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.

Beginning of a Bibliography

I have sorted through my selected works, set up a tentative layout for my finished paper, and have begun the careful study of my three narrowed topics. Still many obstacles to the criminalization of children; it is neither a well-researched topic within anthropology, nor it is a subject anyone wishes to take on within legislation. Judith Levine and the RSOL seem to be my primary sources of information at the moment, though I am also reviewing anthropological texts regarding sex education and other childhood sexuality issues to see what I can pull from there to find a foundational understanding of our current cultural perceptions of sex and adolescence.

Tomorrow: My second meeting with the CCSL! Wednesday: Meeting and progress report

Judith Levine and Campus Coalition for Sexual Literacy

I heard back from Judith Levine! She responded within a day of my email, which made me rather giddy. She's a hero of mine, and her Harmful to Minors: the Perils of Protecting Children from Sex was a great inspiration to me several years ago when I read it. Not only was she quite supportive of my endeavors, but gave me some resources to utilize in my research and to pursue for further activism with regards to the criminalization of children.

The biggest resource she sent me is a link to the Reform Sex Offender Laws site, already linked to Washington state's representative for these issues. As I study the media surrounding the labeling of children as sexual predators, I will be contacting the local representative to talk about ways in which I, and others, can get involved in changing legislation. The battle is a tough one, because no one wants to be seen as anti-child.

On Tuesday, I attended my first Campus Coalition for Sexual Literacy, which meets every other Tuesday from 3-4p.m. in the Q-Center. I met two people who already are big activists in sexual literacy. While much of our conversation involved a private discussion, some of our focus was on services we can provide for people on campus. We are planning both a more intimate, safe-space discussion for a topic (we brainstormed a number of topics to discuss), and an on-campus "Ask the Sexpert" styled event for spring in which we will make ourselves available in visible areas such as Red Square or the lawn in front of the HUB, and answer questions people ask us.

While there, I introduced myself, gave them some information about my skills, and let them know where I might be of use to them. I'm looking forward to the next meeting!

On this week's agenda: 1. Start reading Out in Public, which just arrived in the mail. 2. Contact RSOL in Washington. 3. Continue research on Children and Sexual Predator labels.

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.

Beginning the Search

Before I began my search for articles for my bibliography, I had to address the internal issues facing me. Though my comfort zones and past experiences have given me a wealthy foundation of information about human sexuality, and I could see many places in which that knowledge could be put to use, by my senior year I already had doubts about whether or not to continue to pursue this "comfortable path."

With our nation's political climate being hostile for the last ten years, ever since the Bush administration's theft of the United States, we remain uninsured, in debt, and overconsumers of our environment. All of these issues take precendence in my mind for topics that need to be addressed by the citizens of this country, and such changes can be supported by anthropologists willing to put in the effort toward public discourse and active changes on a community level.

Entering the quarter, I had already attempted to contact several individuals from previous Lavender Language Conferences who presented topics that were of interest to me. Only one among them returned my emails, and was able to direct me toward other resources, but had nothing to share from recent publications.

Not wanting to let this stand in my way, I began a systematic search of anthropological journal articles published over the last fifteen years with various keyword searches such as "gender," "transgender," "queer," "gay," "lesbian," "prostitute," "sex work," et al. Despite the diverse qualifiers I offered the search, the majority of my results turned up primarily international, regionally-based, and often highly biased returns. Again, I pressed on. I decided to branch out into other fields as well, collecting information from women's study articles, and also current publications in the broad media.

In many ways this will require a cross-disciplinary viewpoint, for there are some issues not being addressed by Anthropology today, and others that are only represented through the limited lens of a specific region. While diverse sources are important to gain a broader perspective on over-arching themes within human sexuality research, I know that I will likely be spending my in-public work within the local Seattle area, or at least somewhere within the United States. I am a firm believer that we must work on ourselves before we can attempt to adequately assist others in their goals towards region-based progress.

[This is, of course, a lot of jargon. Are you laughing yet Holly? Karen would be slapping my hands and giving me a lecture right about now.]

Another aspect of my initial searches involved a discovery of areas that I felt need further addressing or at least further research. While my first list of terms I wished to explore under the heading of human sexuality grew rather cumbersome, seeing what was already available in the literature and comparing that to recent news reports that concerned me, I found myself most especially drawn to a few core issues: decriminalizing prostitution, the criminalization of children who are eternally labeled "sex predators" for minor exploratory instances, and the juxtaposition of gender identity and sexual preference including terms like transgendered and gender queer.

By focusing on narrower topics, I can better explore where future work could have meaning should I explore it. While I remain interested in further studies of polyamory, the "kink community," pre-natal and post-partum sexuality, and childhood development, to pursue them would be narcissistic and what I consider "taking the easy path."

Nevertheless I must return to my original statement that I am now unsure whether human sexuality itself is even relevant to the more pressing concerns of food security and environmental damage from anthropogenic sources. No matter how much I wish to see justice for the people, it matters little if there is nowhere for humans to live or any resources with which they can survive.

Then again, I am unsure if I have the stamina necessary for work within environmental spheres. Perhaps in many ways, human sexuality remains an escape plan, a way of moving away from the real work that needs to be done immediately. An optomistic view, though, might suggest that if I am creative enough, I could work to assist in systemic changes that address both the concerns of individuals on a social justice level and the urgent needs of a globe facing severe changes over the course of the next thirty years.

STATUS UPDATE: Though in some ways I am well ahead of where I wish to be mentally for this independent study project, the actual reading of texts and creation of a rough bibliography is not where I intended by the third week. However, narrowing my focus should help me provide more quality research for each subject.