Contested portrayals: Medical and legal social control of juvenile sex offenders

While juvenile courts were originally designed to respond to troubled youth by providing treatment appropriate to the needs of individual offenders, a dvocates of a system that "gets tough" on young criminals by meting out pun ishments based on offense characteristics (both present offense and past of fense history) have become increasingly influential in recent years. In thi s article, I examine a special case, that of juvenile sex offenders in a Wa shington State county, for whom a 1990 law reintroduced treatment as a cent ral goal. While Washington has been a forerunner in the shift toward a juve nile justice system in which offending behavior is the central factor in de cision making, I argue that, largely as a result of this law, juvenile sex offending has been "medicalized" and that, in this process, distinctions ba sed on offense characteristics have noticeably diminished. This case study provides both empirical support for established theoretical arguments regar ding medicalization and a detailed explication of the differences between m edical and legal assumptions about social problems.