Search

This book explores how Circles of Support and Accountability can reduce sexual reoffending. The release of a notorious sex offender from prison strikes fear into members of the public. Media coverage often provokes further panic, casting such offenders as irredeemable monsters and ticking time bombs, destined to continue preying on innocent children and women. In the West, governments have responded by enacting heavily punitive and exclusionary policies, such as public sex offender registers, indefinite detention, and lifetime correctional supervision. A radically different approach – Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA) – emerged alongside these measures. CoSA are groups of trained volunteers who collectively resist the exclusionary impulse, instead actively supporting those with sexual offence convictions to reintegrate into communities. Despite their seemingly counterintuitive nature, the research is clear that CoSA reduce sexual reoffending far better than more popular draconian sex offender management policies. However, little is understood about how CoSA work. This book begins to address this gap by proposing a new way of understanding how CoSA reduce sexual reoffending. Drawing on 65 in-depth interviews with CoSA participants, it offers a new theoretically-informed empirical explanation of CoSA’s capacity to promote desistance from sexual offending, and to turn those convicted of sexual offenders into law-abiding and productive members of the community. Ultimately it is a call to action, demonstrating that we, the community, must play a more central role in integrating people with sexual offence convictions if we desire safer communities for our children and our selves. This work illuminates new directions for research, policy, and practice, and is essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of criminology and criminal justice, restorative justice, sexual violence, and reentry.

Policies designed to prevent sexual (re)offending are often proposed on behalf of survivors of sexual violence. However, no research has examined survivors’ beliefs about the causes of sexual offending. This is a critical gap, because how individuals understand the causes of sexual offending has long been thought to inform their support for particular policy responses. This article presents findings from the first study to specifically examine survivors’ views about the causes of sexual offending, based on interviews with 33 survivors from Australia. It demonstrates that survivors’ beliefs are highly complex and multifaceted, and destabilizes the uniform survivor of governmental imagination.

Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA) appear to reduce the sexual recidivism of core members (i.e., individuals convicted of sexual offending). It remains unclear, however, how they do so. While much previous scholarship has hypothesized that the relations between core members and CoSA volunteers promote desistance from sexual offending, there has been no theoretically-informed research that specifically interrogates these relations. This article begins to address this gap by examining the relations formed in and by CoSA through the lens of Donati’s theory of relational reflexivity. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 62 CoSA participants across six CoSA programs located in the USA and Canada, it proffers a new theorization of the role of social relations in core members’ desistance. Findings from the study will enable CoSA practitioners around the globe to explicate and deepen their practice around more rigorous theoretical precepts.

Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA) are now part of the criminal justice landscape in various parts of the world. While CoSA have received considerable media attention, it is not yet known how they are portrayed in the media. This study addressed this gap by analyzing newspaper coverage of CoSA from across the English-speaking world. Overall, it identified that representations of those convicted of sexual violence in print media accounts of CoSA differ substantially from those identified in previous scholarship. We argue therefore that the nature of CoSA as an intervention may allow for more sympathetic and humanistic representation. The findings provide a platform from which the international CoSA community can develop strategic approaches to interacting with the media.

Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA) is a program used in several countries that has demonstrated success in reducing recidivism and improving community reintegration with people who have committed serious sexual offences. The program is community-based and uses principles of restorative justice. This paper describes the program, reviews evidence on its success and discusses some of the implementation challenges. CoSA is cost-effective and merits wide adoption as a way of dealing with a serious issue in criminal justice.

Sociological and historical research into sexual violence against children has reported consistently that it is girls who have most often been the subject of sexual, psychological and physical violence in both familial and institutional settings in modernity. However, more recently, public inquiries have provided evidence that during the 20th century, boys were much more likely to be abused in particular kinds of religious settings. This has been substantiated in findings from inquiries in Australia, Ireland, the UK and the USA. This reverses the trend of child sexual abuse (CSA) demonstrated in family and community environments, where girls are more likely to be abused, although perpetrators are much more likely to be men across all settings (Dowling, Boxall, et al. 2021). The question of gender in relation to the experience and management of CSA therefore requires further examination. In this article we investigate whether gender is a specific dimension of CSA in religious institutions, and specifically the Roman Catholic Church, by two methods. We begin by firstly examining the literature that addresses gender representation, religion and CSA in relation to three central evidence-based indicators: prevalence, disclosure and trauma impacts. Secondly, we link this discussion to a case study of the Catholic Church in Australia, where we identify specific patterns of gendered child violence and we ask the question: are such gendered forms of violence related to Catholic socialisation processes and if so by which specific mechanisms does Catholic culture produce the conditions that facilitate the sexual abuse of children? This article will explore these questions by looking at the ways CSA in Catholic institutions are gendered and how this produced particular forms of knowledge and truth. We argue that gender is a central organising principle in Catholic bureaucracy, culture and theology. The analysis identifies five central factors underpinning the reproduction of a

Victims of online fraud face a high level of blame from their families, friends, professionals, the broader community and often from themselves. Victims are commonly perceived as stupid, gullible and undeserving of justice. The reasons for this are under-researched, and there are currently no satisfactory explanations of why victim-blaming occurs so frequently in cases of online fraud. This article proposes a potential theoretical explanation for the high level of blame experienced by online fraud victims. Lerner’s Belief in a Just World theory is posited as a helpful theoretical explanation for the high level of blame directed toward victims of online fraud. This article argues that Lerner’s Belief in a Just World theory is a helpful framework for understanding the blame faced by victims of online fraud because it posits that: behavioural responsibility (a trait commonly ascribed to online fraud victims) is central to perceived blameworthiness; and that compensation for a crime determines the level of blame directed toward victims. As victims of online fraud are exceptionally unlikely to receive any type of compensation (whether monetary or otherwise), BJW may help explain the blame directed toward victims. Prior scholarship predominantly understands the blame faced by online fraud victims through the lens of Nils Christie’s (1986) ‘ideal victim’ thesis. This article presents an advance over this existing understanding by illustrating how BJW provides a more detailed explanation for victim blame in online fraud.