Making a Sex Offender: Identity and U.S. Sex Crimes Case Processing

• In Event: The Social Construction of Sexual Violence

Abstract

There are an estimated 60,000 women on U.S. sex offender registries and thousands more women accused of causing sexual harm who never wind up being convicted of a crime. While women of color appear disproportionately on U.S. sex offender registries, existing scholarship does not discuss this reality, nor pinpoint where in the sex crimes criminal legal process women of color may experience bias. Feminist scholarship on intersectionality in criminal legal contexts from Richie (1996, 2012), Pasko and Lopez (2014), and Potter (2013) raises the question of how the convergence of gender, racial, and sexual identities affects women’s experiences with the criminal legal system in sex crime cases. Using data on prison entry compiled from 26 U.S. states, National Crime Victimization Survey on crime commission, and National Incident-based Reporting System data on reports and arrests, this paper traces the process of how women become “sex offenders” in the U.S. criminal legal system, with attention to how gender, sex, and race interact. This analysis will provide the first longitudinal accounting of how the intersectional identities of women accused of causing sexual harm affect sex crime case processing.

Author

• Amelia Roskin-Frazee, University of California, Irvine