violence. In both areas, the government has erected what Professor Oren Gross has called an "alternate system of justice" in which the normal protections of our civil liberties are substantially degraded in order to make room for an aggressive preventive agenda.

The prevention of harm is, of course, a positive. Our law books are full of statutes intended to regulate risky behavior in order to prevent harm. Here, however, I am concerned with a different type of prevention - what might be called radical prevention - that differs from routine prevention in two ways. First, radical prevention seeks to intervene where there is some sort of "propensity" or risk of future harm, whereas routine prevention responds to actual or attempted harm. Second, radical prevention operates by substantially curtailing people's liberty before harm results, whereas in routine prevention individuals suffer deprivations of liberty only after actual harm is done or attempted.

The government's efforts at radical prevention have, in the last half century, met with diminishing success, as the courts have erected some important constitutional bulwarks against excessive erosions of our liberty in the name of prevention. Historically, a central feature of our radically preventive laws has been their focus on "outsider" groups. This has allowed their attendant constraints on liberty to be viewed as exceptional, thus preserving the legitimacy of the "normal" constitutional order. But the civil rights revolution of the past all but eliminated the legitimate targeting of outsider groups. At the same time, the Supreme Court has recognized the fundamental nature of key aspects of liberty, and insisted that criminal sanctions be limited in a variety of ways, including that they be applied only to behavior that has a relatively close connection to harm. These developments have helped to keep radical prevention in check, even in the face of the terrorist threat.

The central thesis of this Article is that the sexual predator laws provide a model for undercutting these constitutional protections for liberty. The laws undercut these key bulwarks, and allow the establishment of an expansive alternate and degraded system of justice, in which radical prevention prevails at the expense of liberty. Sexual predator laws do this by re-introducing and re-legitimizing the concept of the degraded "other." Membership in this outsider group is then used to rationalize a degraded system of justice, in which the normal protections of the Constitution do not apply.

The Article proceeds as follows. First, I summarize the push for radical prevention that has followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks, noting that many of the proposals have been controversial because they are seen as curtailing civil liberties too broadly. Second, I sketch the push for prevention in the sexual predator legislation and note the nearly unanimous political support for these initiatives. Third, I survey the history of preventive legislation in the U.S. I suggest that prevention is not a new impulse in the law. To the contrary, it has been widespread, yet has been tempered by the application of constitutional principles that have curtailed the most radical forms of prevention. I then briefly examine the recent legislative initiative to update public health laws in response to the threat of bio-terrorism, which despite the understandable fear of communicable contagion, has been constrained by constitutional principles. Finally, I show that the sexual predator legislation affords a template for radical prevention that undercuts these limiting principles, thus containing the toxic seeds of a degraded system of justice that strongly weights prevention over liberty.


https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/file/ ... cience.pdf WEIRD SEX SCIENCE” IN BRITAIN, ca.1900-1939:
NARRATIVES OF NATURALISATION AND ERADICATION

Although Crew wrote little about homosexuality, he was closely involved
with the first and only known surgical castration of a homosexual man in Britain, the
operation performed with the specific purpose of eradicating or at least alleviating
the man’s homosexuality. This occurrence has not previously been known in
scholarship. Historians have previously described how male homosexuals, and sex
offenders more generally, were castrated as a eugenic measure elsewhere. For
example, Theo van der Meer has researched the systematic castration of sex
offenders who were hospitalised in an asylum for the criminally insane in the
Netherlands from 1938 to 1968.46 During this time it is estimated that four hundred
male offenders (“psychopaths”) and at least one female offender were “voluntarily”
castrated, ostensibly as a therapeutic measure. Supporters of the policy even included
homophile sexologists, such as Bernard Premsela and the eugenicist J. Sanders, who
actively campaigned against legal discrimination of homosexuals. Merle Wessel has
looked at the situation in Scandinavia.47 Nazi experiments castrating sex offenders,
45 Ibid., 298.
46 Theo van der Meer, “Eugenic and Sexual Folklores and the Castration of Sex Offenders in the
Netherlands,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 39, no. 2
(2008): 195-204.
47 Wessel, “Castration of Male Sex Offenders.”
233
especially the experiments conducted by Carl Vaernet and Gerhard Schiedlausky at
Buchenwald concentration camp, have been documented and discussed by several
historians including Günter Grau and Geoffrey J. Giles.48
Janet Weston has previously stated that physicians in England were highly
sceptical about castrating sex offenders either for eugenic or therapeutic purposes.49
There were some isolated cases. Joanna Bourke has discussed Lionel L. Westrope,
who castrated at least one nine-year-old boy and two young men at the Poor Law
Hospital in Gateshead County Borough (Durham) during the interwar period.
Westrope described the boy, Henry Lawton, as “an epileptic, imbecile, unable to
talk” who had had his head crushed by forceps when he was born.50 Admitted to the
hospital after attacking his five-year-old sister, he was reported to “lie on his face and
work his body as though having sexual connection”.51 Lawton’s mother pleaded with
Westrope to castrate the boy believing that he might attack more females. Westrope
also surgically castrated fifteen-year-old Richard Pegram, who practiced
masturbation and had rubbed himself up against a woman, and twenty-two-year-old
William George Wilson who was a chronic masturbator, notorious for practicing the
habit in public (in common with Lawton’s case, it was Wilson’s mother who pleaded
for Westrope to castrate her son). The legality of the operations was called into
question and the Chief Medical Officer, George Newman, charged Westrope with
unlawfully wounding his patients, although, in practice, Westrope was only chided
for “mix[ing] up the therapeutic and sociological aspects of these cases”.5


https://ccresourcecenter.org/2015/01/16 ... unishment/ Moral panic over sex offenses results in cruel and self-defeating overpunishment



https://www.sentencingproject.org/repor ... ilization/ The Eugenic Origins of Three Strikes Laws: How “Habitual Offender” Sentencing Laws Were Used as a Means of Sterilization


https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals ... A2F0040E63

“Ravished by Some Moron”: The Eugenic Origins of the Minnesota Psychopathic Personality Act of 1939
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2019
Molly Ladd-Taylor
Abstract:
Twenty U.S. states permit the indefinite detention of civilly committed sex offenders after the end of their prison sentences if their dangerousness is due to a “mental abnormality.” This article explores the origins of one such law by examining its predecessor, the Minnesota Psychopathic Personality Act of 1939. Passed in the wake of a panic over sex crimes and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1940, Minnesota’s psychopath statute extended a 1917 eugenics law providing for the compulsory civil commitment and institutionalization of “defectives” to persons alleged to have a psychopathic personality. Analyzing the 1917 and 1939 laws together shows how one state’s psychopath statute had less to do with psychiatric authority than with the legal and administrative framework established by Progressive-era eugenics. From the 1910s until today, dubious claims about the ability of science to identify potential criminals legitimized politically popular, but constitutionally questionable, forms of administrative and social control.

Sex Exceptionalism in Criminal Law [urlhttps://review.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2023/04/Gruber-75-Stan.-L.-Rev.-755.pdf][/url]

Sex exceptionalism is “the idea that sex and sexualities are inherently
different from all other human activities and topics of study,” as Susan Stiritz
and Susan Appleton explain.17 In the criminal law context, critics of our
uniquely harsh sex-crime regime often focus on spectacular cases of children
whose minor sexual infractions ensnared them in a Kafkaesque system of
lifetime registration, social ostracism, and sadistic “treatment.”18 But I tell the
simple story above to show that even sophisticated left-leaning thinkers
embrace as natural—indeed, pre-legal and pre-moral—the principle that sex
radically changes the equation. People widely believe that a sexual assault is far
worse than a beating, that sexual commerce is distinct from nonsexual
commerce, and that molestation, which is often nonviolent and committed by
children, is an order of magnitude more horrific than child abuse

https://link.springer.com/article/10.10 ... 21-09614-4 Criminal Law Exceptionalism as an Affirmative Ideology, and its Expansionist Discontents


Criminal law exceptionalism is an amalgam of several claims about (ideal or real) exceptionalities (as in exceptional qualities and properties) of the criminal law: it is important to note that these claims are (as I will elaborate in my discussion of the other essays in this symposium) ultimately normativeFootnote7 as well as affirmative.

On a foundational level, punishment and stigmatization are considered extraordinarily harsh means of addressing deviance in a liberal society (burden exceptionalityFootnote8). Although there is a quasi-unanimous agreement in Continental discourse that criminal law is part of public law, the (real or imaginary) harshness of its residualFootnote9 sanctions (and the corresponding sanctioning apparatus) sets it apart from administrative, let alone civil law.Footnote10 This often goes hand-in-hand with a claim of efficacy exceptionality,Footnote11 according to which the criminal law is especially capable both of influencingFootnote12 humans as rational actors (after all, the commands of the criminal law are backed up, or so the story goes, by extraordinary burdensFootnote13) and of thereby guaranteeing the “uncertain certainty” of its normatively promised future.Footnote14 Finally, the assertion of subject-matter exceptionality is intrinsically intertwined (“chicken-or-egg” like) with burden and efficacy exceptionality; it “claims that criminal law addresses […] a discrete set of particularly harmful or wrongful behaviors,”Footnote15 which the criminal law can (and even: has toFootnote16) address.


https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10. ... 18.1544233 Pedophilia Screening in Technosecurity Culture The Construction of Dangerous Sub-populations in the Name of Security
Katrin M. Kämpf
Pages 127-152 | Published online: 13 Nov 2018
ABSTRACT
Pedophilia numbers among the prominent fears of western societies. Politicians have argued in favor of mass surveillance, claiming it is required to catch pedophiles, while a growing commercial market exists for ‘pedophilia screenings’. Sexology defines pedophilia as a sexual preference for prepubescent children, meaning that prior sex offenses are not essential for a diagnosis. The diagnostic criteria have changed little since pedophilia was first described as a psychiatric phenomenon, but there have been vast changes in the ways in which pedophilia is diagnosed. One aspect that has however remained the same is the persistent belief that pedophilia is an innate trait of an individual; this makes pedophilia discourses compatible with current risk discourses. Today's diagnostic tools include a range of technological procedures. This trend of deploying technologically enhanced diagnostics is indicative of a shift towards a technosecurity logic within the project of seeking physical evidence to demonstrate sexual desire. At the same time, this shift is co-constitutive of current risk discourses regarding child abuse. Technosecurity-based attempts to identify pedophiles may re-normalize the notion that ‘dangerous sub-populations’ exist that deserve only limited rights, thus paving the way for erosion of the legal system and of democratic principles.



(Historical roots of the sexceptionalism regime???? Eugenics??)