Suffering harms and weighing impacts: individuals and stakeholders offer perspectives on sex offender policies - CANCELLED

• In Event: Reimagining Concepts and Policies Associated with Rape Victims and Sex Offenders

Abstract

Sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws have been repeatedly shown to lack public safety benefits, while imposing significantly destabilizing material and psychosocial collateral consequences on people required to register (PRR). However, these laws remain extremely popular, and have been largely immune from broader criminal legal reform discourse. This study uses 30 qualitative semi-structured interviews with PRR and 20 interviews with professional stakeholders in Philadelphia to explore the wide-ranging impacts of SORN policies on PRR’s lives, as well as perspectives about these policies’ value and purpose. Participants described SORN’s devastating material, social, and emotional impacts on PRR, and were unable to identify specific instances where SORN policies had prevented sexual harm. Despite near universal agreement about the direct and multifaceted harms and the lack of tangible benefits, participants expressed complicated and varied views about SORN’s continued necessity. The majority asserted a need to maintain SORN in some form, frequently alluding to vague notions of dangerousness and community protection, despite directly contradictory professional and personal experiences. This presentation documents the significant harms generated by SORN policies, while highlighting how entrenched societal notions of sex offender dangerousness pose practical and political challenges for addressing SORN related harms and approaching sex policy reform.

Author

• Ruth Shefner, Columbia University