Quick Links for Future Reference

Washington State Institute for Public Policy's list of juvenile civil justice. The Ruth Dykeman Children's Center, which includes residential treatment programs for both survivors of and perpetrators of sexual assault. HB 1473, a bill currently in the Washington state legislature that would require additional information be given to students receiving sex education to understand the laws surrounding adolescent sexuality and the potential consequences should they be caught breaking those laws. Invisible Children blog provides a modest proposal for the end of criminalization of children in all forms, and seeks to create a dialogue about assisting and supporting our youth rather than impoverishing and punishing them. Also on that blog is a call for civil justice along the same lines. (Links found through one of my LinkedIn groups.) Blogger Greta Christina writes about sex and the off-label use of our bodies, arguing for a different perspective on the non-procreative sex acts that humans engage in across the world. While the whole of her entry is inspiring and eloquent, the heart of it lies here:

Off-label uses of body parts and biological functions aren’t just acceptable and morally neutral. They are some of the most beautiful, honorable, and deeply treasured parts of the human experience. Human beings took our animal need for palatable food . . . and turned it into chocolate souffles with salted caramel cream. We took our ability to co-operate as a social species . . . and turned it into craft circles and bowling leagues and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We took our capacity to make and use tools . . . and turned it into the Apollo moon landing. We took our uniquely precise ability to communicate through language . . . and turned it into King Lear. None of these things are necessary for survival and reproduction. That is exactly what makes them so splendid. When we take our basic evolutionary wiring and transform it into something far beyond any prosaic matters of survival and reproduction . . . that’s when humanity is at its best. That’s when we show ourselves to be capable of creating meaning and joy, for ourselves and for one another. That’s when we’re most uniquely human.

More Sensationalism - Reading the Language of the Anonymous Masses

CBS recently featured an article entitled Outrage Growing Over Repeat Sex Offenders, and I must wonder whether this headline itself doesn't fuel that type of mentality. In the article, Ben Tracy feeds fuel to the fire of fear by including the following paragraphs:

Experts say there are not enough parole officers to monitor the more than 700,000 registered sex offenders in the United States. At least 100,000 may not even be living where they say they are.

"The sex offender registry provides this false sense of security we are monitoring and doing something with the sex offenders out there," said Robin Sax, a former Los Angeles county prosecutor.

And monitoring doesn't always work. Even with home inspections, Phillip Garrido was still able to hide Jaycee Dugard in his backyard for 18 years. Last November in Cleveland, 11 bodies were found in the house of another registered sex offender being monitored by police.

Not only does this heighten the "growing outrage" of the U.S. public, it gives further incentive to doubt the systems that have been put in place to help track, monitor, and prevent further attacks by sex offenders without providing a discussion of why there are not enough officers or why these systems may be insufficient. At no point does the author suggest any links between the blanket laws designed to prosecute and punish varying degrees of sexual activity as if they are the all the same crime. As one of the commenters, Fatesrider, stated rather eloquently:

The trouble with the term "sex offender" is that it paints a guy who has consensual sex with his 17 year old girlfriend on the night he turns 18 with the same brush as a violent child sex predator. In the eyes of the law - being convicted of a sex crime - the two are EQUAL. We need to properly identify those who ARE violent, who ARE predators, who ARE worthy of being monitored. With draconian "you can't live here" laws being passed everywhere, and with so few actual predators worthy of being monitored, we are knee-jerking ourselves into a corner with respect to our ability to try to keep our communities safer. There are just too many to oversee and many of THEM are falling off the radar because no one knows where they are. We have to focus in on those individuals likely to re-offend and see to it they never do again. And we have to cut those convicted of consensual sex acts some slack and not necessarily automatically brand them with the same scarlet letter. So rather than some other knee-jerk, draconian, idiotic ploy that doesn't work, how about applying some of that alleged intelligence humans have for fixing a problem and find a solution instead of a band-aid?

This comes back to the issues we face as a society that prosecutes children and teens for experimental sexuality, and for consensual sex between teens crossing the arbitrary border of consent from "child" to "adult" with little allowance for the recognition of stages of maturation with the same level of severity as that of habitual rapists, molesters, and murderers. Where is the justice? Where is the discussion of reform? I don't care for most major networks that sensationalize news and focus on tragedy without true depth of investigation. However, I did create an account with the CBS web site in order to comment to Fatesrider who had already said much of what I wished to bring to bear.

Thank you. As someone who is both a survivor of childhood sexual abuse AND as a person seeking to reform our sex offender laws, these frothing-at-the-mouth hell-and-damnation reactions do not allow us to discuss the real issues behind overcrowding and lack of efficient monitoring of real offenders. When we criminalize children with the same laws intended to protect them, we're not helping anyone. We end up stigmatizing and marginalizing youth engaged in natural, exploratory behavior, and we flood the system with so-called "sex offenders" of every degree, and monitor them equally as monsters. We need to start a dialogue of reform, and discuss with our legislators the difference between truly malicious and harmful individuals in our society, and those who fall outside such categories that get caught up in the language of the law. *Then* we can better address what ways to handle those who, like Gardner, who are the true criminals.

Sadly, my words were not as eloquent as the original commenter, but after reading the majority of comments that appealed to either a particular Christian standard of morals that includes violence and calls for extreme forms of punishment for all "sex offenders" without addressing the problematic labeling, I wanted to add to the discourse on reform. These articles are currently vehicles for delivering fear and to gain immediate, extreme responses from their audience. It is our responsibility as citizens to adapt this divisive, inflammatory language into a vehicle for discourse of reform and as opportunities for education and outreach.