Continental European and Anglo-American jurisdictions differ with regard to criminal justice and community responses to sex offenders on an exclusion–inclusion spectrum ranging from community protection measures on one end to therapeutic programs in the middle and restorative justice measures on the other end. In the United States, populist pressure has resulted in a community protection approach exemplified by sex offender registration, community notification, and civil commitment of violent sexual predators. Although the United Kingdom and Canada have followed, albeit more cautiously, the American trend to adopt exclusionist community protection measures, these countries have significant community-based restorative justice initiatives, such as Circles of Support and Accountability. Although sex offender crises have recently occurred in continental Europe, a long-standing tradition of the medicalization of deviance, along with the existence of social structural buffers against the influence of victim-driven populist penal movements, has thus far limited the spread of formal community protection responses.

This edited book reproduces the spirit of a live conference (at Edge Hill in England, 2000) with its arguing voices and uneven range of materials. The contributors hail from backgrounds in law, philosophy, politics, criminology, sociology, and psychology. Its central issue is the quality of sexual consent. Is it possible to imagine sexual relationships that are unrepressed and safe, or at least ethical?The first half of this collection deals with this issue through sociolegal, philosophical, ethical, liberal, and feminist standpoints. The second half is devoted to "(more) specific and practical themes" (p. 8). Topics include prostitution, male rape, the abuse of the learning disabled, sadism and masochism (S&M) practices, and, finally, the proper care of subjects for sex research.Overall, this is not a feminist book. The positions of assumed equality between sexual partners (attributed to liberals) and the victimization inherent in all sexual relationships (attributed to radical feminism) are marginalized, and "more sophisticated approaches" (p. 2) are developed. These are only debatably postfeminist. Sometimes, the treatment veers into prefeminism. Cowling's analysis of undergraduate conduct codes and practices, for example, shows that a code (that of Antioch College in Ohio) is distanced from the way in which sexual consent is actually negotiated. Cowlings argues for a "real life model of consent." His example, that in order to withdraw her consent a woman could just pretend she's going to throw up (p. 25), is not likely to find many converts.Terry Humphries echoes Cowlings with respect to the way in which nonverbal and contextual clues are still privileged in students' sexual scripts and not easily captured in student codes. Paul Reynolds's position that bad sex is a matter of low-quality consent also comes close to trivializing the nature of abusive conditions, although not as much as Cowlings's. Reynolds abstracts four sets of parameters (context, rationality/irrationality, contract, and sexual knowledge) that affect the quality of consent and can inform social control.After highlighting on-the-scene learning processes of consensual S&M, Andrea Beckmann takes a Foucauldian position on the care of the self in these practices. Karen Corteen finds that unprotected sex ("bare backing"; p. 172) is part of the consent issue in the context of HIV/AIDS. Much of her paper is devoted to early "(s)experts" who discussed consent and also legitimated repressive controls. In a similar vein, Matthew Waites documents how the age of consent (for gay and heterosexual partners) has been rooted in now discredited psycho-medical knowledge. In England, this has resulted in a "hegemony of equality" at age 16 (p. 80). Waites proposes a reduced and equal age of consent.David Renton enters the arena of violence and sex when he argues that Susan Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism" (1980) elides fascism and fascists with violence and oppression. Sontag, he claims, fails to understand the dynamics of sex, violence, or fascism. He abstracts ...

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