Boys and sexual abuse: Rethinking victim and offender categories

Histories of child sexual abuse ignore boys. This project investigates the socio-legal processes that designate boys as sexual victims, sexual offenders, and sexual agents and how they occupy multiple categories or slip between them. It uses legal and cultural evidence in Australia and the United Kingdom between 1870 and 1930 to rethink the formation of victim and offender categories. Comparing policy and practice across jurisdictions can reveal how particular frameworks of knowledge magnify and erase certain crimes and the people who perpetrate them. These findings will provide crucial background knowledge on how sexual maltreatment has been historically categorised, who it has affected, and how we might adjust our modern forms of policing and intervention to deal with the problem.

Aims

1. To identify SCP that prevented offenders from completing an offence;
2. To identify SCP that were overcome by offenders during the offence and how this was the case;
3. To identify which hypothetical SCP are promising in order to prevent sexual offences;
4. To examine the impact and role of potential guardians during the offence;
5. To develop crime event prevention models that will guide prevention initiatives such as the implementation and evaluation of situational interventions

Project Leader: Dr Yorick Smaal (Griffith University)

Project Value: $382,248

Type of Funding: Australia Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA)

Dates: 2014-2017

Theme/s: Justice, Law and Society