Three articles on sex offenders and such that I've seen in the past two days

[conuly]

One on an apparently basless campaign against a group home for disabled women
One on Florida deliberately housing sex offenders under a bridge
One (a few months old) on how draconian laws do much more harm than good.

I'm not saying child molestation is something nice, or only kinda bad. Yeah, it's wrong. It's about as wrong as you can get. But... where is the common sense?

I mean, if the point of these laws is to punish molesters, great. You've done that, several times over. But if the point of these laws is to protect children (which I think is a far more laudable goal)... by supporting these laws, you fail. Miserably.

Here's the facts: Your child is a lot more likely to be harmed by a teacher, doctor, family member, scout leader, or trusted family friend than by a random stranger. While stranger abductions certainly do happen, they don't happen in the proportion that people believe.

Here's another fact: If you can't survive by following the law, if you can't eat, if you can't house yourself - you will break the law to survive. If the law says you have to register and go to treatment to prevent backsliding, and oh, by the way, you can't earn money if you're registered or rent an apartment - you'll drop off the lists, you'll stop going to treatment. Which I guess means you might be more likely to commit the same crime all over again. (Heck, if prison is preferable to life outside of prison, any cynics willing to bet you might commit the crime just so you can do the time? Anybody?)

Here's something else: Every crime, and I mean every crime, will have false convictions. (And, in the case of sex offenders, a whole lot of people who got stuck with the term after they did something dumb like sleep with their girlfriend who was two years younger, that sort of thing.) So while phrases like "They should all be shot" and "They should be tortured and shot" might sound nice, and you might mean it, I'd like to ask how you can really, truly, positively be certain that there aren't any mistakes made. The justice system isn't perfect, it can't be, and I refuse to advocate the death penalty until we can be sure that we only convict the guilty. (And that this sort of law won't get overextended and turn around and bite me in the ass. If it's okay to punish sex offenders after their term is up, why not murderers? Actually, why not murderers? But that's another issue.)

And another one: Recidivism is apparently pretty low with released molesters. I did not know that, and I suspect you didn't either.

Here's what's going to protect children:

Getting rid of scare tactics. People are so scared of "stranger danger" that they're not letting their kids live. Meanwhile, they're apparently oblivious to the risk of Uncle Jimmy or that nice couple who run the Sunday School and have all those programs for kids.

Making laws that can be enforced, and followed. Which means that, yes, a sex offender may live a mile near a school. If that means that we know where they are and that they're showing up for treatment regularly, I'm all for it.

Finding out who's going to be a constant danger. This really ought to be applied to all violent crimes, and it probably is. Keep the really violent people locked up - long sentences do that.

Finding out how to prevent others from doing it again, and doing *everything possible* to help them help themselves. Not because we "feel sorry for them", but because we don't want to hurt kids.

Educating children to speak about it if it happens to them, this can prevent somebody from harming several kids before being caught.

Bonus: Finding out who is likely to become an abuser in the future, offering help before it becomes a problem. Not sure how this could be accomplished - but if this, that, and the other thing prevents recidivism, mightn't it also prevent the crime in the first place?

I don't know, it seems pretty simple to me. I'm always telling people, you can be right or you can help people. Can't do both. There seem to be a lot of people in this world who want to be right so much, they don't see that their efforts to be right and punish others are only, ultimately, hurting the people they want to protect. I just don't get that. I don't get it at all.

Comments

[towanda.livejournal.com]

I'm 100% with you. There is a huge excess of fear mongering surrounding child molestation. That's not intended to diminish the severity of the crime, but when we as a society start marching and carrying torches, then we've lost the high ground.

[conuly]

Well, that can be hard to do when you're talking about things like child molestation. But at the very least, we've lost our sense of... something.

[cumaeansibyl.livejournal.com]

I'm in a slightly unpopular position here, but I think sting operations could really prove effective in the "protecting children" line. The Dateline "To Catch A Predator" schtick is the most famous, of course, but I'm also seeing more and more news stories about local cops catching people who want to have sex with children, or who are willing to let people have sex with their children, just by going online and trolling around a little bit. I think there are two possible benefits: one, that predators might think twice before trying to find child sex through the internet, and two, that people will realize what you're saying about predators being close to home.

One thing about the Dateline series that really sticks is how normal most of the men coming in are -- all manner of education, profession, success levels, whatever. They've had rabbis and ministers and schoolteachers come in, members of the police and armed forces, devoted family men of all stripes. I hope that when people watch these shows, they'll really understand that child molesters aren't just the creepy guys under the bridge.

[ex-chaos-by-699.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'm a little unclear as to why child molestation is considered such a light crime that the offenders ever get out of prison at all.

But clearly, that's just me.

[sunnydale47.livejournal.com]

I've said these things.

I've ranted about zero-tolerance laws, which are in the same class as these. The idea that a 10th grader could be branded a lifelong sex offender for giving a blow-job to a kid in her class is inexcusable. What ever happened to deciding each case on its merits?! The whole zero-tolerance one-size-fits-all mindset would be ludicrous if it weren't so viciously unjust. (cf. the middle-schooler who was expelled for saving her friend's life when she gave her inhaler to her friend who had a severe asthma attack on the school bus and didn't have her inhaler with her, even though the girls already knew they used the identical rescue inhalers)

I've also ranted about the law of unintended consequences, and how it comes back over and over and over to bite those who don't stop to think about what they're doing. A law made in response to one specific situation is almost always a bad law, and almost always results in unintended consequences. And as these articles pointed out, the consequences are often much worse than the situation they were trying to correct. (cf. kudzu, et al)

[griffen.livejournal.com]

There are several reasons for why zero-tolerance laws exist.

The first is plain old economics of scale. As the population goes up, the courts have to deal with more and more cases. So do the schools. So does just about every institution out there that has to regulate people's behavior in some way. There isn't time anymore to consider who did what and for what reason, in this view.

The second is that with the slow conservative Christian monopolization of the public discourse about this over the last thirty years or so, we are turning more and more towards a rigid rule-set, which is the opposite of what the Constitution and our common-law legal system was intended to promote. The black-and-white, letter-of-the-law thinking is convenient for cops and lower-echelon administrators like principals and superintendents. It means that they don't have to work so hard and they can supposedly "catch" more "criminals."

Do I agree with either reason? No, I don't. I feel that we should streamline the courts by reducing the number of things we count as crimes instead of increasing them. The problem is, there's a large infrastructure that's now supported by having lots of criminals - to wit, cops, prisons, and parole officers - and they have a huge political lobby. The average income of a California prison guard in 1980 was $14,900/year. Now it's $45,000 per year. The number of prison guards has also increased by 75,000 people. This, at a time when the crime rate has dropped over 20% in 20 years and keeps dropping.

And what do we have to show for it? Overcrowded prisons full of people who did very little wrong to get in but will now learn how to be full-on hard-core criminals during their three-to-five. Which leads to more criminals doing more crime and more people doing more time, and around it goes. The recent national hype about "security at all costs" hasn't helped either. It's no different than what's happening in the economic world with the various trade bubbles, like housing. It keeps building up and up, and eventually it will burst - and the fallout will not be pretty.

All this because we'd rather not think. It's truly appalling.

[conuly]

What's funny is that, in Georgia, the cops are the ones saying "Wait, hold on... you *do* know how stupid this law is, right? BECAUSE IT MAKES OUR LIVES MUCH WORSE!!!!"

(Of course, they also have a vested interest in not making *too* much work for themselves, I suppose.)

[tsiankiio.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty much with you on this. It's not strangers, in fact the most dangerous person to a child is their mother's boyfriend. Then their stepfathers, uncles, and other close male relatives. These are the same people who are most likely to kill children.

[stejcruetekie.livejournal.com]

Yep, with you all the way.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Educating children to speak about it if it happens to them, this can prevent somebody from harming several kids before being caught.

Not to mention educating adults to (a) behave in such a way that children will trust them with a revelation that something like this has happened to them and (b) believe their children rather than brushing it off or turning a blind eye because "Dad/Uncle Joe would never do that".

Aren't there enough stories where children have whistleblown but where Mummy didn't believe them? Or where Mummy knew what was going on but tried to ignore it and pretend it wasn't happening, because if it shouldn't be happening, it can't be or something?

[towanda.livejournal.com]

I'm 100% with you. There is a huge excess of fear mongering surrounding child molestation. That's not intended to diminish the severity of the crime, but when we as a society start marching and carrying torches, then we've lost the high ground.

[conuly]

Well, that can be hard to do when you're talking about things like child molestation. But at the very least, we've lost our sense of... something.

[cumaeansibyl.livejournal.com]

I'm in a slightly unpopular position here, but I think sting operations could really prove effective in the "protecting children" line. The Dateline "To Catch A Predator" schtick is the most famous, of course, but I'm also seeing more and more news stories about local cops catching people who want to have sex with children, or who are willing to let people have sex with their children, just by going online and trolling around a little bit. I think there are two possible benefits: one, that predators might think twice before trying to find child sex through the internet, and two, that people will realize what you're saying about predators being close to home.

One thing about the Dateline series that really sticks is how normal most of the men coming in are -- all manner of education, profession, success levels, whatever. They've had rabbis and ministers and schoolteachers come in, members of the police and armed forces, devoted family men of all stripes. I hope that when people watch these shows, they'll really understand that child molesters aren't just the creepy guys under the bridge.

[ex-chaos-by-699.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'm a little unclear as to why child molestation is considered such a light crime that the offenders ever get out of prison at all.

But clearly, that's just me.

[sunnydale47.livejournal.com]

I've said these things.

I've ranted about zero-tolerance laws, which are in the same class as these. The idea that a 10th grader could be branded a lifelong sex offender for giving a blow-job to a kid in her class is inexcusable. What ever happened to deciding each case on its merits?! The whole zero-tolerance one-size-fits-all mindset would be ludicrous if it weren't so viciously unjust. (cf. the middle-schooler who was expelled for saving her friend's life when she gave her inhaler to her friend who had a severe asthma attack on the school bus and didn't have her inhaler with her, even though the girls already knew they used the identical rescue inhalers)

I've also ranted about the law of unintended consequences, and how it comes back over and over and over to bite those who don't stop to think about what they're doing. A law made in response to one specific situation is almost always a bad law, and almost always results in unintended consequences. And as these articles pointed out, the consequences are often much worse than the situation they were trying to correct. (cf. kudzu, et al)

[griffen.livejournal.com]

There are several reasons for why zero-tolerance laws exist.

The first is plain old economics of scale. As the population goes up, the courts have to deal with more and more cases. So do the schools. So does just about every institution out there that has to regulate people's behavior in some way. There isn't time anymore to consider who did what and for what reason, in this view.

The second is that with the slow conservative Christian monopolization of the public discourse about this over the last thirty years or so, we are turning more and more towards a rigid rule-set, which is the opposite of what the Constitution and our common-law legal system was intended to promote. The black-and-white, letter-of-the-law thinking is convenient for cops and lower-echelon administrators like principals and superintendents. It means that they don't have to work so hard and they can supposedly "catch" more "criminals."

Do I agree with either reason? No, I don't. I feel that we should streamline the courts by reducing the number of things we count as crimes instead of increasing them. The problem is, there's a large infrastructure that's now supported by having lots of criminals - to wit, cops, prisons, and parole officers - and they have a huge political lobby. The average income of a California prison guard in 1980 was $14,900/year. Now it's $45,000 per year. The number of prison guards has also increased by 75,000 people. This, at a time when the crime rate has dropped over 20% in 20 years and keeps dropping.

And what do we have to show for it? Overcrowded prisons full of people who did very little wrong to get in but will now learn how to be full-on hard-core criminals during their three-to-five. Which leads to more criminals doing more crime and more people doing more time, and around it goes. The recent national hype about "security at all costs" hasn't helped either. It's no different than what's happening in the economic world with the various trade bubbles, like housing. It keeps building up and up, and eventually it will burst - and the fallout will not be pretty.

All this because we'd rather not think. It's truly appalling.

[conuly]

What's funny is that, in Georgia, the cops are the ones saying "Wait, hold on... you *do* know how stupid this law is, right? BECAUSE IT MAKES OUR LIVES MUCH WORSE!!!!"

(Of course, they also have a vested interest in not making *too* much work for themselves, I suppose.)

[tsiankiio.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty much with you on this. It's not strangers, in fact the most dangerous person to a child is their mother's boyfriend. Then their stepfathers, uncles, and other close male relatives. These are the same people who are most likely to kill children.

[stejcruetekie.livejournal.com]

Yep, with you all the way.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Educating children to speak about it if it happens to them, this can prevent somebody from harming several kids before being caught.

Not to mention educating adults to (a) behave in such a way that children will trust them with a revelation that something like this has happened to them and (b) believe their children rather than brushing it off or turning a blind eye because "Dad/Uncle Joe would never do that".

Aren't there enough stories where children have whistleblown but where Mummy didn't believe them? Or where Mummy knew what was going on but tried to ignore it and pretend it wasn't happening, because if it shouldn't be happening, it can't be or something?