Perú líder regional en el respeto de los valores democráticos, la

This research examined adult human development in its broader sense from a sociocultural perspective. To be more specific, I qualitatively investigated the influence of cultural discourses and practices on the psychological development of socially vilified

individuals. This research queried how sexual offenders strive to become better people, and set within the disciplinary framework of cultural psychology, it was also informed by psychological anthropology, forensic and social psychology, criminology, sociology, and feminist theory.

Cultural psychology is the study of how cultural and psychological processes comprise one another in the context of human development (Shore, 1996; Shweder & Sullivan, 1990). From this perspective, culture is conceptualized as a socially embedded set of processes and not as a discrete ethnic group or geographically situated people. Culture is, in part, a learned sociality that is constantly in flux and in interaction with physical environments and physiological

development such that biology, sociality, and psychology are interdependent. Incorporating a cultural analysis, I framed this research to take a meaning-centred approach that facilitated the evaluation of the shared and unique values and beliefs that may influence psychological

development. My focus was on how the meanings that sexual offenders constructed through their participation in sociocultural activities influenced their perceptions of a changing moral selfhood.

Two foundational and interlocking concepts underpinned certain assumptions within this research: discourse and subjectivity. Discourses are systems of knowledge conveyed by means of language and communication that confer power through the formation of subjectivities (Green, 2008; Foucault, 1977, 1978; Weedon, 1987). They derive their power from their penetrating ability to form and maintain knowledge, ideologies, and thus beliefs about reality. All discourses are cultural, for they are formed within a specific social, historical, and cultural milieu; but not all discourses are explicitly moral ones. Public discourses become moral ones when they take on prescriptive and proscriptive expectations for socially acceptable behaviour (Zigon, 2009). Institutional discourses come from state and civil organizations or other authoritative

collectivities, and may also be morally intoned (Zigon, 2009). Moral discourses inform us of what we should and should not do, and how we ought to be, performing a regulatory function in society (Dean, 1994, Hunt, 1999; Janoff-Bulman, 2012).

In the simplest sense, subjectivity identifies the interpreted products of one's mental functions. It “is used to refer to the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself and her ways of understanding her relation to the world” (Weedon, 1987, p. 32). When combined with discourse, subjectivity is a much more complex theoretical concept. Subjectivity speaks to how in our subjection to discourses, we are influenced and transformed by them, and in being so become their cultural subjects. As social beings, all humans are subject to discourses and occupy subject positions formed through structures of knowledge and power (Butler, 1990, 1997; Foucault, 1977, 1978). Subjectivity must account for power relations because our subjective interpretations are formed in part culturally and

historically within a context of material and ideological power structures (Luhrmann, 2006; Ortner, 2005; Weedon, 1987).

Cultural discourses exert a profound and inescapable influence on the psyches and mental functioning of all who are subject to them. In this sense, subjectivity refers to “the cultural and social formations that shape, organize, and provoke those modes of affect, thought and so on” (Ortner, 2005, p. 31). Relaying a distinctly Foucauldian analysis in the construction of

subjectivity, Weedon (1987) states, “[discourses] constitute the 'nature' of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subject which they seek to govern” (p. 108). Discourses transform individuals into political and moral subjects where it is impossible to act with pure acultural autonomy. Because subjectivities are produced through culturally and historically contextualized discourses, they are flexible. Individuals can be viewed as partly knowing subjects to the degree that they recognize and understand how these discourses have formed their subject positions. As agentic beings, humans have the capacity to concede to, resist, or transform these discourses and their impact on our lives.

Sexual offenders are subjects of multiple discourses, many of which are morally imbued. Forensic discourses construct individuals as criminalized identities who represent varying levels of risk to reoffend, levels of required security enforcement, and amenability to treatment. Repeat offenders are constructed through the files of their criminal deeds and psychological assessments that follow them to every institution like permanent identity markers. Public discourses construct them as intractable sub-humans who should never be returned to greater society. To say that these discourses have no influence on sexual offenders is absurd.

Individuals who have been identified as sexual offenders are not passive subjects in their own growth and development. They exert agency by performing acts of resistance and

acceptance toward treatment and management practices (Gavin, 2005; MacMartin & LeBaron, 2006; Victor & Waldram, 2008; Waldram, 2007), and through their responses to stigmatizing or hostile interactions with members of the community (Lasher & McGrath, 2012). The sexual offender is constructed as an object of knowledge in scientific discourses (Foucault, 1977,1978; Lacombe, 2013; Taylor, 2009). Furthermore, recidivism narratives constitute stigmatizing discourses that construct past offenders as untreatable, dangerous, or even evil (Greer, 2003; Jenkins, 1998; Soothill & Walby, 1991). The overall effects of discourses pertaining to sexual offending on the subjectivity, mental functioning, and agentic development of convicted sexual offenders are vague. The subject positions held by treatment participants along with their individual values, beliefs, and goals are likely to contribute to variations in treatment

responsivity. I consider treatment and community (re)integration in this research as the medium through which participants can narrate the changes they have made in their lives. Some of these changes are direct teachings from treatment, some are made in opposition or resistance to certain aspects of the treatment programs, and some are independent of treatment. In this research, I not

only investigated the subjective viewpoints of men who were convicted of sexual offences but I utilized a cultural analysis to theorize about the interaction of subjectivities on individual development.