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1 Introduction
A promising development in the study of crime and criminal justice in recent years has been work that engages notions of visuality and the gaze, and that understands crime and responses to it in terms of an asymmetrical relation between ‘those who look’ and ‘those who are looked at’ (Brown and Carrabine, 2017). Legal scholars and cultural criminologists have argued that, by securing for itself the means to observe and display those in its field of view, the criminal justice state naturalises its own power and affirms its own subjectivity – conversely affirming the objectification and disempowerment of those against whom it exerts its force (Brown, 2014, p. 180). The collection, recording and circulation of images such as the faces of suspects; the use in and around prisons of the chain gang and the orange jumpsuit; the design and layout of public space to allow surveillance and supervision: all of these have been cited in the literature as visual signifiers of this arrangement (Carrabine, 2014, pp. 140–142; Hayward, 2010).1 In combination, they help to ensure that the state can maintain its occupation of a privileged vantage point, not only to exert power, but furthermore to ensure that it can avoid becoming in turn the object of observation. In this vein, critics have attributed political and cultural significance to devices such as the inscrutable surface of the police officer's mirrored sunglasses or the CCTV camera lens (Schept, 2014, p. 199) through which the state can observe others whilst obstructing a clear view of its own actors and operations (Wright et al., 2015, p. 106).2
In the more specific context of male sexual offending against women and the treatment of such offending by the criminal justice system that is the theme of this paper, critical visual approaches tend to proceed on the basis of at least one of the following assumptions. The first of these is that, as a signifier of sexual difference and the asymmetricality of power, the viewing subject/viewed object relation is necessarily sexualised. The second is that this relation can be analogised to an unequal and potentially abusive sexual relation (Carney, 2010, p. 32). The implications of that relation have been explored...