Deconstructing Reform: Exploring Oppositional Approaches to Research in Sexual Assault

Published date01 June 2001
Date01 June 2001
DOI10.1177/a017408
AuthorRuth Graham
Subject MatterArticles
REVIEW ARTICLE
DECONSTRUCTING REFORM:
EXPLORING OPPOSITIONAL
APPROACHES TO RESEARCH IN
SEXUAL ASSAULT
RUTH GRAHAM
University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
JEANNE GREGORY AND SUE LEES Policing Sexual Assault. London
and New York: Routledge, 1999, 244pp. £16.99 (pbk).
For those seeking to reform social policies on sexual assault, the perceived
opposition of analytic techniques such as deconstruction and policy reform
results in a lack of engagement with recent developments in social theory, and
this in turn limits the conceptual themes of analysis. Discussion of the
relationship between theory and practice is familiar to any academic disci-
pline, but here the focus is on social policy and criminology, ref‌lecting the
overlap between the two when social policy tackles ‘crime’ issues such as
sexual assault. An evaluation is given of Gregory and Lees’ contribution to
debate on sexual assault, Policing Sexual Assault, and this evaluation is then
contextualized in terms of the discipline of social policy and its failure to
engage meaningfully with recent developments in social theory. I highlight
the theme of sexuality to illustrate the consequences of the discipline’s lack
of engagement with these developments. Using Policing Sexual Assault as an
example of the dominant social policy/reform approach to researching sexual
assault, I consider the implications of an oppositional conceptualization of
legal reform and deconstruction for theorizing sexual assault, and the conse-
quences of this dichotomy for research on sexual assault. I go on to suggest
that the discipline of social policy represents an opportunity to bring together
practical reform with conceptual theorizing, but that current conceptualiza-
tions of the two as oppositional form a signif‌icant barrier to this. As a result,
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200106) 10:2 Copyright © 2001
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
Vol. 10(2), 257–271; 017408
08 Graham (bc/d) 30/4/01 10:33 am Page 257

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