Author : John Borneman
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2015-03-10
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780226233918
Cruel Attachments by John Borneman Pdf
Child molesters are widely regarded as the most incorrigible of criminal types, as recidivists who deserve harsh punishment. In Germany today, however, attention has shifted from punishment to court-mandated rehabilitation through therapy. Therapists guide the offender through a process normally assigned to a religious authority--the transformation of the criminal into a person capable of reintegration into society. Cruel Attachments is anthropologist John Borneman’s account of the attempt to rehabilitate child sex offenders through therapy. Using select case studies, Borneman follows the experience of offenders from accusation to admission of culpability, through arrest, trial, imprisonment, treatment, release from prison, and either social reincorporation or indefinite surveillance. The book opens with an absorbing and disturbing ethnography of a particularly important (and sensational) case of the rehabilitation of the infamous Berlin sex offender Alexander Marquardt. Marquardt was a child abuser and brutal pimp who underwent rehabilitation therapy during his long imprisonment. During his therapy it was discovered that he had been sexually abused by his mother over several years starting when he was pre-pubescent. After his lengthy and ultimately successful rehabilitation Marquardt was released and is now a successful owner and manager of a fitness center. Borneman’s vivid account of Marquardt addresses the controversial question of whether such therapy "really” works in the sense of changing a person’s deepest desires. The subsequent case histories and theory chapters range from general reflections on the historical evolution of cultural handling of child sexual abuse to cases of incest, pedophilia, inappropriate sex play between parents and children, among others. This is the first book ever on the topic of the intensely ambiguous and fraught project of attempted rehabilitation of perpetrators - and what that project tells us about ourselves and our culture’s contradictions. No other book has combined that focus with a larger meditation on the state of anthropology, as Cruel Attachments so beautifully does.