Framing Contemporary Sexual Deviance: How Politics, Punishment, and Participatory Democracy Shaped California’s Sexually Violent Predator Law

• In Event: 1258 - Law and Sex

Abstract

This paper uses legal historical and content analysis, as well as supplemental interviews, to examine how California’s 1996 Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) Act frames understandings of what constitutes a sexual predator. This law allows for the commitment of certain offenders to mental hospitals after they have served their criminal penalties, on the logic that they possess “pathological” mental illnesses (such as pedophilia, for example) that lead to higher risks of reoffending). Using debates for and against the act, legislative documents, and interviews with key actors involved, I demonstrate how politicians, adjacent institutions, and social factors impact evolving understandings of sexual predation in this instance. Ultimately, I find that the politicians and the law use scientific findings as rhetorical tools to justify and rationalize emotions of disgust (both their own and those of constituents) toward the sexual crimes they find most offensive (in this case, serial rape and child molestation). In this framework, the medicalization of sexual deviance facilitates the enactment of retributory policies that have little functional use, but are almost impossible for politicians to oppose.

Author

• Rebecca Ann DiBennardo, University of California-Los Angeles