Modèles de dangerosité : les contrevenants sexuels et la loi

The history of dangerous offender legislation reveals a selective focus on few sexual and violent offenders many of whom are not demonstrably more dangerous than most of the offenders from the larger pool of sexual and violent offenders from which they are drawn. To the extent such legislation draws attention from routine frequently occuring forms of violence in favour of the violence of a few predatory offenders it is clearly problematic. Nonetheless, there are good reasons such legislation is likely to be retained and perhaps modified to place a greater emphasis on community protection

Rethinking conversion : beyond the religious and the secular

This article seeks to pinpoint some of the consequences of the secularization process – conceived as the dissociation of religion from both state politics and culture – with the aim of broadening the conceptualization of conversion. Conversion is therefore considered to be a social fact beyond the religious and the secular, for which the concept of 'trans-formation' is employed in order to grasp this phenomenon. The concept of trans-formation posits processes of conversion as shifts from intimate convictions to public values. From this perspective, based on a pragmatic sociology of values, religious conversions are put forth as one possible way to qualify trajectories that the concept of trans-formation aims to comprehend. The article ends by considering the status of religious convictions in comparison with convictions otherwise qualified