From Spoiled Identity to Cleft Identity: Parenting, Penal Stigma and Suspended Citizenship

Abstract

This paper examines the social and political consequences of parenting with a conviction for a sexual offence in contemporary Britain. We argue that the systems governing people labelled “sex offenders” operate in ways that exceed what Michel Foucault described as biopolitical governance. While biopolitical frameworks have often been interpreted as oriented toward the optimisation and management of life, including through practices of rehabilitation and reintegration, contemporary punishment bureaucracies frequently foreclose these possibilities in practice. For many parents, redemption is not simply delayed but structurally denied, leaving their citizenship permanently uncertain. Drawing on collaborative, reflexive phenomenology, we develop the concept of cleft identity to describe this condition. Parenting is typically understood as a key site of responsible citizenship, centred on the care and protection of life. Yet parents with sexual offence convictions remain subject to ongoing surveillance, disclosure and stigma, marking them as permanently suspect. They are therefore required to perform the responsibilities of “good” parenting while simultaneously treated as moral outsiders. We argue that this tension produces a form of suspended citizenship in which stigma operates not simply as social reaction but as a mechanism of governance. The paper develops this argument through a theoretically driven, collaborative phenomenological case study intended for analytic illumination rather than empirical generalisation.

1. Introduction

This paper examines the lived and political consequences of parenting with a conviction for a sexual offence in contemporary Britain. We argue that existing sociological accounts of stigma, while illuminating, are insufficient to capture the structural dilemmas faced by those who must inhabit the dual identities of “parent” and “sex offender”1 simultaneously. Drawing on collaborative, reflexive phenomenology and our situated work with criminalised individuals at Next Chapter Scotland, we advance a broader claim: that contemporary governance produces a structurally enforced identity fracture that cannot be resolved through conventional forms of stigma management. Building on Goffman’s (1963) analysis of spoiled identity, we suggest that the interactional strategies he described—passing, concealment, narrative repair—presuppose the possibility of situational containment. For parents with a conviction for a sexual offence, however, stigma is not episodic or reputational. It is institutionalised, administratively archived, and permanently recallable. Through registration, surveillance, disclosure regimes, and enduring moral classification, stigma becomes a political technology of the state. It is reproduced across the life course and embedded within the bureaucratic architecture of punishment. This does not displace the interpersonal and affective dimensions of stigma identified in earlier scholarship; rather, it re-situates them within a stratified field in which personal experiences, institutional practices, and state classifications operate in conjunction but with differing analytic weight. Stigma is lived interpersonally, administered institutionally, and authorised politically.

This article is not intended as a generalisable empirical study of people with sexual offence convictions, but as a theoretically oriented intervention grounded in a single, analytically rich case. Its aim is to develop conceptual insight rather than provide representative claims about all individuals subject to such classifications. One way to understand this what we are calling a ‘cleft identity’ is through the ordinary demands of parenting itself. Parents are expected to participate in school life, community networks, healthcare, and forms of intimate trust that mark someone as a safe and legitimate citizen. For individuals with a conviction for a sexual offence, however, these same spaces are often experienced as sites of potential exposure, suspicion, and exclusion. Everyday parental practices, attending a parents’ evening, explaining one’s past, negotiating disclosure within relationships, or managing fear of public identification become politically charged encounters shaped by the continuing and persistent reach of punishment.

It is this tension that we describe as cleft identity. The concept refers to a socially and institutionally enforced division in which individuals are simultaneously required to perform the responsibilities of normative parenthood while remaining permanently marked by an identity associated with danger, contamination, and moral exclusion. The fracture is not simply psychological or interpersonal. It is sustained through ongoing systems of surveillance, disclosure, and risk management that prevent the subject from fully exiting the penal category, even after sentence completion.

We conceptualise the experiential consequence of this regime as cleft identity: a structurally produced bifurcation in which subjects are simultaneously expected to nurture life while being treated as permanently dangerous or contaminating. In simple terms, the paper asks what happens when an individual is simultaneously required to embody two roles that carry incompatible moral expectations. Parenting constitutes a paradigmatic site of biopolitical governance, requiring the cultivation and protection of life in accordance with normative citizenship. Yet the “sex offender” classification situates the same subject within an enduring regime of suspicion and exclusion in which redemption is structurally constrained and reintegration permanently conditional. Punishment does not end with sentence completion; instead, it persists through ongoing civic exclusion and conditional belonging. While biopolitics (Foucault 1978, 2007) operates through the optimisation of life, this condition exposes its limits. Here, governance more closely resembles what Mbembe (2019) describes as necropolitical: biological life is sustained, but full civic life is systematically foreclosed. The subject is neither eliminated nor restored, but held in a protracted state of social indeterminacy, compelled to be a parent within a social order that simultaneously renders them contaminating and socially abhorrent. Cleft identity thus names a contemporary form of suspended citizenship produced at the intersection of biopolitical demand and necropolitical exclusion.

2. From Phenomenology to Political Structure: Mapping the Development of Stigma Studies

Stigma studies occupy a conceptual plane stretching from phenomenological accounts of lived experience to structural analyses of stigma as an instrument of political rule. At one end lie symbolic interactionist and phenomenological approaches, which foreground stigma as an embodied and relational condition. Goffman’s (1963) seminal formulation defined stigma as a “spoiled identity,” emphasising the micro-social processes through which individuals become discredited and must engage in ongoing strategies of concealment and negotiation. Crucially, stigma does not simply mark difference but reorganises the moral status of the person being stigmatised:

“We believe that the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption, we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unwittingly, reduce his life chances. We construct a stigma theory, an ideology to explain his inferiority and account for the danger he represents, sometimes rationalising an animosity based on other differences, such as social class”.

(Goffman 1963, p. 5)

Goffman treats stigma from the standpoint of the stigmatised, not as a fixed attribute, but rather as a perception, something to be managed or mitigated in social interactions. Stigmatised individuals must decide whether:

“to display or not to display; to tell or not to tell; to let on or not to let on; to lie and not to lie; and in each case to whom, how, where, and when”.

(Goffman 1963, p. 42)

Subsequent phenomenological work extends this insight, demonstrating how stigma is not merely a label but a lived condition that permeates embodiment, temporality, and belonging. It is apprehended in the immediacy of social encounters, in the anticipatory anxiety of exposure, and in the continuous labour required to sustain recognition as a legitimate social subject (Goffman 1963; Scheff 2000).

Midway along this plane are theories that retain an interest in interpersonal processes but situate stigma more explicitly within moral and social regulation. Braithwaite’s (1989) theory of reintegrative shaming represents a pivotal moment in this transition. Braithwaite distinguished between stigmatising shame, which casts the offender as a permanently degraded type, and reintegrative shame, which condemns the act while preserving the offender’s membership within the moral community. It is important to note that Braithwaite was clear in his distinction that “Stigmatization is disintegrative shaming in which no effort is made to reconcile the offender with the community” (Braithwaite 1989, p. 102). Drawing on communitarian theory, he argued that shame, when embedded within supportive social relationships, could function as a mechanism of moral repair rather than exclusion:

“Reintegrative shaming is shaming which is followed by efforts to reintegrate the offender back into the community of law-abiding citizens. Disintegrative shaming, in contrast, is shaming which is not followed by reintegration but instead by exclusion”.

(Braithwaite 1989, p. 55)

This distinction resonates with the moral psychology of Kurtz (2007), who observed that guilt attaches to wrongful actions, whereas shame attaches to the self as a flawed being. Where guilt permits restitution and closure, shame threatens ontological integrity, producing a condition in which the individual is constituted as irredeemably defective. Braithwaite’s (1989, 1996, 1999) interventions are often read as progressive, offering an alternative to purely punitive penal regimes. They nonetheless preserve shame as a regulatory technology. The promise of reintegration remains contingent upon the subject’s successful re-alignment with prevailing moral norms, leaving intact the broader social authority to define deviance and enforce conformity. The moral aspect of stigma is developed within the psychology literature. Taking an evolutionary approach, Kurzban and Leary (2001) argue that the social function of stigma was to socially exclude individuals and groups who were seen as a disease avoidance mechanism to protect the group from any risk of contamination. This, it can be argued, extends beyond “disease” to include social contamination from the toxic status of the socially unacceptable and is useful in understanding the origins of necropolitical exclusion. The socially constructed nature of stigma is explored in the work of Major and O’Brien (2005), who bring the moral aspect to the fore, adding the affective properties of stigma to induce stress in the stigmatised individual. Yang et al. (2007) develop the importance of the moral dimension of stigma, concluding that:

“Consideration of the practical engagements of preserving what matters most can greatly enliven our understanding of how stigma pervades the life worlds of the stigmatized. From the vantage of moral experience, both the stigmatized and stigmatizers are seen as grappling with what makes social life and social worlds uncertain, dangerous, and terribly real”.

(Yang et al. 2007, p. 1530)

The analytical centre of gravity shifts further from the interpersonal to the political in the work of Link and Phelan (2001, 2014), who conceptualise stigma as a form of social power. Their influential model describes stigma as a process involving labelling, stereotyping, separation, status loss, and discrimination, all occurring within a context of unequal power. In later work, they developed the concept of stigma power to describe how stigma is actively deployed to “keep people down, in, or away” (Link and Phelan 2014). This formulation marks a decisive departure from purely experiential accounts. Stigma is not simply something that happens between individuals; it is something that is done through institutions, classifications, and regulatory practices. It enables the management of marginalised populations, legitimating exclusion while obscuring the political decisions that produce vulnerability in the first place. Indeed, it can be said that the most important work in situating stigma within the wider sphere of symbolic power is attributable to that of Pierre Bourdieu, who:

“resituate(d) the study of stigmatic attribution and management in a broader sociology of consequential social classification encompassing the fateful judgements passed, not just by individuals in every day life but, but also by state institutions of social normalization and domestication, such as schools, the police and the courts… before which individuals are not equally positioned”.

(Wacquant 2023, p. 66)

Bourdieu’s contribution to this conceptual plane shows the extent to which stigma emerges not merely as a social process but as a technology of governance through the state’s monopoly on the exercise of “symbolic power” (Bourdieu 1977, 1990, 1992). Condry (2007), in her book Families Shamed, provides a bridge to this by showing the extent to which stigma is institutionally produced through the processes of the punishment system, including imprisonment, registration and supervision within the community. Documenting the extent to which punishment reshapes family relations, leading to secondary forms of stigma, Condry reveals how penal power reorganises intimate life itself, transforming the family into a site where punishment is socially and emotionally reproduced. This, what Condrey calls “secondary stigmatisation” (see also Evans et al. 2021), permeates everyday life, “producing exclusion from community, friendship, and civic participation” (Condry 2007, p. 115).

In this way, punishment exceeds its juridical boundaries, extending into the domain of family life itself, such that “punishment does not end with the offender but extends into the lives of their families” (Condry 2007, p. 163). The family, ordinarily positioned as a biopolitical site of care and social reproduction, becomes instead a conduit through which penal power is socially reproduced and expansively imposed. This body of work is complemented by emerging research specifically examining the lived experiences of people with sexual offence convictions, which documents the enduring effects of stigma, moral condemnation, and institutional control in shaping post-release life (in particular, Ievins 2023).

Tyler’s (2022) concept of the “stigma machine” situates stigma within the political economy of late capitalism(see also Tyler and Slater 2018). Tyler (2013, 2022) argues that stigma is mobilised to fragment solidarities and secure consent for policies that intensify inequality, functioning as a mechanism of rule through division. By directing attention upward, to the state, media, and institutional actors who manufacture and circulate stigma, Tyler states clearly that:

“Stigma is used to pit people against each other in struggles over resources and value. In this way, social solidarities are fractured, and opposition to the anti-social, anti-human movement of capital is neutered and neutralised. Stigma politics is a reign of terror that is designed to disarm resistance”.

(Tyler 2022, p. 267)

Taken together, these approaches trace a progressive line of flight from the personal to the political, from the management of spoiled identity to the deployment of stigma as an instrument of rule. Early interactionist accounts focus on the intimate, lived realities of stigma, revealing how it is internalised, negotiated, and embodied. Intermediate theories foreground stigma’s moral and regulatory dimensions, emphasising its role in enforcing conformity and sustaining societal norms. Structural analyses expose stigma’s political function, demonstrating how it operates as a technology of governance that distributes vulnerability while legitimising exclusion and oppression. Each perspective reveals an essential dimension of stigma, yet each also remains bounded by its analytical framework. Interactionist approaches risk individualising what are fundamentally political processes, reintegrative theories may underestimate the permanence of exclusion in contemporary penal regimes, and structural accounts, while exposing stigma’s systemic production, can obscure the lived contradictions experienced by those who must inhabit stigmatised identities in everyday life.

This article builds upon these insights while arguing that the concept of stigma, even in its most expansive structural formulations, remains insufficient to capture the specific condition under examination here. The focus of this paper is not stigma as a singular identity, but the coexistence of two state-sanctioned master identities that impose incompatible moral and political demands upon the same subject: the parent and the “sex offender.” Parenting occupies a paradigmatic position within biopolitical governance. It is constituted as a life-making practice oriented toward care, protection, and the optimisation of children’s futures. The parental subject is interpellated as caring, responsible, and nurturing, charged with safeguarding life and ensuring children flourish (Gillies 2007). By contrast, the “sex offender” is governed through a regime of permanent suspicion, actuarial risk assessment, and precautionary restriction, reflecting what Feeley and Simon (1992) describe as the “new penology,” in which governance is oriented toward managing dangerous populations rather than rehabilitating individuals (Wacquant 1999, 2024; Garland 2001, 2008, 2021). Disclosure requirements, registration regimes, and ongoing surveillance exemplify a form of governmentality concerned with the continuous classification and supervision of risk (Foucault 1978; Beck 1992; O’Malley 2004), producing conditions of enduring civic debilitation in which full restoration of citizenship remains indefinitely deferred or entirely excluded (Mbembe 2019; Feeley and Simon 1992). Cleft identity is not an individual pathology or psychological conflict but a political condition produced by the simultaneous imposition of incompatible regimes of governance. It names the structural irreconcilability of two moral orders: one insists on meeting the biopolitical demands of care and responsibility, while the other inversely enforces upon the self-same subject intrusive regimes of suspicion and control. The parental role requires recognition as a legitimate life-making citizen, while the penal designation of “sex offender” enforces ongoing civic diminishment and harm. These identities cannot be synthesised into a coherent moral subject. Instead, they generate a condition in which the individual must simultaneously inhabit mutually contradictory forms of state classification and state recognition.

This formulation advances a critical sociology of stigma that moves beyond Goffmanian interactional management and beyond structural accounts of stigma as inequality alone. It undergirds the ways in which contemporary punishment regimes institutionalise durable civic debilitation within social and symbolic spaces ordinarily dedicated to the protection and optimisation of life. Cleft identity reveals the incompatibility between a politics of care and a politics of life (see Rose 2007) marked by permanent punishment. What is at stake here is not simply an intensification of stigma, but a structural condition in which the subject is rendered permanently administrable while simultaneously required to perform normative citizenship. This contradiction is not incidental but produced through the expansion of precautionary governance as a default response to “perceived risk.” It interrogates the premise that some citizens must remain indefinitely administrable in order for others to “feel safe,” and it questions the expansion of surveillance, disclosure, and precautionary restriction as default responses to harm. If stigma is politically maintained across the life course, then its dismantling cannot be achieved solely through individual coping strategies or more refined risk assessments. It requires confronting the political rationalities that sustain permanent supervision as a normative condition of justice.

The sections that follow examine how this cleft identity is lived and governed through three qualitative vignettes from the research subject, Eppie Sprung, the founder and CEO of Next Chapter Scotland. These accounts explore how stigma operates not only as social discreditation but also as a durable political condition embedded within everyday practices of parenting. The discussion will return to the key concepts outlined above, demonstrating how the empirical material both confirms and exceeds existing stigma frameworks. In doing so, the article argues that cleft identity provides a more precise analytic for understanding how contemporary penal governance produces subjects who are simultaneously required to sustain life and positioned as its permanent threat. Beyond the carceral context, related scholarship on sexual stigma and institutional engagement highlights similar dynamics of concealability, disclosure, and anticipatory regulation (e.g., Herek 2007; Meyer 2003), suggesting that the condition examined here resonates with a broader sociology of stigmatised sexual identity.

3. Methodology: Situated Analytic Dialogue in a Politically Constructed Field

The analysis presented in this paper emerged from a recorded and transcribed dialogue between the two authors, centred on Eppie’s experience of parenting under conditions of enduring penal stigma. The empirical material is therefore best understood as a single, in-depth case study (n = 1), selected for its analytic richness rather than representativeness. Rather than treating this as biographical testimony alone, we approach the dialogue as a form of collaborative analytic production in which lived experience and sociological interpretation are mutually constitutive. Following Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology (Bourdieu 1977, 1990; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), lived experience is understood not as raw data awaiting theoretical application, but as a structured vantage point through which broader relations of power become perceptible. The narrative encounter functioned simultaneously as empirical material and theoretical provocation, enabling the development of the analytic concept of cleft identity.

This dialogue unfolds within a specific political and institutional context in which the figure of the “sex offender” occupies a uniquely intensified position of surveillance and exclusion2. While stigma emerges at multiple points across the justice process (from accusation and trial to imprisonment and release), the analysis here is deliberately delimited to post-conviction and post-release conditions, where the permanence of administrative inscription, disclosure, and recallability becomes most pronounced. In Scotland, people convicted of sexual offences comprise over a quarter of the prison population, yet rehabilitative provision remains extremely limited: recent Freedom of Information data indicate that only 32 places in offence-related programmes are available at any given time, with waiting lists estimated to take over a decade to clear. At the same time, the majority of individuals subject to post-sentence notification requirements are assessed as presenting low levels of risk, with MAPPA statistics showing the overwhelming majority managed at Level 1 and none at the highest level. Despite the fact that the numbers of people convicted of a sexual offence are continuing to increase considerably, the number of serious offences, according to MAPPA statistics, seems to be significantly reduced. In relation to England, former police chief Mick Creedon highlights the following decline:

“The yearly total of offenders managed under MAPPA Category 3 (the highest level of risk) in 2006/07 was around 3000 and at a time when the overall MAPPA numbers were much smaller. In contrast, less than 400 offenders were managed under MAPPA Category 3 on 31 March 2021, set against a far bigger MAPPA population”.

(Creedon 2023, p. 27)

In Scotland, the contrast is even more stark. Here are the figures as of February 2026:

MAPPA Level 1—5451;

MAPPA Level 2—97;

MAPPA Level 3—0 (FOI 26-0263)3.

Empirical research similarly demonstrates comparatively low sexual recidivism rates, particularly among those convicted of online offences, with reconviction rates for contact offences below one percent over multiple-year follow-up periods.

The recidivism rates among online offenders are significantly lower than other categories of offence save homicide and culpable homicide:

“A 2025 meta-analysis of over 15,000 online offenders found that about 3.4% were reconvicted for any sexual offence, around 3.0–3.3% for another online sexual offence specifically, and only about 0.5–0.7% for a contact sexual offence over an average follow-up of roughly four years”.

(Clark et al. 2025)

Despite this, individuals remain subject to prolonged registration, surveillance, disclosure regimes, and widespread social hostility long after the formal completion of their sentence. In the UK, notification requirements vary depending on sentence length and offence, with some individuals subject to time-limited registration and others to indefinite supervision, although all remain embedded within systems of disclosure and risk management. As Creedon observes:

“Registered sex offenders are unusual as a group in that they are convicted offenders who have completed the sentence and punishment imposed for their offending and yet remain under a form of state supervision for many years, and sometimes indefinitely. Many highly dangerous offenders involved in organised crime, fraud, money laundering, domestic abuse, gang activity and a range of other criminality do not face such attention at the end of their sentence, despite the fact that many will reoffend and continue to pose a serious threat to society. This is not to suggest that the current arrangements for managing sex offenders are wrong, but rather to recognise that, in terms of managing risk and protecting communities, an unequal process, structure and investment is in place”.

(Creedon 2023, p. 2)

This disjunction between empirically observed risk and the intensity of ongoing regulation forms a critical part of the analytic context in which stigma is produced and sustained. It is within this environment, characterised by expanding administrative oversight, limited pathways to rehabilitation, and persistent public and media scrutiny, that the phenomenology described in this paper becomes intelligible.

Our methodological approach is therefore best understood as a form of collaborative reflexive phenomenology: collaborative in its dialogical production, phenomenological in its attention to embodied and affective experience, and reflexive in recognising that analytic authority is shaped by the positionality of the authors. Both authors work for Next Chapter Scotland (Eppie being the founder and CEO), an organisation providing daily support to individuals and families affected by the justice system; including those subject to supervision, registration requirements, and the wider consequences of penal stigma. Our analytic insights emerge not from a single narrative alone but from sustained longitudinal engagement with numerous individuals navigating criminal justice processes through our work at Next Chapter Scotland. The case presented here functions as a concentrated site through which these broader patterns become analytically visible.

Initial analysis drew on Goffman’s (1963) account of spoiled identity and impression management, particularly the anticipatory regulation required when stigma is concealable yet permanently recallable. However, the experiences described exceeded the explanatory limits of interactional stigma alone. The difficulty, for Eppie the interviewee, was not simply managing a discrediting attribute, but inhabiting two state-imposed moral classifications whose logics were structurally incompatible: the life-making responsibilities of parenthood and the enduring inscription of “incorrigible sex offender.” This recognition prompted engagement with broader frameworks of governance, particularly Foucauldian (Foucault 1978) biopolitics and Mbembe’s (2019) necropolitics, enabling conceptual refinement of cleft identity as a condition produced through the simultaneous regulation, surveillance, and civic diminishment of the subject.

The aim of this methodology is not statistical generalisation but analytic illumination. By situating lived experience within its institutional and political context, the paper renders visible how contemporary punishment regimes extend beyond the prison sentence into the organisation of subjectivity, family life, and civic belonging. In doing so, it advances cleft identity as a theoretically grounded account of how individuals may be governed simultaneously as biological subjects to be managed and as civic subjects whose full social restoration remains indefinitely foreclosed. The dialogue was recorded, transcribed, and thematically analysed through iterative discussion between the authors. Ethical considerations were central throughout, including the dual role of participant and co-author, issues of consent, and the management of identifiable personal material within a highly stigmatised context.

3.1. Vignette 1: Fear, Disclosure, and the Internalisation of Governance

Goffman’s analysis of stigma provides an initial vocabulary for understanding the lived dynamics described in Eppie’s account. He distinguished between the discredited—whose stigma is known—and the discreditable—whose stigma remains concealable but potentially revealable. The criminal conviction for a sexual offence often occupies this unstable terrain. It is not visible in everyday interaction, yet it is permanently retrievable through disclosure regimes, media archives, institutional records, and vigilante activities. The subject therefore inhabits a continuous anticipatory relation to exposure.

Eppie’s narrative foregrounds fear as the organising affect of parenting under these conditions. While these vignettes are drawn from a single case, they reflect dynamics widely documented in research on stigma, punishment, and post-release life, allowing for analytic rather than statistical generalisation (Box 1).

Vignette 1

Box 1. Fear and Parenting After Conviction.

Fears and Parenting After Conviction 

“One of the most significant aspects of parenting after a criminal conviction is fear. Fear of how your children will see you, fear of how your past might affect your relationship with them, and fear that they could, in some way, follow in your footsteps. My own circumstances are shaped by the fact that my offence occurred before I had children, whereas others may have been parents at the time of their offence. The differences in those experiences matter, whether children were young or teenagers at the time, or whether they were born after the offence.

For me, the biggest fear is that my children could be scared of me, that I might no longer be their safe place, their security. Every parent worries about setting an example, about the things in their past they don’t want their children to repeat, drinking, drugs, reckless decisions. But when your past includes something so significant, so extreme, the stakes feel much higher.

My offence was deeply tied to patterns of behaviour I developed in response to past abuse, patterns of blurred boundaries, of internalised ideas about gender and sexuality that I no longer embrace but which still feel ingrained in me. The thought of passing any of that on to my children is terrifying. And yet, at the same time, I have had to find ways to survive, to accept that I am not an entirely terrible person. That complexity, of fearing what might be passed down, while also recognising the parts of myself I do value, is difficult to navigate.

Parenting is already filled with anxiety. Every parent worries about their child’s safety and happiness, but when you add a criminal record into the mix, it becomes another layer of fear. Some parents in my position end up estranged from their children. I don’t anticipate that in my case, but I do worry that as my children grow up and come to fully understand my past, there could be a fracture, a moment of realisation that causes harm to our relationship.”

At one level, this vignette reflects the familiar labour of stigma management: the parent anticipates a future moment of disclosure that could alter how her child sees her. Yet this anticipation is not simply interpersonal anxiety. It is structured by a regime in which the offence is never fully past. Through criminal records, actuarial risk assessments, and informal circulation, the conviction remains continuously recallable. Its significance does not diminish with time; it persists as an enduring classification that can be reactivated at any moment. The parent therefore lives in relation not only to what has happened, but to the certainty that it can be made present again. This permanence exceeds Goffman’s (1963) model of situational stigma. There is no stable backstage in which the self is free from its mark. The offence exists as a latent but ever-available truth, capable of reorganising relationships long after the event itself. Parenting becomes structured by this temporal threat: the fear is not only of what the child knows now, but of what they may one day be made to know. This reveals what we term cleft identity. The parent must inhabit two irreconcilable positions simultaneously: she is required to be the child’s source of safety while bearing an institutional inscription of danger that never seems to end. In this way, punishment extends beyond the sentence into the organisation of everyday life. The offence is not confined to the past; it is carried forward as a permanent condition of the present.

3.2. Vignette 2: Disclosure, Moral Integrity, and the Problem of Permanent Recallability

If vignette one reveals the affective structure of fear, the second foregrounds a different dilemma: whether to disclose the conviction to one’s child. In Goffman’s terms, this is the classic predicament of the discreditable subject—one who must decide when and how to reveal a concealable stigma. Yet here too, the interactional frame is insufficient. The problem is not simply how to manage information, but how to sustain moral legitimacy within a field structured by permanent recallability (Box 2).

3.2.1. Vignette 2

To Tell or Not to Tell

Box 2. Disclosure and the Problem of Permanent Recallabilit.

“Many parents choose to withhold certain truths from their children, whether about past mistakes, addictions, or even criminal convictions. But for me, the decision to be open about my past was shaped by something else entirely—my experience with donor conception. There is a well-established body of research that emphasises the importance of telling donor-conceived children the truth about their origins, to prevent the sense of betrayal that can come from finding out later in life. That principle felt instinctively relevant to my situation. Keeping something hidden doesn’t just preserve the secret—it creates its own damage. The lie itself becomes the problem.

In this context, the question of identity becomes central. By telling my children, my conviction becomes an undeniable part of who I am in relation to them. And yet, the impact of disclosure likely varies depending on the nature of the offence. A parent with a violent conviction, for example, might worry their child would be frightened of them. There are layers of complexity in each case, but what remains constant is the challenge of deciding how much to reveal and when.”

At one level, this vignette reflects what Goffman described as selective disclosure: an attempt to retain narrative control over a stigmatised identity. Yet the conditions under which this decision is made are not interpersonal alone. The conviction is not simply a private truth waiting to be told or withheld; it is a legally and administratively preserved status, permanently recallable through criminal record systems, disclosure regimes, and social and legacy media attention. Concealment can never be secure, because the past remains formally retrievable. Disclosure therefore emerges not as free moral choice, but as an adaptation to the certainty that revelation may occur regardless of the parent’s intentions. What is striking is the ethical inversion this produces. The parent frames disclosure as necessary to preserve their integrity, drawing on the moral imperative not to deceive one’s own child. Yet this obligation arises within a structure that ensures the offence can never fully recede into the past. The subject is compelled to incorporate the conviction into her parental identity, not because its meaning has stabilised, but because its recallability is permanent. The offence persists as an ever-present possibility of reactivation, capable of reorganising relationships long after the event itself. This reveals another dimension of cleft identity. The parent is required to be transparent, trustworthy, and life-sustaining, while carrying a classification that remains institutionally alive. Disclosure does not resolve this contradiction. Telling the child may preserve moral coherence within the relationship, but it cannot extinguish the underlying mark. The conviction endures as a standing condition, extending punishment beyond the sentence and into the temporal structure of family life itself. The subject must therefore parent in the shadow of a past that is never allowed to end.

3.3. Vignette 3: Media Spectacle and the Public Reactivation of Condemnation

If the first two vignettes reveal the anticipatory and moral dimensions of living with a conviction, the third illustrates the moment when administrative inscription becomes public spectacle. Twelve years after conviction, and years after formal punishment had concluded, a tabloid journalist appeared unannounced at Eppie’s home. Her four-year-old daughter answered the door. A long-lens camera was positioned outside the family window (Box 3).

The past was not merely remembered; it was reactivated.

Vignette 3

Box 3. Media Harassment, Vigilantism, and the Persistence of Stigma.

The Immediate Impact of Press Harassment: A Child’s Perspective 

“When the press arrived uninvited at my home, my four-year-old daughter was the one who answered the door. She had no understanding of why I reacted as I did, why I suddenly whisked her away from the doorway, why I immediately shut the curtains, why I entered a state of distress that lasted for days.

For three days, I couldn’t return home. The knowledge that they had been lurking around my garden, taking photographs, turned my home—a supposed place of safety—into a site of intrusion and fear. But beyond my own distress, the harm extended to my daughter. No matter how much I tried to mask my anxiety, she knew something was wrong.

That evening, she voiced what she could not fully comprehend: “I feel sad and I don’t know why.” The next day, she still felt sad. And then, she said something even more heartbreaking: “Normally, cuddles make me happy, but you cuddled me, and I still felt sad.”

This was the direct emotional impact of media harassment on a child, on a four-year-old who had done nothing to warrant this invasion into her life. Even with my full presence and support, my capacity to care for her was diminished because of the sheer stress I was under. The more a parent is placed under duress, the less they are able to meet their child’s emotional needs. This is a reality the media never considers in their pursuit of headlines.”

The Threat of Social Media Vigilantism 

“The physical intrusion of journalists at my home is just one dimension of the problem. In the digital age, media harassment doesn’t stop at the doorstep, it extends into the unregulated, chaotic world of social media, where doxxing and vigilantism thrive.

One of the greatest fears for any parent is the idea that their child could be put in harm’s way. The sharing of home addresses online, the incitement of mobs to turn up at someone’s house, these are real dangers that people with past convictions face. And the cruel irony? Those who claim to be acting in the name of “protecting children” seem entirely unconcerned about the safety of my child.”

The “Google Effect”: A Lifetime of Stigma 

“Even if the press eventually moves on, the internet never forgets. Every tabloid article, every headline, true or not, remains searchable, waiting to be found by curious minds. Children, as they grow up, inevitably Google their parents’ names. And what do they find? Sensationalised, dehumanising portrayals that bear little resemblance to reality.

One of the most egregious examples in my own case was a headline referring to me as a “working girl.” It was a deliberate play on words, designed to be provocative—published when I was starting my own business. There was nothing in my conviction, nor in my history, related to sex work. Yet, the implication was there, shaping how the world—and potentially my own child—might see me.

What does a 10-year-old think when they stumble upon such an article? Does it make them question everything they’ve been told? Does it plant seeds of doubt, forcing them to grapple with conflicting narratives about their own parent?”

Beyond Court Reporting: The Problem of Perpetual Coverage 

“I understand the role of media in covering court proceedings. I may not like it, but I accept that public reporting of criminal trials serves a function. However, what I take issue with is the unrelenting, years-later coverage that continues to follow individuals long after they have served their sentence. This kind of ongoing scrutiny does not serve justice. Instead, it serves to dehumanise, to ensure that a person’s past, no matter how distant, remains an inescapable part of their present.

The media, in their relentless pursuit of clicks and sales, rarely consider the long-term damage they cause, not just to individuals but to their families, their children. A moment of scandal for them is a lifetime of stigma for us. And in that equation, where is the justice?”

This vignette captures the brutality through which a conviction is forcibly reactivated. The journalist at the door and the long-lens camera at the window did not simply observe; they intruded, transforming the home into a site of surveillance and threat. Years after the sentence had ended, condemnation was made present again. The conviction persisted not as memory but viscerally, to be felt as a reawakened status, available for renewed exposure. In this moment, punishment resumed, not through official sanction, but through spectacle. This exposure operates not only through the press but also through the ongoing threat of vigilante attention see Tippett (2022). The circulation of names, images, and addresses online creates the possibility of collective retaliation at any time. As Tyler (2022, p. 267) argues, stigma functions here as a form of terror: an affective regime sustained through fear, alarm, and the anticipation of attack. The subject must live with the knowledge that public denunciation can be escalated and mobilised without warning, that the boundary between private life and public condemnation is permanently unstable.

Digital media ensures that this threat does not abate. Headlines remain searchable; accusations remain retrievable; the past remains continuously accessible to strangers, neighbours, vigilantes, journalists, and, eventually, the child herself. Recall is omnipresent. The conviction lies in wait, capable of reorganising the present at any moment. What is produced is not simply shame but exposure as a condition of existence. Cleft identity emerges here in its most violent form. The parent is required to sustain a space of safety for her child while inhabiting a status that invites surveillance, intrusion, and potential attack. The child’s unexplained sadness registers the affective transmission of this condition: the terror directed at the parent reshapes the emotional atmosphere of the home. In necropolitical terms, the conviction functions as a civil death-mark. Thanks to a toxic cocktail of media, in both its social and legacy forms, the online “sex offender databases” render convictions preserved, searchable, endlessly available for reactivation. The subject is compelled to live and parent within its shadow, unable to secure the temporal closure that punishment is supposed to confer.

4. Discussion: Stigma, Viscerality, and Necropolitical Classification in the Production of a Cleft Identity

Stigma is always bound to relations of power, but the label “sex offender” operates with a particular intensity. It functions as a master status (Hughes 1994), overriding all other identities and achievements, reorganising the individual’s moral standing irrespective of their position in social space. Professional status, educational attainment, and prior social recognition are rendered secondary to a single, totalising classification. Unlike other stigmatised identities, whose force may be mediated by class or institutional authority, this designation produces a subject positioned unconditionally at the bottom of the moral order. Once applied, the power to condemn no longer resides solely with institutional actors; it becomes socially diffused. Neighbours, strangers, journalists, and vigilante groups become authorised to monitor, expose, and threaten those assigned the “sex offender” label. The state’s classificatory act thus redistributes the capacity to dominate, producing a subject whose public degradation becomes universally legitimate and accessible by all social groups, no matter how marginal.

In this sense, the label exceeds the sociological notion of master status and assumes a necropolitical function. Mbembe (2003) describes necropolitics as the power to create populations consigned to conditions of social and political death. The “sex offender” classification produces precisely such a condition: the individual remains biologically alive yet is permanently exposed to exclusion, surveillance, and the possibility of renewed condemnation. Civic belonging becomes conditional and revocable; restoration is indefinitely deferred. The label operates as a death-mark, fixing the subject in a position of enduring civic diminishment.

This condition is not only socially imposed but also corporeally lived. Fanon’s phenomenology captures the visceral force of stigma, describing the moment of interpellation as being “sealed into… crushing objecthood” (Fanon 2008, p. 82). Shame is absorbed through the body, shaping how one inhabits space, anticipates recognition, and relates to oneself. The classification becomes embodied, producing a subject who must continue to be a parent while carrying an identity that marks them as permanently dangerous and morally suspect. It is within this convergence of institutional inscription, social authorisation, and embodied internalisation that cleft identity emerges: the subject is compelled to inhabit the role of life-making parent while simultaneously bearing a necropolitical classification that situates them outside the moral community that legitimates parenthood itself.

5. Postscript: Eppie Is the Exception That Proves the Rule

This paper has several limitations. It is based on a single case study and therefore does not aim to provide empirically generalisable findings. The focus on one individual, who is also a co-author, may raise questions of representativeness and positionality. However, the aim of the paper is analytic rather than statistical generalisation, using a theoretically informed case to illuminate broader dynamics of stigma and governance. Future research could extend this framework across different populations, gendered experiences, and institutional contexts.

The concept of cleft identity names a structural condition rather than a psychological dilemma. It arises where two incompatible master statuses, parent and sex offender, are forced into simultaneous occupation within a political field structured by biopolitics and necropolitics. If biopolitics disciplines, manages and optimises life, necropolitics abandons and contains; together they produce subjects whose identities are permanently fractured by state classification. Stigma, in this sense, is more than misrecognition; it is a form of governance. As the trajectory of stigma studies reveals, scholarship has traversed from the phenomenological immediacy of the spoiled identity to increasingly structural accounts of power. Yet it is in Bourdieu’s (1984) insistence that symbolic power is exercised through classificatory struggle that we see most clearly what is at stake. The stigmatised subject is enclosed within a classificatory regime not of their own making. This classificatory system precedes them; the state’s monopoly on symbolic power relegates them to the bottom of the social structure. Under necropolitical containment, this enclosure is totalising: employment barriers, travel restrictions, surveillance regimes, media exposure and vigilante threats conspire to render the “sex offender” identity exhaustive.

Cleft identity, then, is inescapable at the level of structure. One cannot simply discard a master status imposed and continuously reproduced by the state. Necropolitics, like biopolitics, “emanates from the state and percolates through the social body, its manifestation is the power of naming, nomination and certification, that is the capacity to create identities and enforce social boundaries, in particular through the educational system and the law” (Wacquant 2023, p. 68). It becomes sedimented in institutions, neighbourhoods, and intimate relationships. The death world is not metaphorical; it is administrative.

Yet, as Foucault reminds us, power is never absolute: “Where there is power there is resistance” (Foucault 1978, p. 95).

Eppie’s life demonstrates that while cleft identity cannot be dissolved, it can be reimagined. By naming and owning the necropolitical master status imposed upon her, she refuses its totalising effect. Rather than internalising degradation, she converts it into a vision of political clarity. This exceptionality is not incidental. It is shaped by access to organisational resources, social networks, and forms of capital that enable resistance and reinterpretation of stigma. For many others lacking such resources, the constraints described throughout this paper may operate with even greater force. In establishing Next Chapter Scotland, she transformed containment into collective action. The very mechanisms designed to silence and isolate become the impetus for organisation and solidarity. Understanding the architecture of control becomes the condition of resisting it. To return, finally, to Goffman: backstage, Eppie inhabits love, reciprocity and care, the ordinary intimacies necropolitics seeks to deny. Front stage, she is defiant, strategic and unrelenting, exposing stigma as political rather than personal failure. Cleft identity therefore does not end in resignation. If embraced, it opens up to reveal the true terrain of political struggle. If stigma is symbolic power exercised by the state, then resistance begins in recognising that fact. Eppie’s trajectory shows that even within necropolitical containment, subjects can appropriate the very identity meant to destroy them and refashion it into critique, solidarity and institutional intervention. The iron grip loosens not through denial of stigma, but through its political unmasking.

Symbolic power and the struggle over classification remains. But it is no longer unilateral. In this sense, cleft identity offers a conceptual tool for understanding how contemporary punishment regimes extend beyond the sentence into the structuring of subjectivity and citizenship. It provides a basis for future empirical and theoretical work examining the long-term governance of stigmatised populations.