Forewarned is Forearmed? Sex Offender Tracker Applications and the Individualizing of Risk

• In Event: Appified: Apps and the Mundane Software of Popular Culture

Abstract

In 2006 several smartphone applications began promising parents the opportunity to turn the tables on sex offenders and become more proactive in protecting their families. Registered sex offender (RSO) applications exploit the freely available databases of sex offenders held by each US State, and visualise this data through the cartographic language of contemporary geo-locative app design. Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper examines this genre of apps, exploring the promises they make to consumers, before critiquing the approach that such technologies take towards child safety and ‘stranger danger’. It argues that such apps place children at more risk, trading as they do on (incorrect) assumptions about ‘risk’ in the local community. As such, this paper concludes, these apps reduce opportunities for community resilience building, making the risks of child sexual abuse an individual responsibility, rather than a public concern.

BIO - Sharif Mowlabocus is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Digital Media, based within the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. He is also teaches on the MA in Sexual Dissidence. His research interests include sexuality/queer studies and digital media studies, with a particular focus on LGBTQ identities and practices, their representation in, and relationship to, online digital media.

Author

• Sharif Mowlabocus, U of Sussex