Reversing the Roles: Gender Representations of Child Sex Offenders in Contemporary Western Film

Abstract

Society is dominated by unwritten scripts informing men and women how to behave in sexual ways, and how to respond to fear created by gendered sexual dissonance. These schemas project acts of male perpetration and female victimization whilst underemphasising the existence of female perpetrated abuse and male victimization (Levine, 2006). Empirical research on female sex offenders began to appear in the 1980s and while attention to this group of offenders is growing, femaleperpetrated abuse still remains an under-recognised, under-researched and under-theorised criminological problem. This research explores cultural and social conceptualisations of sex offenders through an analysis of portrayals in contemporary Western film. Such portrayals are heavily gendered and assist in maintaining and reproducing gender norms based in essentialism where women’s offending is excused, minimised or justified, socially and in legal and policy arenas. This thesis adopts a cultural criminology approach in order to aid in decoding dominant discourses and scripts within judicial, media, and popular culture representations of norms and values about both gender and sexuality. Such deconstructions have the potential to challenge public opinion and institutional discourses in the pursuit of progressive justice reform.