Reconceptualising ‘risk’: Towards a humanistic paradigm of sexual offending
| Author | Anne-Marie McAlinden |
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639211032957 |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Reconceptualising ‘risk’:
Towards a humanistic
paradigm of sexual
offending
Anne-Marie McAlinden
School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Abstract
Within Western criminal justice traditions, the ‘risk’paradigm has become the defining
logic of contemporary laws and policies on sex offender management. This article crit-
ically examines the limitations of current technocratic and algorithmic approaches to
risk in relation to sexual offending and how they might be addressed. Drawing on nearly
two decades of theoretical and empirical research conducted by the author, it applies
the learning on sex offender reintegration and desistance to advance a ‘humanistic’para-
digm of sexual offending. The paper attempts to counter some of the dangers of algo-
rithmic justice and shift risk-based discourse away from its predominantly ‘scientific’
origins. It argues that such a move towards a more expansive and progressive version
of risk within criminal justice discourses would better capture the realities of sexual
offending behaviour and its real-world governance.
Keywords
Actuarial justice, algorithmic justice, desistance, new penology, reintegration, risk, sexual
offending
Introduction
‘Risk’has become a dominant framework for conceptualising the social problems of
advanced post-industrial societies. Scholars have noted the proliferation of the ‘risk
society’(Beck, 1992) thesis across a diverse range of fields, including science,
Corresponding author:
Anne-Marie McAlinden, School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, BT7 1NN, UK.
Email: a.mcalinden@qub.ac.uk
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2022, Vol. 31(3) 389–408
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/09646639211032957
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economics, politics, health, technology, law and the environment. Despite its political
and cultural currency, critics have questioned the ubiquitous nature of ‘risk’and the
utility of many of its foundational precepts. For example, it has been described as a
rather nebulous concept which is ‘slippery’(Kemshall, 2006: 60), ‘opaque and disputed’
(Mythen and Walklate, 2006: 3) and open to multiple interpretations. Scholars have simi-
larly emphasised the ‘negative turn’underpinning modernist discourses on criminal
justice (O’Malley, 2004: 325) and the increasingly volatile and uncertain nature of risk
regulation. In this vein, as Mythen and Walklate (2006: 3) have cautioned, it is
prudent to be alert to the threat of ‘risk imperialism’and the potency of risk as a potential
‘blackout blind’(Mythen, 2014: 8) in obscuring the realities of crime or other social pro-
blems. This article furthers these debates by elucidating some of the blind spots of con-
temporary criminal justice policies on sex offender risk governance within Western
societies.
Risk is said to be a ‘mixed discourse’(see e.g. Sparks, 2001: 169) encompassing cal-
culative and political as well as moral or emotive dimensions. This complex interplay is
well illustrated within the domain of sexual offending where the evolution of technocratic
expert-led approaches to risk has taken place alongside, and often in spite of, volatile and
emotive community responses.
1
As Mythen (2014: 20–26) has highlighted, academic dis-
courses on risk may be broadly sub-divided into realist and constructionist paradigms.
The former is characterised by objective risk assessments and statistical modelling by
technical experts as part of ‘actuarial’or ‘algorithmic approaches’. The latter recognises
that institutional policies and social processes shape and are shaped by subjective knowl-
edge about risk. This article is located at the intersection of these perspectives. It exam-
ines the salient gulf between meta-narratives on risk as a ‘problem’as conceptualised
within criminal justice frameworks; and risk as experienced by individuals –including
victims, communities and sex offenders themselves –in the course of everyday life
(see generally Arnoldi, 2009). The term ‘sexual offending’encompasses a wide
variety of behaviours involving adults and children as both ‘victims’and ‘perpetrators’,
examples of which are drawn upon throughout the article.
While there is emerging literature around ‘algorithmic’risk governance, discussed
below, there is a dearth of critical work around the operation of this paradigm within
the specificfield of sexual offending. This article engages with this gap in the literature.
The core argument is that the development and operationalisation of risk-based justice for
sex offenders has been at the expense of the human dimensions of risk management both
in terms of the nature of risk and the type of offender it presupposes. As explored further,
the principal outworking of the algorithmic approach is two-fold –it effectively precludes
the notion of self-redemption for sex offenders and simultaneously diminishes the com-
plexity of sexual offending behaviour and the importance of the social contexts of reinte-
gration. The article ultimately makes the case for a more human and complex
understanding of risk in this context as a much more protean and reflexive concept
than current legal, political and academic framings of risk tend to suggest. In order to
make these arguments, the article draws on key learning from academic discourses on
sex offender reintegration and desistance (see e.g. Laws and Ward, 2011; McAlinden,
2007) including nearly two decades of theoretical and empirical research conducted by
the author.
2
390 Social & Legal Studies 31(3)
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