Punishment or therapy? The ethics of sexual offending treatment

Abstract

The claim that sex offender treatment is a form of punishment and as such cannot be covered by traditional ethical codes is a controversial one. It challenges the ethical basis of current practice and compels clinicians to rethink the work they do with sex offenders. In this paper I comment on Bill Glaser's defence of that idea in a challenging and timely paper and David Prescott and Jill Leveson's rejection of his claims. First, I consider briefly the nature of both punishment and treatment and outline Glaser's argument and Prescott and Levenson's rejoinder. I then investigate what a comprehensive argument for either position should look like and finish with a few comments on each paper.     

Reviews

Postmodern Revisionings of the Political Anna Yeatman, Routledge London and New York 1994

An Introduction to Semiotics Thomas A. Sebeok, Pinter London 1994

The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance Rolf Wiggershaus translated by Michael Robertson, Polity Press Cambridge 1994

An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics Suzanne Eggins, Pinter London 1994     

Regulated restlessness: museums,liberal government and the historical sciences

The ways citizen participation and democracy are changing are poorly understood due to the dominance of theories inherited from the eioghteenth centruy: Democratic citizenship can be better understood if critical reflection is re-oriented around the games of concrete freedom here and now as recommended by Hannah Arendt, Ludwing Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault and Quentin Skinner. This orientation brings to light two distrinctive types of citizen freedom in the present: diverse forms of citizen participation and diverse practices of governance in which citizens participate.     

Time for a change: applying the good lives model of rehabilitation to a high-risk violent offender

In this article we operationalise the theoretical concepts of the Good Lives Model (GLM) of offender rehabilitation by providing a step-by-step framework for assessment, formulation, treatment planning, and monitoring with a high-risk violent offender residing in the community. The case study illustrates how the GLM can be applied to complement and enhance traditional Risk-Management interventions and shows how the GLM's clinical relevance extends from sex offending to broader offending typologies.     

Narrative identity and forensic psychology: A commentary on Youngs and Canter

Purpose. In this commentary, I will take a closer look at Youngs and Canter's (2011) paper on narrative roles in offending and examine the ideas underpinning their study and its methodology. Methods. I briefly overview some important theoretical ideas within the area of narrative research and highlight a number of unresolved and crucial issues. I then summarize the Youngs and Canter paper, concentrating on explicating its findings and identifying the major assumptions underpinning the study. Finally, I critically examine the paper in light of narrative research and theory. Result. There are three classes of problems evident in the paper, which map onto issues evident within the broader field of narrative theory and research. These problems are definitional vagueness, lack of clarity concerning the nature of the self and its relationship to narrative roles, and methodological problems involving reliability and validity. Conclusion. The Youngs and Canter paper makes an important contribution to the application of narrative theory to the forensic and correctional areas although there are some areas of weakness.