Chrysanthi S. Leon

“First and Foremost They’re Survivors” Selective Manipulation, Resilience, and Assertion Among Prostitute Women

Based on qualitative data from three sites (N = 76), we describe prostitute women’s agency and problematize dominant assumptions. Prostitute women exhibit creative, resilient, and rational conduct. Rejecting victimhood, our respondents demonstrate moral reasoning, make choices, work systems that dominate their lives, and assert power and control when they can. Their resistance, while serving a symbolic function, also expresses their system savvy and self-advocacy that produce measurable benefits. We distinguish between “being manipulative” and context-specific ethical conduct intended to further their survival.

A Cite-Checker's Guide to Sexual Dangerousness

In June of 2006, the UC Davis Law Review published an article by Professor Ruby Andrew arguing for rejecting any differentiation between persons convicted of intra-familial child sex abuse and those convicted of child sex abuse where the victim is a stranger or non-related acquaintance. Professor Andrew set out to persuade her readers that fathers and stepfathers who sexually abuse relatives present the same level of both moral culpability and danger to the community as non-familial child abusers, and that their related victims are best protected through rigidly punitive control policies. We agree with Andrew that familial victims are no less deserving than the victims of strangers. But it does not follow that the best way to help children victimized by relatives is by mandating imprisonment, or requiring the public humiliation of the family created by community notification. While we disagree with the general conclusion of Andrews article, the reason for this note is a more specific concern about questions of fact in legal scholarship. On a question at the heart of the penal response to sex offenders - the relative dangers of sex recidivism for incest and non-incest child abusers - Andrews article leaves a demonstrably false impression about current empirical research and, wittingly or unwittingly, ignores scores of published researched studies involving many thousands of subjects in several countries. What law review readers do not know can hurt them. We would hope that a peer-review process in which experts were consulted would have caught Andrews false claims. But short of that, law students or lay people who checked her citations using the universally-accessible search engine provided by Google could have easily caught this problem.

‘Nobody worries about our children’: unseen impacts of sex offender registration on families with school-age children and implications for desistance

Abstract The current paper presents findings from a qualitative study using a web-based survey (n = 58) and open-ended interviews (n = 19) to investigate the impact of sex offender law and policies on family members of convicted sex offenders. Specifically, this paper discusses the impact sex offender policies and ‘extra-legal’ restrictions made by employers and landlords on housing and income stability, as well as impacts on family dynamics: a far less examined consequence of sex offender laws. Participants described how their children missed out on family bonding activities due to restrictions placed on their registrant parent, such as having their father attend school events, taking their children trick-or-treating, and going on family vacations. Responses indicated that policies intended to protect children and families are in reality tearing these family members’ lives apart. As a result, registrants and their families experienced social rejection and isolation, both of which are obstacles in the process of desistance from offending behavior and successful reintegration. Experiences of these family members shed light on the unintended punitive consequences of current sex offender policy and the critical need for reform.

Relationships among Stigmatized Women Engaged in Street-Level Prostitution: Coping with Stigma and Stigma Management

Abstract Very little research has examined how prostitute women relate to each other. Drawing on interviews, focus groups, and observations with 76 women engaged in street-level prostitution in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and a mid-Atlantic state, we show how prostitute women provide mutual assistance both to meet their basic needs and as part of their ethical norms, in contrast to the stigmatized characterizations of prostitute women as morally deficient. Women’s relationships offer them concrete support and encouragement while simultaneously producing a counter-narrative that challenges their stigmatized identities.

The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Emotion, Social Movements, and the State

This book begins with the creation of the colony of the Philippines in 1898 and ends with national independence in 1946. However, the book does not center upon either; instead, it focuses on the economic, political, and legal struggles of Filipino immigrants in the United States. The book is organized chronologically, although there is some overlap of periods across chapters. The first chapter deals with the racial politics of empire and the establishment of the Philippines as a colony of the United States. This lays the groundwork for the analysis of the political economy of Filipino immigration (1900s–1920s) in the second chapter. The next chapter deals more specifically with social and legal barriers that Filipinos confronted during the first three decades of the century. Chapter Four is a study of violence directed against Filipinos in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Finally, last two chapters deal with the political negotiations for independence, the participation of Filipinos in the Second World War, and the consequences for immigrants in the United States. The colonization of the Philippines resulted in the creation of a new legal category: the U.S. national, that is, those persons owing allegiance to the United States because they were at the same time citizens of one of its colonies. However ‘‘nationals’’ were not full-fledged citizens of the United States, and this initially led to considerable confusion about their rights to entry and to work. This ambiguous political status set the stage for the immigration of Filipinos who came to work in agri-business, first in Hawaii and then to the western and southwestern states. Later, Filipinos would also find work in service and industrial sectors. The first generation of Filipino immigrants struggled for and soon (in 1906) attained the right, as U.S. nationals, to unlimited entry into the United States. The author skillfully shows how Filipinos were clearly agents, and not merely victims, in this process: they were active in both class struggles, to obtain better wages and conditions, and legal battles, to achieve right of entry into the United States. Even though they gained the right to unrestricted immigration, Filipinos confronted other legal barriers regarding interracial marriage, property rights, and naturalization as U.S. citizens. In addition, local governments also attempted to police the color line by passing laws enforcing social segregation. In general, the legal issues were complicated by two principal factors. First, the laws were not always created with Filipinos in mind and the existing racial categories did not easily apply. Indeed, part of the strategy of Filipinos was to argue that they were outside of the laws that were erected explicitly against Afro-Americans, Mexicans, and ‘‘Asiatics,’’ namely, Chinese and Japanese. Second, the interests of local ‘‘nativists’’ often conflicted with those in agribusiness or the federal government. On the one hand, the nativists sought to preserve white privilege, dominance, and the color line; they opposed Filipino immigration. On the other hand, agricultural enterprises were in favor of Filipino workers, although they also sought ways to divide and conquer them whenever workers organized and pressed for better working conditions. In addition, the federal government was obliged to concede some degree of legal and naturalization rights to Filipinos. In the international sphere, it was not good politics to simply exclude them as ‘‘aliens’’ in U.S. society. Especially interesting is the analysis of the diverse and often contradictory positions of the local nativists in towns, counties, and states, the economic interests of agribusiness in the region, and the laws and policies of the federal government. In addition, the full range of actions and strategies of Filipinos on different fronts is fully explained.

Sex Offenses and the Men Who Commit Them: An Assessment of Sex Offenders on Probation

Scholars, teachers and policymakers in the area of sexual offending are in an awkward position—most want to ground policy in empirical research, yet little solid sociological research has been conducted. Michelle Meloy’s book makes a flawed but worthy contribution. As Meloy explains in an introductory chapter, the field of sexual offending has been dominated by a medical model of criminality. She blames this medicalization for the absence of research that tests other criminological theories, such as rational choice. Her book addresses this gap by studying a sample of sex offenders on probation in order to measure their perception of the “costs” of current policies. Meloy brings both quantitative and qualitative tools to bear, with mixed results. As I will discuss, the quantitative analysis is limited not only by sampling problems she cannot control, but also by her choices. The qualitative analysis is much richer. The book is especially useful for undergraduate and graduate courses which study sexual offending. In chapter 1, she succinctly presents the misperceptions which hamper good policymaking, including our society’s preoccupation with stranger danger over the far more prevalent sexual assault by familiars. In chapter 2 she provides a short, clear overview of the problems which plague recidivism, risk prediction, and treatment research, and she convinces the reader of the necessity of further work in these areas, notwithstanding the methodological obstacles. Chapter 3 includes an introduction to the structural problems which support sexual offending. She accomplishes in two pages what I struggled to make clear in months of lectures—reading Meloy’s book finally provided my undergraduates with an “Aha!” moment on the uniquely gendered nature of sex crime. For this as well as for the discussion of sex offender policies in chapter 5 from the perspective of those subject to them, the book has great pedagogical worth. In light of the clarity and value of the other chapters, her quantitative analyses disappoint. Meloy obtained all the court and probation files of all adult men convicted of sex crimes and on active sex offender probation for at least six months in a Midwestern county, leading to a sample of 169 offenders on probation. The descriptive picture the data provide is helpful, but her decisions to examine deterrence and the predictors of recidivism are problematic. With regard to deterrence, Meloy operationalizes the “costs” of punishment as jail terms and number of mandated treatment conditions (p. 67). While this may be the best way available to measure cost, that does not make it a convincing representation of the way offenders experience criminal sanctions. Further, the recidivism analysis is constrained by the small, disaggregated sample. Unfortunately for the analysis, only 20 of the 169 recidivate. As Meloy explains, this is a general problem for sex offender recidivism scholarship, along with the lack of established base rates. But despite its limits, Meloy persists in seeking predictive variables. Although Meloy (2005) acknowledges the drawbacks of failing to disaggregate by offense (p. 216), and in other chapters of the book she refers to the heterogeneity of her probation sample, she fails to include the original sex conviction as one of the predictive factors (she does look at victim relationship, finding that stranger offenders were more likely to re-offend than familiars, p. 65). In an earlier article which used a much larger probation study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Meloy faults both the BJS coding and the insufficient number of offenders in discreet categories. If the BJS sample of 917 recidivists did not allow for meaningful disaggregated analysis, then her 20 recidivists probably could not have either. But though we know the 169 offenders range from misdemeanants with internetrelated sex charges to rapists and molesters (p. 56), we are left to wonder about the subsample who recidivated. Perhaps they were largely exhibitionists, generally known to have a higher risk of re-offense? While the descriptive profile of the recidivist sub-sample is suggestive, the quantitative analysis should have been relegated to an appendix.