About the project
Comprehending desistance is one of the most critical and captivating tasks in contemporary criminology. How and why people stop offending is an important question not just to criminologists, or indeed for the people themselves involved in offending. It is also paramount to the prevention of harm against existing or potential victims, and to the maintenance and development of social cohesion. By extension, it is a crucial question for the correctional services, who have been given the demanding and often contradictory task of working to aid the rehabilitation of people who are convicted and punished for criminal acts.
Through three empirical sub-studies with people who are desisting and people whose job it is to support desistance, this project develops criminological knowledge about desistance from sex offending in Norway, a context where it has until now only to a limited degree been explored. In using precisely sex offending as a lens or prism to understand extant challenges and contradictions in desistance experiences and work to support it, the project will also contribute to criminological theorization of desistance more generally.
Method
This project first and foremost employs qualitative methods (interviews) and possibly also ethnographic fieldwork.
Objectives
At its core, this project is an investigation of how desistance from sex offending in Norway is connected to and affected by the social context it is unfolding within, with the specific aim of unpacking and theorizing what may help or hinder desistance processes. This includes shedding light upon how perpetration of and desistance from sexual and other forms of interpersonal violence can be understood in relation to the gender equality ideals, sexual autonomy and norms for respectable and acceptable masculinity in Norway.