The Cost of Confession: Narratives of Guilt and Innocence in Youth Convicted of Sexual Offenses

Receiving a sexual offense conviction often entails broad social rejection. The resulting pain is managed through telling stories addressing guilt and innocence, justification, and remorse. Building upon narrative interviews with seven young men convicted of sexual offenses, this article demonstrates their intricate post-conviction repair work. Our analysis yielded three types of narratives addressing guilt. In confessional narratives, the participant accepts responsibility and agrees that harm was caused. The moral self is damaged in such stories, but the route to believable desistance appears more viable as they signal normative alignment and a willingness to reform. In other narratives, the participant maintains moral identity through reducing culpability, either by categorically denying that anything happened, or by presenting mitigating factors or justifications that alleviate responsibility. We show how denial can be a double-edged sword. It can help to maintain the moral self, but also hinder believable narration of desistance. Rather than treating these narratives as binary indicators of truth and lies, we examine them as social currency : resources used to construct moral credibility through storytelling. By critically assessing the barriers against denial narratives within the punitive system, we raise the question whether deniers should also be accepted as candidates for rehabilitation.