Beyond "Monsters"

I sat in a prison for men convicted of sexual offenses. The cinderblock walls closed in around me, and the fluorescent lights hummed just loud enough to make silence uncomfortable. I had come as a researcher. I had my armor, my research guide, and my pen.

A man in a blue jumpsuit mopped the floor. Others milled around, wondering what I was doing.

As I read their files, I realized that they reduced men to categories based on the statute they violated or their level of risk.

Despite my strict edict to code the files, I began talking to the man who was mopping the floor. I told him about my research. He told me about his offense and the harm he caused. He discussed growing up in a home where no one ever discussed consent. He learned that sex was a conquest. He talked about his friends and the values they placed on masculinity as dominance and vulnerability as weakness.

None of that excused his behavior. But none of it fit neatly into the categories I would code him into.

As I left the prison, I couldn’t shake the feeling that incarceration was like trying to solve something enormous by shrinking it down to one person and one offense at a time, as if dealing only with the person before us fixed the problem of sexual violence.

Sexual harm didn’t begin with this man. And it didn’t end with his incarceration.

Years later, I found myself in a circle of survivors. The woman to my left spoke about being assaulted by a coworker. The man to my right talked about being assaulted by his boyfriend. Another woman described freezing during her rape and then questioning herself for years because there was no dramatic struggle.

They spoke of ordinary men in ordinary spaces.

Yet, when we treat sexual violence solely as the work of deviant individuals, we create the caricature of a monster and ignore the more common, more complicated, and more ordinary reality.

Monsters are easy to condemn. Cultures are harder to confront.

We say sexual violence is an individual problem. But the soil it grows in is collective. And that disconnect is hard to ignore.

Our criminal legal system is designed to identify individual culpability. A person violates a statute; a sentence follows. And post-conviction sex crimes policies are premised on the idea that sexual violence is the product of uniquely deviant individuals who must be permanently monitored.

The story is simple and politically powerful: identify them, isolate them, and we will be safe.

It is also sorely incomplete.

If punishment and surveillance alone were sufficient to end sexual violence, we would have ended the epidemic decades ago. Instead, it remains a persistent public health crisis and the conditions that facilitate harm remain right in front of us: misinformation, peer normalization, rigid gender scripts, and silence. We currently ignore those conditions, even though it is clear that conditions matter.

We can only address this problem by examining environments, social norms, prevention strategies, and early intervention systems.

These questions expand responsibility outward beyond individual harmdoers to the societal scripts and victim-blaming narratives. It expands responsibility to institutions that protect their reputations before they protect the people in their care.

This outward expansion negates individual pathology, but it doesn’t erase individual accountability. Accountability is real, but it is not synonymous with endless punishment.

We have invested enormous resources in monitoring people after they are convicted, while underinvesting in comprehensive consent education, bystander intervention, early therapeutic intervention, and institutional reform.

Sex crimes policies as they exist today are like trying to stop a flood by focusing only on the houses already underwater, while ignoring the broken levee upstream.

Sadly, the individual frame persists because it is comforting. Reducing sexual violence to individual deviance allows society to avoid looking at itself. If sexual violence is the work of a few irredeemable monsters, the rest of us can feel safely distant from it. We can believe we are not implicated.

But sexual harm is socially produced — shaped by cultural narratives about masculinity, power, entitlement, silence, and loyalty to institutions.

Sexual violence is woven into everyday dynamics — into the jokes we excuse, the pressures we minimize, and the silences we maintain.

These are not individual failures alone. They are collective ones.

We cannot incarcerate our way out of an epidemic.

We cannot “registry” our way out of it.

The question cannot be limited to: Who did this?

It must also be: What conditions made this possible?

Until we are willing to ask that second question — in our schools, congregations, workplaces, and homes — we will continue mistaking containment for prevention.

And the epidemic will continue, quietly, in ordinary rooms that look nothing like prison cells.