Harmful to Minors

Today I contacted Judith Levine, author of Harmful to Minors, which I read a few years ago and found to be one of the few voices speaking out against the hysteria that has culminated in our legal system and how we treat innocent, natural explorations of children and adolescent sexuality in a criminal manner. In this climate, preschoolers can be labeled as sex harassers for hugging a teacher, holding hands or a playground peck is now grounds for a lifelong sentence as a sexual predator, or at least close scrutiny within an elementary school that will slap it on a permanent record.

Since reading her book, Judith has become one of my heroes in the efforts to bring sanity and reason back to discussions about human sexuality in general, and within education in particular. My main query was to discover whether or not there are any groups, organizations, or otherwise actively seeking to counter these laws that punish children in incomprehensible ways. I hope that she will reply, though I imagine she receives a great inundation of emails on a regular basis, and am feeling like a nervous fangirl.

Before sending the email, I had already participated in an online discussion regarding a blog entry titled "Turning Kids Into Criminals" (found here). My response to someone who argued that the data seemed vague as did any real accounts of injustice:

People often cite the ambiguous nature of teen years when one individual in a couple suddenly crosses that invisible "18" line and suddenly becomes a criminal. Or even teens under the age of 18 engaging in consensual, exploratory sex, a natural part of development, in which one partner (usually male) is prosecuted by the other partner's parents for rape. But the hysteria is far worse than that. There are growing reports from around the nation of elementary students, kindergartners, and even preschoolers being labeled sexual harassers by their schools or even brought up on legal charges by parents of so-called victims for simple shows of innocent affection like attempting a playground kiss or even for hugging a teacher. A three year old preschooler, just out of diapers will have a permanent mark as having engaged in inappropriate physical conduct throughout elementary school because he hugged a teacher. This is where these laws get completely out of hand. In Harmful to Minors, a book challenging many of our views on children, sexuality, and sex education, the author, Judith Levine, offers many examples in which our broad-based laws and rabid fear of anything remotely sexual among American youth has backfired. When holding hands, playground pecks, natural curiosity, and hugging is deemed worthy of criminal action, what are we teaching our children? Most schools do not even express in clearly defined ways what types of touch are appropriate, and which are grounds for potential legal action. In all of the fervor to "think of the children," it doesn't seem as though there is much "thinking" going on at all.