Human rights and human wrongs: a rights-based approach to the punishment and treatment of sex offenders

The treatment and management of sex offenders is largely premised on the concepts of punishment and public protection. Driven by populist punitiveness and moral panic, policies designed to manage such offenders are largely incapacitative and retaliatory. Rather than looking at punishment from this perspective however, this article considers the influence of human rights on the concept of punishment. By looking at the management of sex offenders through the use of the sex offender register it considers how concepts such as dignity and equality are relevant to the punishment debate