„Don‘t Offend“. Preventive Securitisation By Subjectivating 'potential Perpetrators'

Potential Perpetrators – this concept serves as the foundation for therapeutic and self-help approaches aimed at preventing paedophiles from sexual child abuse. They specifically target and produce individuals deemed 'at risk' of offending while at the same time possessing the capacity for self-intervention. Thereby, the question arises as to what defines the 'potential' for engaging in sexual violence. How does one negate an action that has not yet occurred? What are therapeutic strategies employed to address one’s sexual self to account for such a possibility?

This talk delves into the subjectivation inherent in primary prevention efforts against sexual child abuse, which starting in Germany 2005, are being implemented globally. Unlike therapy with offenders it can’t draw on situations that have happened in the past. Instead, it relies on the examination of 'sexual fantasies' as a surrogate to extrapolate potential future actions. This poses a new social position especially for the paedophile: As a potential perpetrator he not only persists as a danger, whose difference is outcast as an abject. By identifying, observing, and acknowledging his fantasies, he is asked to develop a capacity for sexual control. He perceives actions as sequences of adjustable situations, aligns himself ethically with his juvenile counterpart, and plans futures that ensure safety for him, children, and society.

By discussing preventive subjectivation I highlight the governance of futures by the promise of security. I will shed light on this dispositif, which fosters the transformation from a task of negating action into acts of capacity-building and self-determination. Drawing upon insights from 8 therapeutic and self-help concepts and 22 interviews with participants, I focus on the formation of futures, which instead of an antagonistic relation of offender and victim are imagined as dyadic relations of subjects: the 'vulnerable boundary aware child' and the paedophile 'Not Yet Offender'.