The Monster’s Dilemma. Integration and Non-Integration of Sexual Violence Perpetration in Self-Narratives of Young Men in Norway

Narratively integrating one’s own harmful acts into a running self-narrative can be an especially difficult undertaking when the harmful act in question is a sexual violation. Sexual violations are a category of harmdoing that carries particular condemnation and stigma to its perpetrators. At the same time, making meaning of harmful acts one has committed often does entail an effort or imperative to consider such integration. This is perhaps particularly true when such processes are undertaken during imprisonment and (partly) as a response to the expectations of a rehabilitative prison regime. Hence, the question of narrative integration (or non-integration) of harmful acts into the running story of one’s life and biography is, we argue, central for people who have done sexual harm to others. On this background, our paper presents and discusses a self-narrative analysis of qualitative, semi-structured interviews with 17 young men (age 18-25) in Norway. Our participants had been convicted of a sex offense or otherwise self-identified as someone who had sexually violated another person. Our analysis highlights the narrative strategies the young men employ to figure out which place their sexually violating act(s) may have in their developing self-narrative. For our participants, this process started after they had been accused, reported or convicted for a sexual offense, or if they had otherwise concluded that they have sexually violated someone. In 2007, Maruna and Roy critically discussed the term ‘knifing-off’ as a conceptualization of the separating of harmful or criminal acts from narratives of self, and how this term might be useful or counterproductive to understand the relationship between self-narratives and desistance from future crime. We use the concept of ‘knifing-off’ as a point of departure for understanding the self-narratives of our participants, and how their various narrative strategies for non-/integration of harmdoing may be connected to desistance processes.