Menacing Dennis: Representing ‘Australia’s most hated man’ and popular protests for policy change

Abstract

From 2003 until 2012 the Australian media closely followed child sex offender Dennis Ferguson as he appeared in and was expelled from numerous local communities. Unattractive, alone, and obstinately unwilling to acknowledge his crimes, Ferguson conformed to dominant representations elsewhere of the stranger paedophile that demands ongoing governmental intervention. This article closely examines media and political discourses in which Ferguson has operated as a metonymic focal point for public considerations of child sex offending in Australia across the last decade, defined in relation to various conceptions of safe, responsible community. It considers public debates about how best to respond to the release of such offenders and the significance of Ferguson to the development of new Australian law and policy applying to sex offenders as an exceptional population, including extended supervision and continuing detention orders, and post-release institutions. As such, the article argues for close attention paid to the figures which garner media and political attention and around whom new policy approaches are developed, including their limiting effects for addressing problems such as child sexual abuse.Keywords community, news media, policy, post-sentence, sex offender In September 2009, in the kitchen of my parents' home, my family debated the presence of the newest and most newsworthy resident of our otherwise quiet suburb. Although taking place only streets away, it was via the front pages of Sydney's newspapers that we were informed of the negative response of our local community. Despite a sense of unease over our neighbours' reactions, that Dennis Ferguson was living in our suburb was similarly felt to be undesirable, somewhat threatening, and requiring close governmental surveillance. Arguments made on behalf of his rights to freedom and safe accommodation were considered rather abstract, when pitted against the immediate threat Ferguson was deemed to embody.

Policing paedophilia: Assembling bodies, spaces and things

“…In the context of the governance of paedophilia, the mediating role of the cultural public sphere is significant, and has certainly not gone unnoticed in the criminological literature (Grealy, 2014;Greer, 2003;Greer and Jewkes, 2005;Jewkes and Wykes, 2012;Kohm and Greenhill, 2011;Schofield, 2004). However, such communicative modes do not guarantee a politically palatable public dialogue.…”

“…In a very eloquent article, he elaborates an account of the cultural public sphere which, he says, ‘trades in pleasures and pains’ (McGuigan, 2005: 435) and works through the kinds of performative (aesthetic, affective, vocal, textual, embodied) modes of communication to be found in everyday gossip, poetry, drama, popular and high art, television soap operas, newspaper columns, social networking sites, Hollywood film and reality TV, for example. In the context of the governance of paedophilia, the mediating role of the cultural public sphere is significant, and has certainly not gone unnoticed in the criminological literature (Grealy, 2014; Greer, 2003; Greer and Jewkes, 2005; Jewkes and Wykes, 2012; Kohm and Greenhill, 2011; Schofield, 2004). However, such communicative modes do not guarantee a politically palatable public dialogue.…”

“…The paedophile, argues Thomas, lies at the heart of a ‘secular demonology’ and has emerged as ‘the hate figure of our time’ (2005: 1). Routinely figured as ‘monsters’, ‘beasts’, ‘sex fiends’ (Thomas, 2005: 1), and ‘predatory strangers’ (Schofield, 2004: 121), the paedophile has become the mainstay of tabloid and broadsheet media (Grealy, 2014; Greer, 2003; Greer and Jewkes, 2005; Jewkes and Wykes, 2012). Moreover, the criminal justice response to child sex offenders across UK and OECD jurisdictions has become increasingly more exclusionary and retributive signalled by the growth of both intensive and extensive punishments, fewer rights and the proliferation of summary orders and prohibitions (Kemshall and McIvor, 2004; Thomas, 2005).…”