In Defense of Sex Offenders
Jason Kuznicki on Dec 3rd 2008
Because someone has to stand up for them:
They were neighbors, aged 13 and 10, who played together in a toy fort at the older boy’s home. But one summer afternoon, the teen began talking about masturbation, then performed oral sex on the younger boy. He said they should do it again the next day. And they did.
Soon after, two sheriff’s deputies arrived at the adolescent’s Eastside home to read the seventh-grader his rights. Within two months, he was a registered sex offender, convicted of first-degree child rape.
“I didn’t know that what I was doing was a crime — that’s not to minimize it — I just didn’t know,” said Tyler, now 23, who agreed to talk with the Seattle P-I if identified only by his middle name.
“I was just some stupid kid growing up, who had an urge and he didn’t know how to cope with it. Afterward, I always wondered, ‘Is there something wrong with me? Is there some malfunction in my brain? Am I a pervert?’ But it was just my inability to understand what I was feeling.”
Ten years later, Tyler is still on the sex offender registry, which is a matter of public record. It severely impairs his ability to find work in a wide variety of fields, and it will for the rest of his life, unless this horrible law is changed. I’m not saying that what he did was right. Teenage sex is usually irresponsible, and sex with anyone younger than a teenager should never be permitted. But is this a felony? Surely all sense of proportion has been lost.
A lot of people will say, “Well, yeah, but we can’t go easy on sex offenders, can we? You can’t be too careful.” This answer is itself a part of the problem. Gray areas exist in human sexuality, and you can be too careful.
When confronted with a gray area, one strong tendency among moralists, both trained and untrained, is to reach for the strictest policy: At least, the thinking goes, no known wrongdoer will go unpunished, regardless of what other mistakes we make. Punish them all; let God sort them out, one might say.
This tendency must be resisted, and not only because it gleefully cops to punishing the innocent. It’s also a pathetically ineffective way of increasing the proportion of the clearly guilty who do get punished. This is because regardless of the strictness of the definitions and the penalties attached to them, many obviously vicious and depraved acts (which Tyler’s was not) still go unreported, or the crimes go unsolved. If we wanted to punish a larger proportion of the clearly guilty, we would focus on reporting, detection, and apprehension, rather than simply declaring more and more gray areas punishable with ever greater penalties.
If I ruled the world, I would give Tyler a new identity, and to the bureaucrats now ruining his life I’d give small locked cells for a very long time. Again, not that what he did was right — but he was a child, and his action completely lacked the element of criminality that would obviously be present had he been 30 instead of 13. If this is a sex offense, how many of the rest of us are guilty too? And how many of us didn’t realize we were victims, or how atrociously we’d been victimized? I’m not looking for literal answers, nor am I supplying any, but I think we ought to consider the answers we have in our minds even if we’d rather not say them aloud. We all know genuine rape victims, and I suspect that all of us know people like Tyler and his supposed victim. Can’t we please, please be adults and recognize the difference?
The temptation arises toward civil disobedience: How, we ask, does one become a sex offender? Could we all do it, the better to mock the system? It turns out it’s fully possible, and, as you probably guessed, one need not do anything terribly offensive. All it takes is one of a wide variety of easy, fun, not all that compromising activities, like this one:
Twelve of the runners who streaked the Pearl Street Mall on Friday night wearing nothing but pumpkins on their heads will have to register as sex offenders if they are convicted of indecent exposure.
The 10th year of the Naked Pumpkin Run started as usual — with laughter, beer and a whole lot of pumpkin carving. But the nude run, which has grown in recent years to include well over 100 people, ended with police citing 12 of the streakers for indecent exposure, a Class 1 misdemeanor. Police have warned runners in the past that the activity isn’t legal, but this is the first time officers showed up en masse to enforce the law.
It’s hard to imagine anyone who would be traumatized by this event. Hell, if I’d been eight years old and seen it happening, I’d probably have laughed till I fainted. I’d have told all my friends at school about it, and we’d have cracked naked pumpkin jokes for weeks on end. Good times!
Now, as a parent, I wouldn’t take my kids to it, but not because they’d be scarred for life. I’d keep them home because it’s vulgar, and teaching children to disdain the vulgar is part of parenting. (Does it surprise you that kids like vulgar things? It shouldn’t.)
So why do we reach for spare-no-one strictness, when it’s clearly so out of all proportion to the harms being done? One of my favorite bloggers offers an answer here:
There is a strong assumption in religious circles that the material world is evil and sinful and ought to be shunned. What is good is the spiritual. Caring for people’s material needs is not critical — only their eternal soul is important. There is an intense hatred for this life and a glorification of the alleged “after life”. The assumption has been that the flesh, the material existence, is evil. . . .
We call stores that sell erotica “dirty book stores”. Sex is “doing the nasty”. Nudity is called indecent. Sex is called obscene. Genitals are “the ugly bits”. The same word describe sex that describes being violated: getting fucked. We screw someone when we make love to them and when we cheat them. Our entire culture is permeated with two things. One that sexual desire is unavoidable and everywhere. Two, that it is disgusting and evil.
No wonder our wacko sex laws are becoming more and more intrusive and bizarre. We are turning millions of harmless people into “sex offenders” not because they have harmed another person but because our culture truly finds sex offensive. When a student streaking a school event is considered a sex offender, when two teens having sex on a date are sex offenders, when urinating behind a tree can make label you a sex offender, then we have moved beyond sexual schizophrenia to sexual paranoia.
It isn’t that Americans are any less likely to be sexual. On the contrary the constant preaching about sex makes it more attractive to many people. So people still do it and always will. That is never going to change. But in America we have to punish it and punish ourselves. We have to satiate the guilt that we experience because the reality of lives doesn’t match the theological nonsense that we preach. And that is a very bad combination of problems.
This is a system worth offending against, and particularly because there is no limit to the scrupulousness of the sexual ratchet effect: No sooner do we establish that gray is the new black, but we find that off-white is the new gray, and in time this gray must also become the new black. By serendipity, I found the following story today:
When the officiant tells Claudaniel Fabien he can kiss his bride at the altar Saturday, no one will fault the couple for a little “should I tilt my head this way, or that way?” awkwardness.
It will be the couple’s very first kiss.
And that night could be their very first … uh, back to that kiss.
“I don’t know how long it’ll last, but it’ll be great,” says a confident Melody LaLuz, 28, who is marrying 30-year-old Fabien in Chicago after a yearlong courtship and two-year friendship.
The “no-kissing” rule came up as a way to prevent things from getting out of hand.
You see, Fabien and LaLuz both teach abstinence courses to Chicago Public Schools teens. And they say they practice what they preach.
To avoid temptation while dating, they made sure they were never alone with each other in a house. When they watched movies on the couch, they snuggled sitting straight up, never lying down.
You see? They are more pure than anyone else. All you people who kissed before marriage — disgusting! Shame on you! We can’t be too careful! Now, let’s frown on hand-holding and sidelong glances, too. Such is what passes for moral progress.
As Nietzsche put it, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception maculated conception.
Filed in The Boudoir
This good post took an unexpected turn, thought not in an irrelevant direction.
On the first part… I have no intention of participating in “civil disobedience” on this matter. “Sex offender” means “child molester” to most people, even if you win the designation while streaking. Your analysis of the heavy-handedness of punishment for certain sex crimes, as well as of the streaking and how a kid would process it, are both spot on.
The idea that jumped out at me, as you were describing Tyler’s story, is that you’ll be branded a sex offender for the rest of your life has no deterrence power for a 13 year old. To begin with, the 13 year old probably hasn’t heard or doesn’t understand the concept of sex offender. And what healthy 13 year old really understands the concept of “the rest of your life?”
Jason, I share your aversion to those religious systems who separate and denigrate the physical. But I think that’s not the best mono-causal explanation for the heavy-handedness here.
Drunk driving has gone down a similar heavy-handed path. No, you don’t get a scarlet letter for life, but it’s a) a lot easier to get in trouble than it used to be, b) your rights, should you be stopped for it, are not consistent with Constitutional provisions to protect yourself from further incrimination, and c) the penalties are quite stiff, and carry a greater stigma.
I write this despite the fact that a) I’ve never been drunk in my life and b) my mother was killed by a juvenile drunk driver in 1978. But in 1978, drunk driving was a joke — drunkenness was considered very hip and funny (remember Foster Brooks and Dean Martin?). Judges, businessmen, and prominent citizens drove drunk. It was little more trouble than a speeding ticket: Seriously. In 1979, someone’s child was killed by a drunk driver, and then a movement got started to deal with it.
A similar movement has sprung up to “protect children.” And every time we protect children, either our rights or our wallets are at risk. And there is going to be an overreaction. And in this case, most Americans believe overreaction is warranted. Why? Well, I don’t know a lot about this subject, but my impression is because child predators a) are very dangerous and seek opportunities to be predators and b) they are very, very likely to repeat their crimes. So, how does the community protect itself?
And doesn’t the pendulum always swing to an extreme?
In addition, another causal factor you overlooked was the fact that if you give a bureaucrat a single inch, they will take ten thousand miles. As a libertarian, you know that, the power you give a politician you like today, to do something you really want done, is a power that will be misused and abused tomorrow by politicians you can’t stand. I know of no winning prosecutors who ran promising to be strictly respectful of civil liberties; they always promise to be tough on crime. Should we really be surprised that ambitious DA’s haven’t found other ways to apply the law and wring out convictions by scaring the hell out of their targets?
So I don’t think this is mere moralism. But I don’t want to deny that fact. It’s important and should go on the list. But if tolerance of sexual behaviors, lifestyles, and minor errors is important, your final twist was at best ironic. Isn’t premarital abstinence a valid choice? If so, then I assume someone could teach it (though I hope without taxpayer funding, but that’s another topic). And if they’re teaching it, shouldn’t they practice what they preach?
Even though there is the possibility of a true sex offender repeating an offense, registering their every move will not prevent other offenses. Parents should not depend upon just watching the registry will determine their child’s safety. I think the restrictions are a cop out for some parents. They never think their child may be someones first offense.
I do think the laws that have defined sex offender are too broad and I agree with Jason about the influence of religion. I think that view of sex has a lot to do with the spread of STD’s and unwanted pregnancies. To take responsibility for ones sexual behavior, one would have to admit what they were doing was wrong, to do nothing, one stays in denial. Weird, but true.See this quite often in church going communities.
Jim Babka,
I have no problem with people practicing what they preach, but I shouldn’t know it.
Jim — You make good points all around.
As to your last paragraph, I don’t at all mind people practicing what they preach, although I personally think it’s ill-advised to marry someone without even kissing them beforehand.
What I worry about is not the practice of premarital abstinence, but the reflexive moral thinking that leads us to from no premarital sex, to no premarital kissing, to arranged marriages sight unseen, to women wearing burqas, or some pseudo-Christian equivalent thereof.
I didn’t mean to criticize individual life choices, but rather a sloppy system of thought that I suspect lies behind them.
If the religious right could accept the reality of natural selection, they might recognize the inevitability of teenage lust. Sexual desire is what causes us to reproduce–those who reproduce more successfully leave more offspring than those who do not. Therefore, the population tends to be composed of the offspring of those with higher sex drives, and will be characterized by higher sex drives.
And of course that sex drive kicks in around puberty, because puberty is nothing less than sexual maturity. Unfortunately it doesn’t arrive with an equal dose of mental maturity (the frontal lobes, where judgement and self-control are located, don’t mature until the early twenties), so it’s simply inevitable that many teenagers will be unable to control themselves, or–less pejoratively–will begin experimenting sexually.
Treating this inevitable biological behavior as a criminal act is both perverse and pointless. And extending the label of “sexual deviant” to those who goofily run down a street naked as part of a ritual, or who pee behind a tree (perhaps peeing on another person is sexually deviant, but on a tree?) is moralism run amok.
Our greatest battle in terms of liberty is not against the deviants but against the moralists of all stripes–those who think in absolutist terms and believe all actions are justified in the pursuit of their goals.
A friend of mine’s son was busted by the local constabulary for pulling over along a country road and, with his back to the road, relieving his bladder. Not good enough. Turns out that’s indecent exposure and, yep, a conviction as charged would lead to registering him for life as a sex offender. This, folks, is damned close to Alice’s Restaurant stuff.
Is there no limit to the petty obsessive idiotic “zero tolerance” (read: zero intelligence) world we have been creating for the last 25 years or so?
“Isn’t premarital abstinence a valid choice? If so, then I assume someone could teach it (though I hope without taxpayer funding, but that’s another topic). And if they’re teaching it, shouldn’t they practice what they preach?”
It may be “valid” choice, but it is a stupid choice. And considering how stupid it is, perhaps some hypocrisy would be better for this couple.
In Portland, OR, where I live, there is an annual event that has been going on for over a decade known somewhat as the Naked Bike Ride. This year, participants included well over 150 people, and cops usually watch, or help traffic avoid them. People hink their horns, hoot, holler, and otherwise enjoy Portland’s weirdness get out on a nippy night with about 100 of these bikers wearing nothing but birthday clothes. Some wear underwear. Are THOSE people not sexually offensive?
And I will argue, Jason, that the 13 year old could not have done wrong under the statutes that argue for criminality, or even really morality, as he was not just a 13 yo, but that the participants were separated by only 3 years. Had they been 17 and 21, respectively, this would be covered under a Romeo/Juliet style law. The issue here is that an arbitrary line (teenager) apparently confers a magical position of reason, logic, and moral understanding.
It is even questionable whether the younger had any instigating power or continuating power in the relationship. I would not claim that both are culpable, if only by the fact that neither may be guilty of a culpable offense.
I agree that sometimes this sex offender stuff can devolve into outright insanity along the lines of the Salem Witch trials.
World Nut Daily, who have a healthy dose of a anti-government paranoia, are often good on anti-state issues, but they play into this hysteria. For instance just today they did a story about a female teach (35) having sex with a “boy” of 17 and they explicitly used the term “boy” someone who is 17 years old. The woman “faces a second-degree charges of sexual assault and child endangerment….”
What insanity.