성폭력 강성 정책에 대한 비판적 고찰

A critical study of a get-tough policy on sexual violence fear of crime, moral panic, and neo-liberal governance

This study aims to critically consider the background, political meanings, deterrence effects, and negative results of a get-tough policy on sexual violence in Korea. Severe punishment, risk managerialism with community notification, electronic surveillance and chemical castration, and withdrawal of treatments for sexual predators are the main keynotes of it. The emergence of get-tough policy cannot be fully understood with rising sexual crime, and it needs to consider the parents’ fear of crime toward their children and the moral panic stimulated by mass media. The policy shares the contexts of neo-liberal governing, which emphasis the shift from dispositional approach to situational one, the actuarial justice more concerned with risk analysis and proactive prevention, and reducing the state’s roles and reinforcing the partnership in crime prevention. The get-tough policy causes lots of legal arguments and the deterrence effects are unclear. Although community notification has an effect to encourage individuals to take protective acts, but because of not being connected to the collective crime prevention activities and inciting community members to distrust each other, it holds a risk to fragment the community. By focusing ‘strange’ sex criminals, the policy dismiss the reality that there are many sexual crimes occurred between intimate relationships and it maybe weaken the regards for victims of sexual violence. And in spite of the hard punishment’s rhetoric, the public prosecutors and the judiciary have dealt with sex criminals more or less loosely. Under these analyses, this study suggests to change the philosophy of sex crime policy from exclusion to inclusion, to make a plan basing itself upon empirical evidences, and to implement a policy putting a stress on criminal treatments and their social integration.