Description
Book SynopsisExploring different cases of the attempt to rehabilitate child sex offenders, this book details a secular ritual process aimed not only at preventing future acts of molestation but also at fundamentally transforming the offender, who is ultimately charged with creating an almost entirely new self.
Trade Review"Cruel Attachments is wholly absorbing, in the sense that it is unputdownable, but also in the sense that it provides numerous occasions for what can feel like utterly contaminating, destabilizing emotional identifications: with victims, family members, therapists, prison guards, the anthropologist himself-and, however unnervingly, also perpetrators. It is no small feat to bring readers inside the emotional worlds of all these players. To have done so, and with such subtlety and nuance, is remarkable and unprecedented." (Dagmar Herzog, Graduate Center, City University of New York)
