Video gaming and sexual violence: rethinking forensic nursing in a digital age

This article reports findings from a qualitative study into how forensic nurses, and male personality disordered sexual offenders, talked about "pornography" in one U.K. high-security hospital. Research rationale was rooted in current professional and political debates, adopting a discourse analytic design to situate the project in a clinical context. Semistructured interviews, as co-constructed accounts, explored talk about sexual media, offending, treatment, and risk. Data were analyzed using a version of discourse analysis popular in healthcare research, identifying discursive repertoires, or collective language use, characteristic of the institutional culture. Findings revealed that masculine discourse marginalized female nurses and contradicted therapeutic goals, where men's talk about pornography, sex, and sexual crime represented discriminatory and gendered language. Nursing definitions of pornography were constructed in the context of the client group and an organizational need to manage risk. In a highly controlled environment, with a long-stay population, priority in respondent talk was given to mainstream commercial sexual media and everyday items/images perceived to have embedded sexual meaning. However, little mention was made of contemporary modes of producing/distributing pornography, where sex and sexual violence are enacted in virtual realities of cyberspace. Failure to engage with information technology, and globally mediated sex, is discussed as a growing concern for forensic health workers.