Where to Draw the Line
Jul 22nd, 2007 at 10:33 am by Susie
The Times magazine takes on a very sticky issue: Where do we draw the line between a budding pedophile and a kid with transitory boundary problems?
This isn’t an idle question. Children who experiment by touching are often put into the same category as those who forcibly rape other children, and registered as sex offenders. How do we distinguish between children who are a real risk to others - and those who can be helped?
But the Adam Walsh Act and similar legislation may risk ensnaring low-risk teenagers who were never headed toward becoming adult sex offenders. Numerous studies show that recidivism for juveniles who commit sex offenses is about 10 percent. That’s lower than most other juvenile offenses, including property and drug crimes. It’s also a significantly lower recidivism rate than that of adult sex offenders, which ranges from about 25 percent to, for the most serious offenders, 50 percent or higher. (Official recidivism rates are lower than actual rates; some sex offenders commit later offenses that go undetected.) And though the Adam Walsh Act requires many first-time teenage offenders to publicly register for life, if an adolescent hasn’t committed another sex crime within five years of his first offense, research suggests that he is unlikely to do so, notes Mark Chaffin of the University of Oklahoma.
As Elizabeth Letourneau, the professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, explains, most adolescents don’t have the sexual deviancy that prompts an adult predator to offend repeatedly. “If you’re an adult child molester, you’re violating clear age and legal boundaries. You’re crossing over a lot of lines, so you have to be highly motivated,” she said. “Kids typically don’t cross as many lines when they offend; they do stupid things all the time because their brains aren’t developed.”
You know, at this point it hardly seems to matter. As a nation we are dedicated to cranking out 100,000 hardened and trained criminals a year, converting non-violent drug offenders into unemployable virtual serfs who can be depended on to re-offend. On this scale, creating an untouchable caste of 0.01% of the population is just an artifact.
The only real point that can be seen in all of this is to make the people who aren’t arrested feel good about themselves, because nothing else in their lives makes them feel that way.
We’re in the endzone of the self-esteem paradigm.