Eléonore Rimbault – “Killing Two Birds with One Stone” – 4:30-6pm Jan 21st, 2016 (Thu) @ Haskell 102

Medicine and Its Objects presents

Killing two birds with one stone: mandatory therapy for authors of sexual violence-s and the prevention of sex crime in France.
Eléonore Rimbault, University of Chicago, Anthropology
Discussant: Kieran Kelley, University of Chicago, Anthropology

Abstract:
This paper considers the development of new clinical and medical practices in the early 2000s in France, after the adoption of a set of legal reforms aiming at the prevention of sexual infractions and the protection of minors. Among other provisions, the reform led to the creation of a new form of punishment for convicts condemned for sex infractions or crimes: “socio-judiciary follow-up”, which can be described as long term (up to 20 years, renewable) and mandatory therapeutic follow-up. Through an ethnographic focus on the work of therapists conducting “mandatory” therapies in the aftermath of this reform, I document how the translation of legal rulings into a ground for diagnosing transformed the professional space and the temporality of therapies and punishment. The conjunction of clinical care and punishment gave rise to a contracted temporality for clinical intervention, in which therapy (oriented by and towards the symptoms of sexual violence observed in the past) and prevention (anticipating recidivism for every patient and for patients as a group more broadly, through actuarial predictions) are always tied, leading to the emergence of new forms of diagnosing. In particular, this paper argues that the mode of diagnosing it gives rise to builds off constellations of symptoms in the ever-renewed abductive reasonings of the clinicians. This symptomatology, if essentially unstable, is nonetheless actively developing, both through the export of local nosographies into institutions that congeal these criminal-psychiatric types into stable categories (this case is documented in the paper with the example of MRI-research on pedophile brains) and by the internal development of actuarial predictive methods which are expanding the potential field of intervention of criminal-psychiatric clinicians today, from intervention with “authors of sexual violences” to intervention with “authors of violences”.

For a copy of the paper, please contact Hiroko Kumaki (hkumaki@uchicago.edu).

For any questions and concerns about the workshop, or if you need assistance in order to attend, please contact Hiroko Kumaki (hkumaki@uchicago.edu).

We look forward to seeing you soon!