Politics Of Sex Offenders

Politics

This (quite large) section is comprised of the following sub-sections:

1) Childhood Historically, and Today's Feminist-Conservative Alliance

2) Abduction-Murder of Children Rare

3) The Media

4) Anti-Crime Hysteria

5) Politicians' Demagoguery

6) 'Violent'

7) 'Predator'

8) Glee at Suicides and Murder

9) Projection Issues

10) Sex Offender Laws Not Based on Reality

11) Sexual Abuse by Other Minors

12) Severe Punishments Don't Deter

13) The Pendulum Has Swung Too Far

14) Sex Offenders Can Never Pay Their Debt

15) Abuse Concept Arbitrary

16) True Dangers to Kids

17) Sexualizing Children 18) Pretending Children are Adults for Punishment Purposes

19) State-Induced Harm

20) Leaving Victims Behind

21) First They Came for the Socialists...

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1) Childhood Historically, and Today's Feminist-Conservative Alliance

M40 [x] "[C]ontemporary children's lives are more regimented and constrained than ever before. Contemporary society is extreme in the distinction it draws between the worlds of childhood and youth, on the one hand, and of adulthood, on the other. Far more than previous generations, we have prolonged and intensified children's emotional and psychological dependence. Children are far more resilient, adaptable, and capable than our society typically assumes. We have segregated the young in age-graded institutions, and, as a result, children grow up with little contact with adults apart from their parents and other relatives and childcare professionals."

[62] "As the conflict between Britain and the patriots grew violent [during the American Revolutionary War period], boys in their early and mid-teens played active roles. James Collins, eleven years old in 1775, served as an informal scout, a 'collector of news,' who provided information on the location of bands of loyalists. Israel Trask, who was ten in 1775, served in the Continental Army as a messenger and cook alongside his father. Boys as young as twelve served as drummers, spies, and even as soldiers."

[77] "The Romantic vision of childhood [which emerged in the early 19th century] encouraged the notion that children needed to be sheltered from adult realities, such as death, profanity, and sexuality, in order to preserve their childish innocence. Ironically, it contributed to a moral severity toward actual children who failed to live up to the Romantic ideal."

[Also see 'Pretending Children are Adults for Punishment Purposes' below (#18). The above is also reminiscent of how harshly female offenders are treated under the law in, e.g., today's State of Oklahoma. Some commentators have noted that this appears to be due in large part to that state's extremely 'conservative' culture, under which females who do not behave in the 'ladylike' way expected of them are to be punished with much greater severity.]

[135] "It was not until the mid-twentieth century that educators and self-described 'child savers' succeeded in universalizing the middle-class norm of an extended, protected childhood."

[170] "Concern about child prostitution led New York State to raise the age of consent, which was only ten in 1865, to eighteen by 1895."

[222] "The late nineteenth-century [223] emphasis on self-control [was] championed by such figures as John Harvey Kellogg, whose cold cereals were intended to curb masturbation..."

[To contemporary eyes and ears, this might seem like a joke. But Kellogg was dead serious. (Graham crackers had the very same intended goal.)]

[234] "[I]t's easy to commercially exploit the public's sentimentalization of childhood and deprive children of fundamental emotional and psychological needs in the name of helping them."

[330] "In a landmark 1967 ruling in the case of in re Galt , the U.S. Supreme Court declared that juveniles charged with criminal offenses were entitled to many of the procedural protections in juvenile courts that adults enjoyed in criminal courts, including the right to have legal counsel, to cross-examine witnesses, and to remain silent. 'Neither the 14th amendment nor the Bill of Rights is for adults only,' Justice Abe Fortas wrote for the seven-to-two majority. 'Under the Constitution, the condition of being a boy does not justify a kangaroo court.'"

[337] "[A] panic over stranger abductions of young children was touched off by the mysterious disappearance of six-year-old Etan Patz in New York's SoHo district in 1979, and the murder of Adam Walsh, also six, in Florida in 1981. Published reports claimed that half a million children were kidnaped each year and as many as 50,000 were murdered annually. Soon pictures of missing children appeared on billboards and milk cartons, and the federal government established the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. A federal investigation subsequently revealed that the actual number of children under twelve abducted by strangers was between 500 and 600 a year and the number murdered by strangers around 50. The overwhelming majority of missing children were runaways or were in the hands of noncustodial parents. It turned out that the gravest threat to children came not from strangers, but from family members or neighbors. About 2,000 children a year were murdered by their parents -- 400 times as many as were killed by strangers."

[And yet, media coverage would lead one to the opposite conclusion.]

[357] "During the 1970s, liberals and conservatives discovered that child endangerment was a highly effective way to mobilize political support...Social conservatives and political moderates quickly discovered that they could use the politics of childhood for their own purposes. Many policies they proposed in children's name proved to be highly restrictive."

[359] "More than forty years ago, social critic Edgar Z. Friedenberg wrote that adults' hostility towards youth -- 'rooted in fear of disorder, and loss of control; fear of aging, and envy of life not yet squandered' -- was often disguised as efforts to help the young."

Throughout this site, for purposes of brevity sources are abbreviated ('A1,' etc.). However the titles of some are so good, they bear repeating outside of the 'Bibliography' itself. The following is one of them:

"Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex"

L25 [xi] (from Foreword by Joycelyn Elders:) "Judith Levine is right -- sex is a moral issue, but not in the way the Christian right claims."

[xxvii] "[T]he idea that sex is the thing that can hurt your babies most of all is hardly the way of all flesh, not now and not in the past. Indeed, the concept that sex poses an almost existential peril to children, that it robs them of their very childhood, was born only about 150 years ago."

[xxviii] "Concerning sexuality and its role in worldly corruption...children were regarded quite differently before the eighteenth century from how they are today: they were not necessarily 'good,' nor adults 'bad,' merely by virtue of their length of tenure on the earth...In the late nineteenth century, that innocence came to be figured as we see it today: the child was clean not just of political or social corruption, but ignorant specifically of sexual knowledge and desire. Ironically, as children's plight as workers worsened [toiling -- and often getting gravely injured or even killed -- in textile mills, etc.], adults sought to save them from sex."

[xxxi] "While remaining utterly dependent in many ways, children worldwide share in every aspect of the work and play of the great communities of adults -- labor and commerce, entertainment, crime, warfare, marriage, and sex. Though we locate them in a separate political category, a medical and psychological specialty, a social subculture, and a market niche, children in the twenty-first century may be more like adults than they have been since the seventeenth century."

"Modern efforts to protect the idealized child while squashing the sinner, all to produce a decent adult, resemble in their solicitude and their cruelty the foot binder’s techniques of enhancing the beauty of the woman by stunting the graceful foot of the girl. Current [xxxii] youth policy and parenting advice teeter between high-anxiety child protection and high-anger child punishment. It would appear that children are fragilely innocent until the moment they step over some line, at which point they become instantly, irredeemably wicked. One striking pair of contradictory trends: as we raise the age of consent for sex, we lower the age at which a wrongdoing child may be tried and sentenced as an adult criminal. Both, needless to say, are 'in the best interests' of the child and society."

[xxxiii] " Harmful to Minors says sex is not in itself harmful to minors. Rather, the real potential for harm lies in the circumstances under which some children and teens have sex, circumstances that predispose them to what the public-health people call 'negative outcomes,' such as unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, not to mention what I'd also consider an unwanted outcome: plain old bad sex."

"Even incest is correlated with poverty and [xxxiv] the family chaos that is woven closely with it: a child whose parents bring in less than fifteen thousand dollars a year is eighteen times more likely to be sexually abused at home than from a family with an income above thirty thousand dollars. It is these unhappy conditions, and not the desire for physical intimacy, not child pornographers or abortions, not even the monstrous human immunodeficiency virus, that leave a young person with her defense's down..."

"Sex is a moral issue. But it is neither a different nor a greater moral issue than many other aspects of human interaction. Sex is not a separate category of life; it should not be regarded as a separate category of art, education, politics, or commerce, or of emotional harm or benefit. Child or teen sex can be moral or immoral. And so can our treatment of the children and teens who desire it and act on that desire."

" Harmful to Minors launches from two negatives: sex is not ipso facto harmful to minors; and America's drive to protect kids from sex is protecting them from nothing. Instead, it is often harming them."

"But the book aspires to be positive too. It is based on the premise that sex, meaning touching and talking and fantasizing for bodily pleasure, is a valuable and crucial part of growing up, from earliest childhood on."

"For better or worse, American culture places a lot of value on sex -- a lot . But if sexual expertise is expected of adults, the rudiments must be taught to children. If educators want to be credible [xxxv] about sexual responsibility, they have to be forthright about sexual joy." [Emphasis original.]

[And now to Harmful to Minors itself; i.e., the words of the author herself (Judith Levine):]

[7] 'In young children, we regard curiosity as a virtue, and by the mid-twentieth century curiosity about body parts and the making of babies was considered normal and nice. In fact, curiosity is a reassuring explanation of what otherwise might look like the quest for bodily pleasure."

[12] "Evidence of the harm of exposure to sexually explicit images or words in childhood is inconclusive, even nonexistent...The 1985 Commission on Pornography...could not establish factual links between sexually explicit materials and antisocial behavior...Indeed, researchers have found more evidence that the opposite is true. Interviews of sex criminals including child molesters reveal that the children who eventually became rapists were usually exposed to pornography less than other kids...According to John Money, one of the world's foremost authorities on sexual abnormalities, 'the majority of patients with paraphilias' -- deviant sexual fantasies and behaviors -- 'described a strict anti-sexual upbringing in which sex was never mentioned or [was] defiled.'"

[21] "'MONSTROUS' shouted the banner of the Boston Herald on October 4, 1997. For once, the paper's notoriously hyperbolic headline writers had struck the right tone. Three days earlier, ten-year-old Jeffrey Curley of Cambridge had disappeared in the middle of the afternoon while washing his dog outside his grandmother's house. Now he was dead. Jeffrey's neighbor, Salvatore Sicari...and Charles Jaynes...had reportedly lured the child into Jayne's Cadillac with the promise of a new bike...The story was terrifying enough to inject freon into the veins of any parent. But terror begs for reason, and while the Curley family struggled to find spiritual lessons in their child's demise, other parents watched their own kids pedal down the street on their bikes and looked desperately to the authorities to do, to say. . .something...[I]t did not seem sufficient to call Jeffrey's murder what it was: an event utterly without sense, a ghastly aberration of high psychopathology, a crime of such rarity as to be, statistically, almost nonexistent. This inexplicable tragedy needed an explanation." [Emphasis original.]

"Hear the word pedophile and images and ideas flood to mind. Pedophiles are predatory and violent; the criminal codes call their acts sexual acts and sexual assaults...[23] Even if a child survives a liaison with a pedophile, we believe, he will inevitably suffer great harm."

[24] "The problem with all this information about pedophiles is that most of it is not true or is so qualified as to be useless as generalization. First of all, the streets and computers and computer chat rooms are not crawling with child molesters. According to police files, 95 percent of allegedly abducted children turn out to be 'runaways and throwaways' from home or kids snatched by one of their own parents in divorce custody disputes. Studies commissioned under the Missing Children's Assistance Act of 1984 estimate that between 52 and 158 children will be abducted and murdered by non-family-members each year. Extrapolating from FBI statistics, those odds come out between 1 in 364,000 and fewer than one in 1 million. A child's risk of dying in a car accident is twenty-five to seventy-five times greater."

"Fortunately, pedophilic butcheries are even rarer than abduction-murders. For instance, in 1992, the year a paroled New Jersey sex offender raped and killed Megan Kanka, the seven-year-old after whom community notification statutes were named, nine children under age twelve were victims of similar crimes, out of over forty-five million in that age group. As for Adam Walsh, invoked by the Boston Herald as the Uber-victim of molestation murder, no defendant was ever indicted in his disappearance. According to detectives in Hollywood, Florida, where the crime occurred, Adam's father spread the rumor that the abductor was a pedophile, most prominently in a much-quoted book about child molesters, although there was neither suspicion nor evidence of sex in the case."

[25] 'Pedophiles are not generally violent, unless you are using the term sexual violence against children in a moral, rather than a literal, way. Its perpetrators rarely force or cause physical injury in a youngster. In fact, what most pedophiles do with children could not be further from Charles Jaynes's alleged necrophilic abominations. Bringing themselves down to the maturity level of children rather than trying to drag the child up toward an adult level, may men who engage in sex with children tend toward kissing, mutual masturbation, or 'hands-off' encounters such as voyeurism and exhibitionism."

"Indeed, say some psychologists, there may be no such thing as a 'typical' pedophile, if there is such a thing as a pedophile at all. Qualities by which social scientists and the police have marked him, such as his purported shyness or childhood sexual trauma, do not bear out with statistical significance. More important, sexual [26] contact with a child does not a pedophile make. 'The majority of reported acts of sexual abuse of children are not committed by pedophiles,' but by men in relationships with adult women and men, said John Money, of Johns Hopkins, a preeminent expert on sexual abnormalities."

"[C]ontrary to politicians' claims, the recidivism rates of child sex offenders are among the lowest in the criminal population. Analyses of thousands of subjects in hundreds of studies in the United States and Canada have found that about 13 percent of sex offenders are rearrested, compared with 74 percent of all prisoners. With treatment, the numbers are even better. The state of Vermont, for example, reported in 1995 that its re-offense rates after treatment were only 7 percent for pedophiles..."

"Why, in spite of all information to the contrary, do Americans insist on believing that pedophiles are a major peril to their children?...Our culture fears the pedophile, say some social critics, not because he is deviant, but because he is ordinary. And I don't mean because he is the ice-cream man or Father Patrick. No, we fear him because he is us. In his elegant study of 'the culture of child- [27] molesting,' the literary critic James Kincaid traced this terror back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Then, he said, Anglo-American culture conjured childhood innocence, defining it as a desireless subjectivity, at the same time as it constructed a new ideal of the sexually desirable object. The two had identical attributes -- softness, cuteness, docility, passivity -- and this simultaneous cultural invention has presented us with a wicked psychosocial problem ever since. We relish our erotic attraction to children, says Kincaid (witness the child beauty pageants in which JonBenet Ramsey was entered). So we project that eroticized desire outward, creating a monster to hate, hunt down, and punish."

[28] "Incest is a qualitatively different experience from sex with a nonfamily adult; almost inevitably, the former is a lot worse."

[29] "I asked Meg Kaplan, a widely respected clinician who treats sex offenders at the New York State Psychiatric Institute Sexual Behavior clinic, about the medicalization and criminalization of the taste for adolescent flesh. 'Show me a heterosexual male who's not attracted to teenagers,' she snorted. 'Puh-leeze.' Rather than indict our Monday night football buddies, rather than indict the family, though, we circle the wagons and project danger outward."

[30] "In 1885, the popular tabloid Pall Mall Gazette introduced London's readers to the 'white slaver.' Its sensationalist series 'The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon,' one of the most successful 'exposés' in journalistic history, told of a black market in which virgin girls were sold by their hapless mothers to wicked neighborhood procuresses, who in turn prostituted them to eager, amoral 'gentlemen.' The articles ignited one of the greatest moral panics in modern British history...Although adult prostitution did flourish in the new industrial cities, the trade in children was virtually an invention. The Gazette's editor, it turned out, had engineered the abduction of the 'five-pound virgin' (referring to her price, not her weight) around whom his exposé was built; 'the throngs of child prostitutes' claimed by London's anti-white-slavery campaigners were 'imaginary products of sensational journalism intended to capture the attention of a prurient Victorian public,' according to the historian Judith Walkowitz...Following the 'Maiden Tribute' articles, the British age of consent rose from thirteen to sixteen. In America, between 1886 and 1895, twenty-nine states raised theirs from as low as seven to as high as eighteen."

[31] "When [World War II] ended...it was time to get gender and the family back to 'normal.' Men had to resume the breadwinning and women the bread baking. The homosexual culture that had seen its first sparks in the barracks and soldiers' bars had to be extinguished. And teenagers, who had enjoyed a taste of adult wage earning and adult sexual license during the wars and the Depression, had to be dispatched back to childhood. Lingering resistance required an antidote: a social menace to make the renewed old order more attractive. And before FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy began painting the menace red, they set their sites on pink: the first targets of their inquests were homosexuals in the State Department...By the mid-1950s, prewar anxieties about masculinity had zeroed in on sex between men, and in both the academy and the public imagination the psychopath [32] took on the stereotypic characteristics of the homosexual, and vice versa. Boys were alerted never to enter public toilets alone. And after every grisly crime against a child, the gay bars were sure to be raided. As they had a half-century earlier, the headlines rang out alarms of a crime wave against children...But also like the panic of the earlier era, this one reflected no actual increase in violent sex crimes against children. Nevertheless, commissions were empaneled, new laws were passed, and arrests increased...[A] few highly publicized violent crimes drew a clangor of public demand for dragnets, vigilante squads, life imprisonment, indefinite incarceration in mental institutions, castration, and execution of psycho-killers, all of which were revived in the 1980s and 1990s."

"During the 1960s and 1970s, sex panic gave way to sexual liberation, including, for a brief moment, the notion that children had a right to sexual expression. 'Sex is a natural appetite,' wrote Heidi Handman and Peter Brennan in 1974, in Sex Handbook: Information and Help for Minors. 'If you're old enough to want to have sex, you’re old enough to have it.'"

"The child pornographer, when he first came to public light in 1976, was a feeble beast and an even worse businessman. In fact, he was [33] almost bankrupt. Raids aimed at cleaning up Times Square for the Democratic Convention uncovered only a miniscule cache of kiddie porn. But those few stacks of dusty, decades-old black-and-white rags, already illegal, were enough to launch a crusade. It was led by a team that would epitomize the anti-child-porn forces: a child psychiatrist, Judianne Densen-Gerber, who founded the drug-rehabilitation empire Odyssey House in New York, and a vice cop, Sergeant Lloyd Martin, of the Los Angeles Police Department...Martin traveled the country orating speeches of oratorical fervor, warning America on one Christian television show, for instance, that 'pedophiles actually wait for babies to be born so that, just minutes after birth, they can grab the post-fetuses and sexually victimize them.' At that 1977 congressional committee, he declared that the sexual exploitation of children was 'worse than homicide.'"

"Within a few years, police testified that child porn had never been more than a boutique business even in its modest heyday in the late 1960s...The 1.2 million figure [Densen-Gerber's estimate of the number of child victims of prostitution and pornography], which Densen-Gerber subsequently doubled, was revealed to be the arbitrarily quadrupled estimate of an unsubstantiated number one author said he'd 'thrown out' to get a reaction from the law enforcement community. Densen-Gerber would soon slip from the public eye under suspicions of embezzling public monies and employing coercive and humiliating methods at Odyssey House. Martin would later be removed from his post at the LAPD for harassing witnesses and falsifying evidence."

[Thus, both the campaign to raise the age of consent, as well as the crusade against child pornography, began with complete fabrications, concocted by persons whose own moral compasses were subsequently shown to be quite askew.]

"But their work had been accomplished. The press continued to broadcast their bogus statistics. And hardly a year after Densen-Gerber's first press conference, Congress passed the Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation Act of 1977, prohibiting the production and commercial distribution of obscene publications of children younger than sixteen. One of the first casualties was Show Me , a sex education book for prepubescent children featuring [34] explicit photographs of children, from around six to early teens, engaged in sex play. When it was published in 1970, the book was showered with awards. Under the new restrictions on 'child pornography,' it became illegal to publish, distribute, and, eventually, even to own anywhere in the United States."

[35] [Following the 1985 Meese Pornography Commission:] "Right-wing organizations that had long fought for censorship of erotica were determined to stay the course. Shrewdly, they abandoned their old maiden in distress, 'decency,' and took up the cause of 'families and children.' Citizens for Decency in Law (founded in 1957 by that paragon of decency through law, savings-and-loan swindler Charles Keating) became the Children's Legal Foundation..."

[36] "In spite of proud FBI claims, many lawyers and journalists, including me, suspect that the child pornographer is the same penny-ante presence online as he was in Times Square. Bruce Selcraig, a government investigator of child pornography during the 1980s who went online in 1996 as a journalist to review the situation, concluded the same. In the cyberspeech debate, he said, the dissemination of child porn amounted to 'a tuna-sized red herring.'."

"Aficionados and vice cops concede that practically all the sexually explicit images of children circulating cybernetically are the same stack of yellowing pages found at the back of those X-rated shops, only digitized. These pictures tend to be twenty to fifty years old, made overseas, badly re-produced, and for the most part pretty chaste. That may be why federal agents almost never show journalists the contraband."

[37] "[A]nother logical answer to the almost exclusive use of stings to arrest would-be criminals is that the government, frustrated with the paucity of the crime they claim is epidemic and around which huge networks of enforcement operations have been built, have to stir the action to justify their jobs."

"The same logic can explain why the volume of anti-child-porn legislation has increased annually. From a relatively simple criminalization of production and distribution, the law eventually went after possession and then even viewing of child-erotic images at somebody else's house. It raised the age of a 'child' from sixteen to eighteen and defined as pornography pictures in which the subject is neither naked, nor doing anything sexual, nor, under the 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act, even an actual child. Legislation that was first justified as a protection of real children evolved to statutes criminalizing the sexual depiction of anyone intended to look like a minor , including 'virtual' computer-generated children."

[This ban on 'virtual child porn' was eventually struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court as (obviously) contravening the First Amendment. The apoplectic reaction to this by John Ashcroft, President George W. Bush's Attorney General at the time, provided perhaps a rare window into the real motivation behind much of the anti-child-pornography crusade: not the protection of actual children , but rather, the safeguarding of certain ideologies .]

[39] "[C]loser examination of...most child abuse charges...reveals that pleas are often taken under advice of counsel to eliminate the chance of a long prison sentence and also to limit the personal destruction that publicity wreaks even if the accused is exonerated. Unfortunately, plea bargains, because they lack the details of depositions, interrogations at trial, and the defense's version of events, make it almost impossible to tell what the person is accused of doing, much less whether he did it. According to Kincaid, neither the FBI nor the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children now keeps track of how many children are actually lured to danger after online assignations, the feared eventuality that motivates these [sting] operations."

[40] "Statistics that I got from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 1996 indicated that the feared eventuality that motivates all this activity had rarely come to pass. Only twenty-three minors were enticed to malls and hotel rooms by their adult suitors between 1994 and 1996, none of these 'children' were under thirteen, and most were at least a couple of years older than that. A 2001 survey conducted by the University of New Hampshire found that almost a fifth of ten- to seventeen-year-olds who went online received sexual solicitations from 'strangers,' an unspecified number of whom may have been adults. However, it would be hard to impute widespread harm to these experiences. Three-quarters of the youth said they were not distressed by the posts."

[Therefore, less than 10% of 10-17 year-olds experienced sexual solicitations online which they found distressing.]

[41] "Civil libertarians have called these [child pornography] laws constitutionally vague. A reasonable person can't know in advance if he is breaking them."

[42] "For Americans convicted of any sex crime, legislation passed in the 1990s arguably constitutes cruel and unusual, and perpetual, punishment."

"Sweeping over individual differences, politicians routinely refer to the former convicts as sexual predators, a phrase connoting insatiable appetite and sharp teeth."

"Those who work with sex offenders have warned that such policies might do no good and even could do harm. For one thing, former sex offenders are at far lower risk of committing new crimes than those released from prison after serving time for other crimes. Nevertheless, rage against sex criminals is often far greater, and community notification laws serve to focus that rage. Since their inception, such programs have fueled harassment and vigilantism, which further isolate and unnerve the parolee, leading to the exact opposite of the law's intended effect. 'You ban somebody from the community, he has no friends, he feels bad about himself, and you reinforce the very problems that contribute to the sex abuse behavior [43] in the first place,' Robert Freeman-Longo, former director of the Safer Society Program and president of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, told me. 'You make him a better sex offender.'"

"Tom Masters, program director of correctional treatment services at Oregon State Hospital, described such policymaking succinctly: 'A lot of crime legislation is a function of politics, and not of rehabilitation or community safety.'"

[44] "Panic about adult-child sex, like panic about anything, prompts fewer right decisions than wrong ones, and the wrong ones can be breathtakingly wrong. Attorney general Janet Reno's decision to lay siege to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, was based in part on rumors of child abuse going on inside. In the ensuing conflagration, eighty people died, including twenty-four children."

"Trying to fortify the nuclear family by fomenting suspicion of strangers fractures the community of adults and children; it can leave children defenseless in abusive homes. Projecting sexual menace onto a cardboard monster and pouring money and energy into vanquishing him distracts adults from teaching children the subtle skills of loving with both trust and discrimination. Ultimately, children are rendered more vulnerable both at home and in the world."

[46] "[There is] a new 'epidemic,' the 'sexualization' of children; a new class of patient, 'children with sexual behavior problems'; and a new category of sexual criminal perpetrator, 'children who molest.'...[55] The children-who-molest people argue that even if the kid is not being abused and even if he would not become a grownup abuser, 'age-inappropriate' sex play is a sign of emotional distress. Of course sometimes it is. But, on the other hand, who is to say that a sexual activity is a sign of distress if the child does not seem distressed either by the sex or otherwise? Toni Cavanaugh Johnson offers a clue to the distress she and her colleagues are most concerned about: not children's. Her behavior chart alerts parents to seek professional help when children's eroticized play is 'directed at adults who feel uncomfortable receiving' it, when the child 'wants to be nude in public after parents say "No,"' or when he 'touches the genitals of animals.'"

"What's wrong with these things? I asked University of Georgia social work professor Allie Kilpatrick, who conducted an in-depth study of women's childhood sexual experiences and their aftermath. 'They make parents nervous,' she answered."

[56] "Adults are responsible for teaching children appropriate behavior...But if something is reasoned to be inappropriate because it might cause harm, how is harm determined -- and correction undertaken -- without asking the child if she feels hurt?"

"At the University of California at Los Angeles, a thorough review of the literature and major longitudinal studies of families from a child's birth to its eighteenth year found that three-quarters of kids had engaged in masturbation or some of kind of sex with other kids before the age of six."

"A study of 526 New England undergraduates revealed 'no differences...on a variety of adult sexual behavior and sexual adjustment measures' between those students who had had sexual experiences with brothers or sisters, those who'd had them with kids outside their families, and those who'd had none at all. Sociologist Floyd Martinson, an eminence grise in the study of child [58] sexuality, collected scores of reminiscences of happy consensual sex among kids under twelve, including play between siblings and kids five or more years apart in age, both crimson flags in the children-who-molest literature."

"Indeed, just about everything Toni Cavanaugh Johnson considers worrisome is unremarkable some place else in the world. Clellan Ford and Frank Beach in their classic Patterns of Sexual Behavior examined 191 of the world's peoples, including Americans. 'As long as the adult members of a society permit them to do so,' they discovered, 'immature males and females engage in practically every type of sexual behavior found in grown men and women,' including 'oral-genital contact and attempted copulation.'"

[60] "Harm also exists on a continuum, and it can come from different sources...[T]he trauma of youngsters' sex, with anyone, often comes not from the sex itself but from adults going bananas over it."

['Tony' had been placed in "sexually reactive children's" group therapy for "touching the front and back" of his sister:] "The boy didn't want to call himself an offender, the [61] first required step to 'recovery,' and was intimating that the other kids shouldn't either."

[Describing a similar program:] "The minute a child touched his neighbor's penis or buttocks, he had been assumed devoid of moral faculties; there was simply no debating whether what he did was wrong."

[63] "Step seven was Apologizing on the Knees to the victim, the victim's family, and the boy's own family...[As the program's assistant director says,] 'As soon as the kids knees hit the floor, most often, he will be sobbing. To the parents, it will look like I'm being mean. But I will tell them, "When this is all over, you will have your own boy back."'

"Their own boy, obedient, broken, expiated of deviant fantasy. Or maybe of sexual fantasy altogether."

"The methodology...strikingly resembles the 'treatment' gays and lesbians were subjected to in the 1950s to cure them of their attractions to others of their own sex."

[64] [Again describing the above children's program:] "They were not violent sex offenders (otherwise, they would be ineligible for the program); they may not have even been sexual aggressors. Many were kids who'd had sex that simply made adults nervous."

[Said Vern Bullough, a sexologist who spent more than half a century studying childhood sexuality:] "'What we've got now is heroic intervention in childhood sexuality by people who don't know what they are talking about.'"

[65] "'There is no doubt in my mind that what was done [by Child Protective Services etc.] was a hundred times worse than any problem [the family itself] had to begin with,' said an angry [Phillip] Kaushall [a psychologist who worked with the above 'Tony' and his family]. 'It was handled with a lethal combination of zealotry and incompetence.'"

[66] "The category of childhood 'sexual behavior problems,' with its healers' obsessive attention to excess and its dire predictions of future misery, is a reincarnation of the eighteenth- and nineteenth- century 'disease' of masturbation insanity, crossed with the Progressive Era criminal designation 'sexual precociousness' and the late-twentieth-century crime of sexual abuse, with a dollop of the popularly designated affliction 'sex addiction' thrown in as well."

"[I]ntergenerational sex has been normal as sexual initiation in many preindustrial societies..."

[67] "There are some values that parents and professionals, clerics and politicians would agree should be instilled in children: be kind, considerate, respectful of self and others, noncoercive in sex as in all things. But 'normality' is a fickle and disputed virtue, and given its potential as a confederate in therapeutic abuse and social disenfranchisement, it is overrated."

[85] "Many psychologists believe that adults' reactions even to certifiable sexual abuse can exacerbate the situation for the child, both in the short and the long-term...'To send out the message that you've been ruined for life and this person was vile and they were pretending to care -- that often does a lot of damage,' commented Fred Berlin, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University and a well-respected expert on treating sex offenders."

"How can harm be prevented rather than inflicted on youngsters? How can we even know what is harmful, so that we may be guided in guiding them toward happy and safe sexual relations? The first answer is simple, said University of Georgia social work professor Allie Kilpatrick: 'Ask them. Have them describe their sexual experiences, without pre-labeling them as abuse.'

[86] "Kilpatrick found that 55 percent of her respondents had had some kind of sex as children (between birth and age fourteen)...'[T]he majority of young people who experience some kind of sexual behavior find it pleasurable. They initiated it and didn't feel much guilt or any harmful consequences,' she told me. What about age? 'My research showed that difference in age made no difference' in the women's memories of feelings during their childhood sexual experiences or in their lasting effects."

[88] "Such redefinition [of what youth or adulthood is ] is a subtle and never-ending task; it requires serious popular consideration and will never be settled for all time. In 1800, the age of consent was ten throughout America. In 1880, after the white-slavery panic, when a ten-year-old might be working fourteen hours a day in a factory, it was sixteen."

"Irrationally, as the age of sexual initiation slowly drops, the age of consent is rising. And while 'adult' sex becomes a crime for minors, it is only in the area of violent criminal activity that 'children' are considered fully mature: In Chicago, in the late 1990s, an eleven-year-old boy was tried for murder as an adult, and at this writing prosecutions of minors as adults are becoming almost common."

"Legally designating a class of people categorically unable to consent to sexual relations is not the best way to protect children, particularly when 'children' include everyone from birth to eighteen. Criminal law, which must draw unambiguous lines, is not the proper place to adjudicate family conflicts over youngsters' sexuality. If such laws are to exist, however, they must do what [Lynn M.] Phillips [a New Jersey social psychologist who conducted a study of minors who had sexual relationships with adults] suggests [89] about sexual and romantic education: balance the subjective experience and the rights of young people against the responsibility and prerogative of adults to look after their best interests, to 'know better.' A good model of reasonable legislation is Holland's."

"The Dutch parliament in 1990 made sexual intercourse for people between twelve and sixteen legal but let them employ a statutory age of sixteen if they felt they were being coerced or exploited. Parents can overrule the wishes of a child under sixteen, but only if they make a convincing case to the Council for the Protection of Children that they are really acting in the child's best interest. 'Through this legislation, therefore, Dutch children of 12 to 16 years accrued conditional rights of consent to sexual behaviors, and parental authority was conditionally reduced,' wrote David T. Evans in Sexual Citizenship . 'Simultaneously it was recognized that all under 16 remained open to, and thus had the right to protection from, exploitation and abuse...Overall, the legal message here is that children over the age of 12 are sexual and potentially self-determining, and they remain weaker than adults, and should be protected accordingly, but not under the autonomous authority of parents.'"

[93] "The idea that sex is a normative -- and, heaven forfend, positive -- part of adolescent life is unutterable in America's public forum."

[112] "In Europe, where kids have as much sex as they do in America, teen pregnancy rates are about a fourth as high as ours. In the Netherlands, where celibacy is not taught, contraception is free through the national health service, and condoms are widely available in vending machines, 'teenage pregnancy seems virtually eliminated as a health and social problem,' according to Dr. Simone Buitendijk of the Dutch Institute for Applied Scientific Research."

[134] "Research on the quality of youths' sexual experience is virtually nonexistent. Getting funding to ask adults about their sexual attitudes or behavior is hard enough; asking minors the same questions is nigh on illegal. Congress has repeatedly blocked surveys of young people that mention oral sex."

"Still, there's no reason to believe kids are different from adults in this regard. Under the best of circumstances, pleasure takes practice. And sexual ignorance, coupled with sexual guilt perpetrated by parents, clergy, teachers, and public-service announcements, contributes to crummy sex, and to all the emotional 'harms' with which the abstinence-only educators impugn adolescent sexual activity. Said sexologist Leonore Tiefer, "It is impossible to separate issues of coercion and consent, regret, neurosis, harm, or abuse from a culture in which there is no sex education.'"

[136] "In one [study], conducted by the prestigious Commonwealth Fund, the questionnaire the girls answered did not define 'abuse' at all. [Another], from the highly respected Alan Guttmacher Institute, described abuse as 'when someone in your family or someone else touches you in a sexual way in a place you did not want to be touched, or does something to you sexually which they shouldn't have done.' These studies, in other words, left about an acre of space for unarticulated cultural assumptions to creep in, both the subjects' assumptions and their interpreters'."

[138] "[E]rotic pleasure is a gift and can be a positive joy to people at every age."

[142] "I can't help suspecting that the adversaries of school-based sexuality education have been gleefully aware of what would happen if the task of sexual enlightenment were relegated entirely to families: almost nobody would do it."

[179] "People brought up to be aggressive and suspicious of intrusions against their own body's 'boundaries'...will be more self-protective and territorial and thus more belligerent, both socially and sexually."

[182] "Children, for their part, are trained to look for sexual malevolence in every adult touch. Programs such as the popular 'good touch/bad touch' have been shown to have no positive effects and plenty of negative ones. They reinforce kids' prejudices against 'bad' people (i.e., people of different races or those who wear ragged clothing) and raise general levels of anxiety, particularly in young children...Not surprisingly, the programs make children especially wary of sex, teaching them, in the words of psychologist Bonnie Trudell, that 'sexuality is essentially secretive, negative, and even dangerous.'"

"Richard Johnson is a member of a small but growing group of educators intent on turning this trend around. The group's writing, collected by Joseph Tobin, a professor of early-childhood education at the University of Hawaii, into an anthology called Making a Place for Pleasure in Early Childhood Education , constitutes a powerful, often emotional critique of 'no-touch' teaching. Reading it, one is left with the strong feeling that too little touch may be just as harmful [183] or worse than too much -- whatever 'too much' means -- and that the losers are both adults and children."

[185] "Therapist and sexologist Leonore Tiefer, who spends much of her time in the consulting room repairing the damages of sexual ignorance in a culture that demands but does not teach sexual virtuosity, is a tireless promoter of masturbation."

[203] "'Parents' abandonment or overt rejection of homosexual adolescents is partially responsible for the dramatic [204] rise of teen-male prostitution in the United states,' wrote adolescent public-health doctors Martha Sturdevant and Gary Remafedi in a review of the special needs of homosexual youth...'This may be the most politically unsavvy thing I can say,' averred Paul Thoemke, [Project] Offstreets' gay lesbian bisexual transsexual (GLBT) case manager. 'But I sometimes think the greatest risk for these kids is their families.'"

[209] "In the risk-benefit calculus of life on the street, sex is both a plus and a minus. [210] 'Survival sex' in trade for a bed, a shower, or a pair of shoes -- may also offer some personal rewards, such as adult companionship and affirmation. And like other adult-minor sex, it is not always an interaction of utter abjection on the young person's side. 'A lot of the youth don't see survival sex as prostitution,' said Ludfi Noor, the easygoing director of Offtreets' HIV education. Added Gonne...Asser, a young outreach worker, 'This youth was talking the other day, saying, "I was going to clubs and getting lucky. Older people wanted to have sex with me".' Of the here-today-gone-tomorrow relationships between youngsters and adults, she added, 'It can be a relationship that lasts a week, but to the kid, it's still a relationship."

[212] "Street kids are not another species. Even for them, sex is not all work, exploitation, or pain. 'Sex is nice, it's intimate, it's fun, it doesn't cost anything,' Project Offtreets' Thoemke said, in answer to my question about the role of pleasure in his clients' lives. 'These kids, not having close relationships with their families, if they were abused, sex was a really awful thing. To find sex as a pleasure, that's so great.'"

[220] "Not only is child abuse related to poverty, poverty is child abuse. David Gil, a Brandeis University social policy professor and lifelong child advocate, put it eloquently...'The massive abuse and destruction of children is [221] a by-product of the normal workings of our established social order and its political, economic, and cultural institutions.' It is wrong to single out sexual abuse as the worst harm to children, Gil told me, when child abuse is business as usual."

[223] "We also need to start seeing children as citizens...[224] When we are ready to invite children into the community as fully participating citizens, I believe we will also respect them as people not so different from ourselves. That will be the moment at which we respect their sexual autonomy and agency and realize that one way to help them cultivate the capacity to enjoy life is to educate their capacity for sexual joy."

"Sex is a moral issue, but the teaching of 'sexual values' is a redundancy. The same things that make you a solid member of your third-grade class -- cooperation, respect, integrity -- also make you a considerate lover, a consistent safe-sex practitioner, a person able to say yes or no to sex and honor the consent of a partner...That said...[e]thical questions get more complicated as you grow up; crucial moral priorities compete, such as the imperative to protect children versus the value of respecting their choices."

"In a lush and mysterious photograph by Sally Mann, a naked three- or four-year-old, dressed loosely in a blanket, dozes on a deck above a muddy river. Her face is lax, her mouth ajar, her pale body languid. Onto the bank below, a small alligator crawls. Looking more closely at the photo, however, one sees that the alligator is not real. It is a blown-up plastic float, its teeth and claws [225] printed on. The mist off the river obscures its cartoon shape, makes it look fierce and mobile. The photograph is entitled 'The Alligator's Approach.' What is the alligator? A pedophile with the child's fragrance in his nostrils? A Hollywood mogul concocting the commercial sex that will invade her fantasies? Is it pregnancy or AIDS, poverty or homelessness? Which are the people and conditions that can hunt the child's flesh and devour its spirit? Which are the bags of air, the mass-produced masquerades of danger? The line between perils real and illusory is not always crisp. As we have seen, a make-believe monster can terrify and tear as effectively as a real one."

"Sex is not harmful to children. It is a vehicle of self-knowledge, love, healing, creativity, adventure, and intense feelings of aliveness. There are many ways even the smallest children can partake of it. Our moral obligation to the next generation is to make a world in which every child can partake safely, a world in which the needs and desires of every child -- for accomplishment, connection, meaning, and pleasure -- can be marvelously fulfilled."

[227] "I agree...with researchers who believe the term 'abuse' had become so broad as to be virtually useless. Fortunately, research was creating a more nuanced picture of the 'victims' and their experiences; for instance, it was making distinctions between being raped nightly by a father and groped once by a stranger at the pool. Even the same act does not feel the same to everyone...Some children or teens are traumatized, others unmoved, and some say they initiated the sex and enjoyed it. 'Could a priest and a boy conceivably have a positive sexual experience together?' the reporter asked. 'Conceivably? Absolutely it's conceivable,' I answered, 'because the data tell us that some kids report such relationships as positive.'"

[232] "When asked to explain the 'firestorm of controversy' (as everyone called it) around Harmful to Minors , I always answered that the book was about the American hysteria over children's sexuality and this attack was an example of the same hysteria."

[233] "Selective quotation, exaggeration, and outright lies are time-honored tactics of the Right. Judith Reisman ® has long circulated the calumny that Alfred Kinsey conducted sexual experiments on infants at his institute; she offers no substantiation."

[ ® Reisman is also discussed in the Pedophilia section of this site.]

[236] "Sexual McCarthyism works with marginalization to discourage solidarity among the accused. In order to secure the credentials of normalcy, to remain in the safe precincts of what anthropologist Gayle Rubin describes as 'systems of sexual stigma,' the targeted person distances herself from those who are even further out on the edges."

"But when called a pervert, one often goes further than not helping others accused of perversion. Ashamed, one wins respectability by expressing disgust for the 'real' perverts. 'What do you think of NAMBLA?' I was often asked. That's the North American Man/Boy Love Association, an advocacy/support group for men with intergenerational sexual desires. 'I think they're creeps,' I replied to one interviewer. But I am angry at myself for doing that. NAMBLA is a tiny, ineffectual group, exercising its right to free speech; it doesn't advocate criminal activity. Already utterly despised, NAMBLA's members don't need me trashing them, too."

[237] "Americans simultaneously worship and mistrust experts, especially outside the hard sciences. For many, the only unassailable expertise is gleaned from personal experience, and from emotion uninfected by reason."

[238] "Repression cannot operate without fear. If there isn't enough danger, it must be exaggerated or invented...the bogeyman can be as scary as anyone wants him to be."

"Sexual peril is real...But the kind of 'protection' that is mobilized by fear, the kind that purports to keep the young safe by locking them in their rooms, ignorant and scared to death...will not protect them...[S]uch policies offer only illusory security, because they do nothing to stop the wellsprings of danger. Ironically or intentionally, those wellsprings are the very ignorance and terror we're instilling in kids, whereas the means of their self-defense are knowledge and courage, as well as rights and respect, political and sexual citizenship."

[239] "We need to balance respect for young people's freedom with adults' obligation to protect them. In dangerous times, we must discern which dangers threaten us for real, in the form of a virus, a rapist, or a flaming jetliner, and which are of our own making."

[249] [FN22:] "More than eight times more people were incarcerated for low-level sex offenses in 1992 than in 1980."

[250] [FN26:] " The degree of social anxiety that pedophiles exhibit may be a result, not a cause, of the intense hatred and ostracism they experience, say a number of observers including psychologists Theo Sandfort and Larry Constantine."

[FN30:] "In her meta analysis of seventy-nine studies encompassing almost eleven thousand subjects, Oskosh (Wsconsin) Correctional Institution clinical director Margaret Alexander reconfirmed the fact men who rape adult women are the most intransigent, with about a fifth striking again whether they undergo a treatment program in prison or not. But men arrested for having sex with children are usually overcome with shame and remorse; they want to stop. For them, good treatment has made a great difference. In 1943, an average of 11 percent of 'child molesters' who were treated in jails, hospitals, and outpatient clinics found their way back to prison, compared with 32 percent of those who took part in no treatment. Margaret A. Alexander, 'Sexual Offender Treatment Efficacy Revisited,' State of Wisconsin Department of Corrections/Oshkosh Correctional Institution report, Oshkosh, May 1998. There's also evidence that better treatment is increasingly successful. Before 1980, recidivism among treated sex offenders was almost 30 percent; after 1980, it dropped to 8.4 percent. Eric [251] Lotke, 'Sex Offenders: Does Treatment Work?' National Center for Institutions and Alternatives report, Washington, D.C., 1996, 5."

[254] [FN77:] "If the goal is to eradicate deviance and not necessarily to prevent actual crimes, as the ACLU's Marjorie Heins suggests, suspicion of deviance goes a long way toward legally establishing predisposition to criminality."

[256] [FN96:] "A 1996 review of data by the National Center for Institutions [257] and Alternatives concluded that only 13 percent of former sex offenders are arrested for subsequent sex crimes. This compares with a recidivism rate of 74 percent for all criminal offenders...'Community Notification and Setting the Record Straight on Recidivism,' Community Notification/NCIA/info@ncia.net.org, November 8, 1996."

[261] [FN46:] "Other research also strongly interrogates, and condemns, sex-specific treatment for young violent sex offenders as well. One study compared boys who had committed exceedingly brutal sex crimes with other young violent offenders and found that both groups had survived childhoods affected by severe violence and not by sexual abuse and that the two groups exhibited identical psychiatric and neurological disorders, including depression, auditory hallucinations, paranoia, and often 'grossly abnormal EEGs [electroencephalographs, which measure the brain's electrical activity] or epilepsy. 'The assumption that sexually assaultive offenders differ neuropsychiatrically from other kinds of violent offenders, which has led to the establishment of specific programs for sex offenders,' the research concluded, 'must...be questioned in light of our data.' Dorothy Ptnow Lewis, Shelley S. Shankok, and Jonathan H. Pincus, 'Juvenile Male Sexual Assaulters,' American Journal of Psychiatry , 136, No. 9 (September 1979): 1195-96."

[262] [FN7:] "The volume of publicity and punishment given to Mary Kay Letourneau, thirty-five, for her relationship with a thirteen-year-old student [was immense]...But the boy insisted he still loved her and was adamant that he was not a victim. 'It hurt me, it makes me more angry when people give me their pity, because I don't need it,' he told the local television station. 'I'm fine.'"

J11 [147] "Aligning with the prevailing 'law and order' ethos, feminist concerns about the seriousness of sexual violence struck a chord with conservatives. Conservatives and feminists made common cause in advocating for tougher penalties for sexual violence...But many conservative commentators also sought to undercut the feminist notion that widespread and traditional society values were connected with sexual violence. The paradigmatic 'sexual predator' served this conservative agenda well, placing responsibility for sexual violence in the aberrational stranger and absolving society for any responsibility for deviant sexual behavior."

F21 [14] "Unfortunately, that advocates for the problem of sexual abuse have been able to assume the moral consensus [that sexuality between adults and minors is wrong] has led to fuzzy thinking. They have not had to examine the assumptions of their position. They have not had to think through the moral issues clearly in their own minds because the weight of traditional morality supported their point of view..."

[15] "Many assertions of 'intrinsic wrong' made about other sexual behavior, such as homosexuality or masturbation, have been called into question in recent years."

"A second argument rejects adult-child sexuality because it entails a premature sexualization of the child. From this point of view, childhood should be a time of relative immunity from sex, where a child enjoys freedom from an often problematic aspect of life. When adults approach children sexually, they draw them into a world for which children are not yet ready. Unfortunately for this argument, however, children are sexual."

M41 [8] "It could be that when historians recall this period of our history, they will designate as its defining characteristic this social panic over sexual abuse, of if you like, the threats presumably plaguing children and -- along with them as always -- women. Threats frequently accompanied by the adjective, 'sexual.' I personally hope that it is a matter of a transitory phenomenon that will have burned itself out, not because we will have done away with erotic encounters between children and adults, or because we will have done away with all forms of aggression, be they sexual or not, but rather because we will have learned to place them within another framework, to interpret them in a different manner, and [9] to face them in ways that are calmer and more reasonable. Erotic encounters involving children always have existed and will continue to exist. Some of them will be abusive and violent; others, hopefully the majority, will not.

"The majority of the experiences included by researchers in the category of abuse are not committed by so-called pedophiles; and yet, the latter have been converted into the bogey-man of modernity. Those who love children -- and who very rarely attack them -- undoubtedly lead a complicated existence; especially those who are attracted to prepubertal children, since society is not likely to allow them to live out these experiences in relative liberty and tranquility. We have a lot to learn -- as do they -- about how to permit them to live out and express those desires through channels that are more acceptable, and cause fewer problems for both minors and society.

"But of course, we will not get where we need to be by continuing along the path we have been on up until now, the path of fear and sexual dangerousness. Limiting ourselves to the logic of persecution, of the repression and punishment of adults, and of the victimization, salvation, and cure of minors is a road that leads nowhere."

[11] [from prologue by E. Amezua:] "If at the beginning of this century we had set out to design the poorest possible context for individual sexual development, it is difficult to see how we could have made things any worse."

[13] "What is there really left for us to learn about child sexual abuse? No matter how much one may read, the repeated impression one gets is that we already know everything, that the conclusions have been there, systematic and irrefutable. The contributions of ever more abundant researchers and professionals who have been rushing out to write about the matter would seem to be more in the nature of immutable truths than theoretical inquiries. In fact doubts have been conspicuous by their absence..."

"If, as Durtheim would say, 'It is science, not religion, that has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand' (1992:25), my sense would be that what we have before us are priests, not scientists."

[16] "To think that the only interesting social problem boils down to an adult who abuses a girl, or a boy, and that our most pressing preoccupation as researchers has to be shunning these acts and persecuting them, means making the exigencies of the politician one's own, adopting the same pragmatic priorities and neglecting the real work of the theoretician ...[I]n research, with some notable exceptions, priority has been given to understanding the problem of child sexual abuse as an individual problem that needs to investigated in order to be combatted, as per certain questionable and insufficiently grounded premises..."

[18] "Explaining the existence of these [prevention-oriented] activities as reflecting the logical responses of society and its institutions to the problem of child sexual abuse...might appear reasonable; nevertheless in my opinion everything is not as reasonable as it would seem, nor does it presuppose a minimally valid explanation for the phenomenon. It is possible that on the level of public discourse or individual rationalization this would be the reason put forth; as Douglas says, 'The attribution of danger is a way of placing a subject beyond all discussion.' (1991; 40) Nevertheless the sociological imagination requires us to go further, in order to try to bring about a better understanding of that aim.

"The new moral language of 'abuse' has come to replace old terms like sin or honor. Before, we told ourselves, everything was sin; today everything is abuse. Moreover it is, as we shall see, a broad discourse, elastic, within which there can be room for diverse realities, desires, experiences, and objectives. Some adapt better; for others, who will have to be conveniently concealed, it costs a bit more."

[19] "[T]he anxious way in which the phenomenon of the sexual dangers menacing childhood has been conceived -- loaded with intense emotions, dramatic dimensions, and disastrous personal and collective consequences -- corresponds more to ideological and moral controversies than to rational and reasonable practices. So-called child sexual abuse , referring to practically any 'sexual' interaction involving a minor, above all when it is an adult, is the central focus -- par excellence -- of disorder threatening the very foundations of our culture."

[22] "As a researcher I have acknowledged that my point of departure upon beginning my doctoral thesis, of which this book is a result, was clear: to not automatically believe in the horror of abuse which is reflected in what has been said and written about it in specialized books, manuals given out, pamphlets, the media, novels, etc. Neither do I share the view that fear or over-dramatizing are useful either in transforming a society or in protecting its individuals, be they children or adults."

[23] "'[T]he important thing is not what happens but what is believed to happen, or, to put it in terms of a phrase coined by sociology, when people define situations as real they are real in their consequences, even though so defining them is senseless.' (Lamo de Espinoza, 1993; 93)"

[24] "[W]hat is peculiar about the matter which occupies us, that of abuse, is that in large measure it has been precisely those persons who have studied it who have also constructed it -- in the sense of defining, delimiting, configuring, ascribing meaning to, symbolizing, and exhibiting it -- making it possible for those describing the object to simultaneously be the ones who have 'created' it. This paradox could, theoretically, generate a false representation of the social object, since this serves precisely the interests of those who have produced it. The relationship between the observer and what is being observed is so intense that it could continually corrupt their discourses, calling their validity into question."

[25] "It now seems as if it has always been there, that we have known about it for our entire lives, without it ever leaving our side and, in fact, at this point we don't care by whom, how, or why it was placed there."

[79] "Taking upon oneself the role of the victim, for all its disadvantages and disagreeable aspects, turns out to be quite attractive to many people. It gives one the right to protest to and complain to others, with the latter feeling compelled to accede to their claims. The victim's object is not simply to obtain redress; it is oftentimes a question of being a victim for life. Moreover, Todorov [1998] points out that, victimism is not limited to the private sphere; it is on the public stage that the 'heroic ideal has been replaced by the victimistic ideal.' Justice is, in turn, replaced by compassion, because it has been established that being weak is reason enough.

"In this process, exalting victimization goes hand-in-hand with individuals identifying with the victim group to which they belong...Withhunts, asserts this author, the call to accusation, 'rousing the ghosts of the "offended"' (1998; 257) is the reality which flows from this discourse. In the opinion of authors like Todorov, Kaminer [1999], and Hughes [1994], all of these phenomena are nothing but a retreat from the advances of democracy and individual liberty, a renunciation of one's own autonomy.

"The phenomenon is...a perversion of, an exaggeration of, or a deviation from modern values."

[80] "The concepts of rape, harassment, assault, and abuse were broadened to ridiculous extremes, which led to the dissemination of terrifying and apocalyptic statistics concerning the problem ([Lipovetsky], 2000; 65)...This would, therefore, be a product of the judicialization of interpersonal relations in ways that were unimaginable prior to that time."

[81] "It is possible that in the origin of that whole historical process we do not simply find a rejection of sex and its pleasures per se; but among its consequences, intended or not, we can hardly help but observe a modern perception of sex as threat. A reality which has brought it to the fore once again, shining a light on its darkest side, and also concealing and corralling the positive aspects that it can have for human beings."

[82] "[T]he discourse of recovery [of purportedly previously repressed memories] allows any adult, above all a woman, to convert herself into the eternal victim of some past abuse whose veracity is difficult to establish. Without any basis in either science or reason, the movement's defenders have, in turn, converted an experience associated with the sexual into the source of all ills, and have ended up convincing society, and many judges, that the victim's word is sacrosanct. Victims become the heroes of [American] society, and victims of sexual abuse were, undoubtedly, called to convert themselves into role models.

"In fact the image of the abuse victim, whose memory is dramatically recovered with the help of the 'therapist-God,' unites in that same reality the notions of victim and survivor. In this there is something of that heroic optimism of the phoenix rising out of the ashes, a symbol very well-suited to the ideal of American individuality...The symbol of the 'victim-survivor' is the ideal par excellence of that society at that point in its history.

"Therefore I would suggest that, in general, a good portion of the law and specialized discourse concerning the sexual abuse of minors has been a product of that historical moment which we are participants in without being aware of it. In the United States in those years we come across, therefore, social realities which seem to converge towards the same point. To the Christian right the 'sexual' was the danger which best illustrated the threat that minors were living under; to everyone else, the grotesque [83] phenomenon of ritual abuse was the most indisputable manifestation of the horror into which the 'sexual' could degenerate. And we must emphasize that it is within that social context that this modern anxiety and the discourse that has sustained it would have arisen; this is where what we now believe regarding the sexual abuse of minors was forged."

[86] "We are...confronted with a -- scientifically and publicly -- successful perspective on erotic encounters between minors and adults which has silenced, by its radicality, any other possible alternative for interpreting and responding to these acts."

[90] "Situated within this context is the alliance forged between the 'zealous' child protection movement and that of recovered memory, reflected in the ritual abuse panic of the '80s...Moreover what is more important for the purposes of this section, in its continued critical references to the recovery movement's most prominent authors, is that many of the latter are also recognized figures within the field of abuse research. Names like Herman, Finkelhor, Browne, Williams, Briere, Schatzow, Putnam, Runtz, Rush, Green, Courtois, Goodwin, Summit, and Young crop up again and again in sexual abuse handbooks and studies...and many of these are, in turn, prominent personalities within the recovery or ritual abuse movements.

"Nathan & Snedeker comment on the current situation of all of these distinguished professionals and researchers who, in its day, led the charge against ritual abuse. Not one of them -- nor any prominent child protection authority in that country -- has ever criticized those actions or amended their ridiculous theories. Quite the contrary. All of them continue to hold prominent positions in professional associations and public institutions which -- frequently -- continue to spread the ritual abuse message, this time in the new language of sadism and violence. Many of them continue to receive money and contracts to train new professionals in abuse detection techniques. As many others continue to write about abuse. Among them are Finkelhor, Summit, McFarlane, and Meyer-Williams.

"One idea is central in this sense: The reader of any manual published in our own country or in other European countries concerning the problem of a abuse or recovered memory discourses."

[99] "In Finkelhor's text...are gathered what in my opinion...are the principal elements that have given form to the modern discourse on the danger of abuse, and which share -- beyond any doubt whatsoever -- the principles of the ritual abuse and memory recovery movements: the historic denial of and blindness in the face of the problem, the terrible extent of it -- which renders the blindness all the more incredible -- and its seriousness.

"The ritual abuse and memory discourses, and I believe the modern sexual abuse discourse in general, were born with claims of truth, of great truth . In that context, any questioning of its proposals becomes anathema."

[100] "To put into question or to at least suggest the need to closely scrutinize victims' stories was, in a way, to clearly defile the most sacred aspect of the sexual abuse discourse."

[102] "[T]he therapist -- entrusted with uncovering those memories buried in the past -- also enters into a level of existence superior to that which is commonly perceived, as a being of special importance and ability who is involved in the complex and important work of saving the individual and -- why not -- the society as well."

[103] "Every case of abuse is interpreted as another emerging tip of an enormous iceberg, never as rare or isolated acts...[I]ntervening in abuse, or simply talking about the topic, has taken on the characteristics of a sacrament, such that what is now converted into a taboo is not its existence but its denial or criticism. Saving or curing an abuse survivor is to make oneself a participant in a great social movement that is fighting against the horrors that are closing in on this society. In this struggle, ritual abuse or recovery movement activists are simply the most militant battalion; but they are part of the same army."

[104] "The victim, who from the perspective of a certain feminist discourse we come to see as a survivor of it all, also acquires signs of sanctity or, if you like, heroicism, for there is something of the epic in his or her experience, which leaves an indelible mark. A mark which not only signifies a memory of the suffering but is, above all, an indication of the fortitude which belongs to those who have returned from hell...Observing the abuse victim demands a gaze somewhere between devotion and admiration, for you are in the presence of an exceptional being.

"We have gone from that supposed blindness which would thwart even considering the possibility of abuse to a suspect tendency to credit everything, even the most outlandish stories or the most unfounded suspicions. Though this is clearly the case in the recovered memory phenomena, it is no less so in the academic and public discourse surrounding abuse in general. The sense of having found an always-hidden truth leads therapists to take its certainty for granted.

"Evidence is unnecessary and its absence means nothing, for we know that abuse is there , though it lay behind a story of outlandish ritual Satanic abuse which is never proven. The truth of abuse and the priority of protecting and curing its victims render all doubt obsolete."

The problem is that this dogma is also translated to the penal area, radically altering what had been bedrock principles of justice in Western countries, such as the presumption of innocence or that [105] the defendant gets the benefit of the doubt.

"The great truth discovered in abuse allows, in turn, for nearly everything that happens to a patient to be explained. The recovery movement affirmed this with absolutely no qualms whatsoever: depression, schizophrenia, alcoholism, anxiety, work-related problems, anorexia and bulimia, headaches, arthritis, sexual dysfunctions, and relationship problems are just some of the many future effects of child abuse, and which can be explained simply in terms of that experience. Only the recovery of those dormant memories will permit one to overcome present difficulties. The Sexual abuse discourse generally is also a participant in those beliefs associating sexual abuse with an endless series of future problems. Present problems are explicable in terms of past victimization...Behind all of this is nothing but the same, unquestioned truth: the terrible power of sex to do harm.

"Lastly, combating this dramatic reality for the sake of a more just world -- as if that would solve one of the principal problems of society -- requires a rigid, infallible, and intolerant attitude with respect to these acts. This is...so-called 'zero tolerance,' which puts each and every erotically-tinged experience on the same level and requires the reporting and prosecution of all such incidents."

[106] "The reality of sexual encounters between adults and minors has basically been constructed from the perspective of maltreatment, practically blotting out the map of social and scientific interests, or for that matter, any other approach that dispenses with terms like abuse, maltreatment, and assault. In its configuration as danger, not only has it been necessary to present it for public consumption as if it were a question of a historical discovery; it has also been necessary to stridently point out its terrible gravity. What is odd is that this gravity is, in a certain way, detected for the first time..."

[109] "The stories that are published everywhere end up generating new -- and more problematic -- ways of interpreting personal experiences. Moreover because of these discourses, families are going to fear any physical contact that could be suspected of being a prelude to a sexual contact. The harm in this case could be greater, Ramey [1979] warns."

[110] "What do we gain -- Ramey asks -- by telling young people that their lives have been destroyed by that [child sexual abuse] experience?

"The horror theory, of lifetime harm, of inevitable trauma, finally ended up dominating the scientific, political, and social arenas that dealt with the issue. And not only with regard to father-daughter incest, which was the most important object of preoccupation in this field's first research efforts; all sexual contacts between adults and children...were seen more and more, and with greater firmness, as the source of unutterable suffering."

[113] "The premise that it is possible to associate a current symptom -- or constellation of symptoms -- with a specific past experience, such as that of abuse, is beyond arguable, even when the patient is aware of such an experience; to say nothing of when he or she is not. This criticism is also applicable to research into the effects of abuse."

[114] "The notion that specific disorders in adulthood are due to abusive experiences in childhood -- thereby ignoring the complex genesis of any illness or personal problem -- is more than dubious; as is, of course, using any given morbid symptom as a reason to suspect the existence of those abuses. Obviously the therapist's assumption -- that behind all such disorders lie some sort of sexual abuse -- may lead the patient to reinterpret his or her present and past within a framework which is adapted to the premises of the professional who is treating him or her. Patient and therapist, proceeding based on the assumptions implied in this approach, end up fulfilling the symptom interpretations listed in the manuals to a tee, situating them in relationship to abuse and thereby establishing that that is what caused them.

"The connection established between sexual abuse and problems in adulthood seems to correspond more to the foundational assumption that those experiences are negative, which is a fact that is amenable to being empirically demonstrated. Just like what happened with the recovery movement, the science of abuse in general -- not forgetting the exceptions to this -- has established that abuse has to be the central element in the life of that person who, from that moment on, shall be a victim . As Offshe & Watters suggest, patients are seen not as complex individuals with the will to create and organize their own lives, but as unidimensional creatures who share a singular and defining experience: abuse. (1996: 79) The sensation of having gone on to prove the truth of a pre-existing belief ends up being unavoidable upon reading a large portion of the literature on the effects of abuse."

[115] "[I]t is understood, on the part of both the law as well as scientists, that any sexual relationship between an adult and a child is abusive by definition, although there would also have been other authors who would understand that these relationships can also be positive, pleasurable, and desired on the minor's part. And so looking at things in this way, Sandfort comments, it is par for the course that the majority of the empirical data utilized in those discussions -- which according to him is quite limited -- is based on cases involving sexual abuse and which always encompass it, regardless of the minors' actual experiences. In his opinion the case of Finkelhor is illustrative because, despite the fact that he cites cases in which minors -- boys and girls -- responded positively to the experience, to this author they are still victims, and continue to be characterized as such.

"Sandfort may be right, since it is likely that the abuse researchers have created victims, even in spite of the fact that the former would perhaps not feel themselves to be such. Sandfort's criticism...is along the lines that one has neglected to investigate the erotic relationship in the context of the overall relationship between the minor and the adult, often ignoring the experiences of the minors themselves, or, if they are taken into account, interpreting them in a biased manner. In the end, if one expects adults who have suffered abuse experiences in childhood to almost necessarily be victims for the rest of their lives, perhaps that is precisely what will happen to these minors.

"It is true that studies which have compared children who have suffered abuse with others who have not -- and who also do not come from clinical samples -- are conclusive about the act that the former do exhibit more symptoms than the latter. Nevertheless, it is evident that these studies are based on victims of abuse that has been detected, when all of the authors acknowledge that the vast majority of abuse cases are not detected. They are working, therefore, with populations of children who have already been through the whole [116] process of revelation and judicial or clinical intervention following the abuse. Moreover, in the case of the symptoms -- such as post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal tendencies, running way, or self-harming behaviors -- the results are based on just one single study, and as far as others are concerned -- like anxiety or low self-esteem -- the studies are contradictory and do not point in a single direction. Due to the number of studies and their results, the evidence is clearer for symptoms like depression, shyness, somatic complaints, anti-social behavior or delinquency, non-specific mental illnesses, school problems, and inappropriate sexual conduct.

"When clinical samples of those who have suffered abuse and those who have not are compared, the results are less dramatic for abuse victims, who tend to exhibit less symptomatology than clinical samples in general. Nevertheless, the authors point out, it is necessary to take note of the fact that in many cases, as far as the children in treatment who presumably have not suffered abuse are concerned, it is very likely that they also did in fact suffer it. Oddly enough, this caveat is not offered when it comes to comparing abuse victims with populations of children who are outside of the clinical arena.

"Along these lines, we might cite a curious piece of data acknowledged by Finkelhor and his colleagues. A significant percentage of children, which oscillates between 21% and 49% of cases according to the study of reference, do not exhibit any kinds of symptoms, or to be more precise in terms of the notion expressed by the authors, which never ceases to be ascribed significance, the impact has been muffled or masked . Although they acknowledge a certain degree of surprise in the face of these results, they do offer one explanation for such an oddity. In fact in this case Sandfort is right, because the authors continue to speak of 'victims' of abuse, to not having taken into account all of the possible symptoms and thus leaving some obscured, or having relied upon insufficiently sensitive instruments. Because of that, asymptomatic minors could not, in reality, be so. Another possibility is that the traumatic signs have still not shown up as of the time of the study, and that they should appear at later stages in one's development. The third possibility, they point out, is that these minors truly are less affected, and that asymptomatic victims are, in reality, those who have suffered less serious abuse, or that their own personalities or social contexts favor a better resolution of the trauma.

"In a later article, Finkelhor & Berliner (1995) undertook a review of the results and characteristics of therapeutic interventions in sexual abuse cases. In this work, they take up once again the topic of asymptomatic minors and introduce a new concept, that of 'dormant effects,' whereby asymptomatic minors develop sequelae in later phases of their development. In any case, at no time do they accept the fact that in almost half of children the abuse does not produce any effects worth mentioning; and when that is acknowledged, the latter is only 'apparent'; something which is not asserted when they do exhibit symptoms, which are never evaluated under the disclaimer, [117] 'seemingly.'

"In conclusion, the take-away message -- at least the one transmitted in bold print to the public and to all of those who do not closely examine the abuse literature's fine print -- is one of its seriousness, in terms of its negative sequalae and consequences.

"Félix López has been a pioneer in abuse research in our country [Spain]. In his study of the incidence of abuse in the general population, based on the memories of adults, López (1995) points out that the population in general appears to have a more pessimistic view of these acts than victims themselves . As for the latter, some 35% ascribed 'no' importance to the abuse -- among men this category would rise to 44.78% -- with another 25.6% ascribing 'some' importance to it, with some 13.95% ascribing 'a lot' of importance." [Emphasis added.]

[120] "Sexual abuse was converted into a much greater object of social preoccupation relative to other kinds of abuse, far surpassing the social preoccupation relative to other kinds of abuse, far surpassing the social preoccupation with vulnerable and disadvantaged groups; it even squelched any interest in those cases in which the risk to minors' actual lives was much greater, an aspect which is uncommon in sexual abuse cases."

[122] "In my opinion it is likely that this generalized utilization of the term 'sexual abuse,' including a great variety of acts and experiences, is a response to the ideological and professional needs of the moment."

"Lastly, it is necessary to highlight how the differentiation between violent [123] and non-violent acts has also been swept away in the sexual abuse debate. In 1979 Ramey, as we have already seen, pointed out the importance of this aspect for adequately understanding the problem; and many other authors have echoed him in this. It is not a good idea to mix things that are different in together, he would say, because it does make sense to equate incest -- or for that matter sexual relations between adults and children generally -- with rape, aggression, maltreatment, etc. In the 1970s, Leroy G. Schulz (1973) would do something similar. He emphasized that the effects of victimization in these cases have been exaggerated, both the short- and long-term. For his part, he would insist that only 5% of these offenses would involve physical violence. By contrast, he pointed out, the majority of children who have had such experiences with adults without violence having been employed experience these acts as non-traumatic, and feel themselves to be participants in a relationship of affection. A sense of guilt among victims is usually absent, although it may be instigated by the parents or during the legal process.

"Nowadays, the absence of violence is simply interpreted as a reflection of the fact that aggressors are able to attain their objectives through deceit or the abuse of power or trust...Now, when an adult does not use violence in these experiences, this is not a mitigating factor in his actions or a reflection of his essential goodness. Neither can it be a reflection of the naturalness and spontaneity with which these relationships are sometimes initiated and extended over time. The absence of aggressiveness is simply an indication of a perverse nature which is hidden behind his seemingly innocent gestures.

"In summary, the general line that scientific and social discourse has been following concerning abuse has been one of going on to label more and more situations as abuse...The sexual abuse concept has triumphed, interposing itself to measure the infinite and varied reality that confronts us with the same yardstick. Now anything can be abuse, and is so to the same degree."

[125] "The scientific interpretation that in the end was accepted -- with some notable exceptions -- is one that imputes to these acts a gravity and seriousness which is practically indisputable. Sexual abuse, [126] we would say, continues to be taboo; only now, it is so in an inverse sense, since the prohibition is on talking about or dealing with it in any way other than that which has been ordained."

[127] "[W]hat is new is that Finkelhor acknowledges that...a large portion of the abuse research that has been done...[128] promotes a simplistic discourse which homes in on abuse as the origin of all of the problems that people experience...In the search for simple and direct traumatogenic causes, sexual abuse, as a unique experience, was undoubtedly a prime suspect.

"That, Finkelhor says, was simoly a mistake; and now, in order to continue to make progress, it is necessary to question those beliefs which science has established as true. The object of attention should now be not abuse per se, for which there is no reason to ascribe such importance, but rather the general framework of a 'victimology' that takes into account both children and their circumstances. Abuse, he now asserts, always takes place within a context which very much has to be taken into account, and which may, if you will, be more important than the abuse experience itself in explaining individuals' experiences and possible problems. If -- with a person who says he or she has suffered abuse during childhood -- we must take into account the many other problems which that person might be experiencing surrounding the abuse, then the statistical correlation between abuse and subsequent pathology virtually disappears.

"The catechistic model, which ties sexual abuse to future pathology as if they were inevitably associated with one another, is erroneous. Most of the time the latter does not come to pass; and when it does, it is often not statistically significant. If a person drinks, Finkelhor would say, perhaps this is due not to the abuse that he suffered when he was small, but rather to a relationship problem, or some other factor. Surprisingly, he does acknowledge that recent studies have high numbers of children -- which may reach 40% -- who do not exhibit symptoms of trauma due to these experiences. This may be due to the fact that the trauma and the symptoms will appear later on; but he does admit that perhaps the problem lies in how difficult it is for us to simply accept this fact, due to our lack of 'objectivity, and prejudices.' (1999; 208)

"One oft-repeated idea is that abuse can strike any family, or that any child can become a victim. Nevertheless Finkelhor breaks with this premise of abuse science, and in these pages establishes that, normally, abuse is associated with other social, family, and personal problems. It is within this pathological framework that one must situate the problem; abuse per se thereby becomes less consequential, or, must be relativized based on the context in which it occurred.

"New winds blowing through the scientific discourse? There are; but at [129] bottom they are not all that new. The messages are toned down, conclusions become less cut and dried, and the tragedy inherent in sexual trauma is softened. Nevertheless there are still excesses in the area of child traumatization, and although the abusive experience is contextualized, it continues to be the center of gravity.

"In addition to the three elements that I have pointed out as belonging to the scientific discourse concerning abuse -- its status as great truth, its gravity, and its extent -- [there is] a fourth major factor that accounts for a large portion of what has been said with respect to it. I am referring to the enormous power that sex apparently has to do harm, and the particular way in which it exercises this power.

"Nathan & Snedeker (2001), in talking about ritual abuse or sexual abuse in general, ask how it could have happened that at some point in time, sexual abuse was ascribed an importance and a gravity that, surprisingly, was denied to other forms of maltreatment, such as physical abuse or neglect. Poverty and marginality, violence and negligence were pushed to the back burner -- or even minimized -- to sexual abuse's benefit.

"Ofshe & Watters (1996) end up asking the same kinds of questions in their analysis of the [memory] recovery movement, questions that one might well ask upon reviewing the sexual abuse literature as well. These authors ask how it could be that sexual trauma in childhood is so traumatic that its repression would turn out to be so common, and why this does not occur in other types of [130] experiences -- such as physical abuse -- which are not repressed, especially given that children often do not distinguish between right and wrong touching, sexual or otherwise. Therefore, what is it about sex that makes it so terrible that it must be pushed back into the deepest recesses of one's memory until the therapist comes along to recover it?

"There is, then, something in the sexual which makes it especially threatening to the integrity of those who suffer its violence, real or symbolic. That idea belongs to the recovery movement and, in my opinion, is also implicit in what has come out of the science of abuse.

"It is true that those authors who have written about abuse have insisted that it is not a question of rejecting child sexuality, or the value that sexuality and its pleasures has for the human being as a whole. Certainly in these works, one does not necessarily [131] observe a negative view of sexuality in general. But it is just as correct to assert that ascribing so much importance and gravity to experiences between adults and children which have something to do with sexuality can only serve to reaffirm the harmful power that sex has had since antiquity.

"Ofshe & Watters's conclusion was a radical one: We have converted a horror of this society, the sexual abuse of children, into a universal or eternal truth; incest, or sexual abuse generally, has been transformed into one of the most horrendous crimes that one could possibly be a victim of. In the end children's actual experiences are of little importance, since they are only used to reaffirm our horror of abuse. The important thing is for us to have the firm and unquestionable belief that enduring these sorts of experiences is the most terrible thing that could happen to us. It is in that context that abuse has been set apart as an object of veneration over and above physical maltreatment, poverty, marginalization, or even surviving the Nazi holocaust. And to that we must add the fact that we make no distinction between one kind of abusive experience and another; for example, if it was violent or not. And so any abuse experience, of whatever type, is regarded as serious and painful. (Ofshe & Watters, 1996; 31)"

[132] "In a culture filled with stories of sexual violence against children it is not difficult, Krauthammer [1994] notes, to persuade vulnerable persons that their problems stem from a childhood experience which, by its very traumatic nature, they do not remember.

"Researchers, in many cases connected to or influenced by a certain feminist discourse, made themselves participants in this logic, collaborating in the search for that new and dreaded harm. The ritual abuse or recovery movement phenomena are nothing but the products of that same way of thinking, carried to its logical conclusion. Its professional bent allowed for the development of a flourishing sexual abuse industry (Money, 1999), leading to suspect offers of therapy and a heretofore unimagined degree of overlap between the realms of help and punishment; it has also affected the penal law in the area of sexual offenses, and has produced a combative atmosphere which is actually to no one's apparent benefit."

[133] "[W]e now find ourselves confronted with an extreme which perhaps never ceases to astonish us and awaken our curiosity. I am referring to the passion to astonish us and awaken our curiosity. I am referring to the passion with which the search for sexual abuse is both proclaimed and reported to the authorities. It is curious how the principal spokespersons of the public discourse on this matter do not appear to doubt the need to do so vehemently and combatively...Any handbook which we might care to look at will insist on this point: Sexual abuse is a terrible scourge that must be combatted by rooting it out, prosecuting it, and reporting it...[It is] that certainty which is so frequently proclaimed without any trace of doubt and in a shameless appeal to visceral revulsion -- which then paradoxically also pretends to be 'reasoned'."

[134] "The strategy of accusation , strongly encouraged by abuse experts and the organizations that combat this scourge have adopted universal or universalized approaches, in which the particulars of each individual, and each family, community, society or culture, are swept aside in favor of a singular as well as double objective: punishing the guilty and saving the innocent. A Manichean discourse [135] characteristic of this modernity in which, oddly enough, the evil -- following a Western tradition dating back centuries -- is rooted anew in the sexual, thereby justifying the struggle. The indiscriminate accusation, without gray areas or even a chance of them, is raised to the status of indisputable truth, and the only way to end the scourge of the perverts.

"In essence, the zero tolerance policy regarding the sexual abuse of minors would end up determining that in the wide array of situations susceptible to being characterized as such there is no such thing as a trivial incident; all of them must be denounced, and those responsible for them, punished."

"[W]e could speak of certain professional and scientific interests in cornering the market in new areas of intervention and research, with all that that means in terms of [136] employment positions, grants, need creation, and strategies to be utilized in particular power games. An abuse industry that has to feed off new victims, and which therefore demands an increasing reporting of these cases. (Money, 1985) It is evident that it is from very specific professional, social, or scientific groups that the lion's share of the calls for denunciation come; demands that, in turn, are fortuitously accompanied by offers of services.

"It is likely that this whole discourse in which one is invited to publicly denounce any abusive act -- whether it be to persons nearby or to penal, social, or health authorities -- without any suggestion that the circumstances, the particularities, the variations, the degrees of unimportance or seriousness, the consequences of denunciation, or alternative solutions be taken into account, is nothing but a codicil inscribed in a far broader social mechanism. Perhaps the truly important thing on a sociological and historical level is the continuity that occurs with the perpetual appeal for inner examination and vigilance..."

[137] "What an individual approves of insofar as he himself is concerned and what he approved of with regard to others, what he defends as a general moral principle or norm and what he desires and does at any given moment, are not always one and the same. In fact typically, what we regard as proper in terms of guiding the conduct of others directly contradicts with our own behavior and the moral assessment that we make of it. This distinction...is crucial to understanding the moral workings of all of society, and in my opinion is also necessary for comprehending the complex reality of the day-to-day practice of denouncing abuse."

[141] "In fact some have suggested that resorting to denunciation as well as intervention by professionals -- be they of the social, juridical, or law enforcement sort -- as a favored course of action in cases of sexual abuse is precisely the sign of an uncivilized society. (Amezúa, 2000) And it seems clear that to this extent, the strategy of denunciation made real necessarily means a radicalization of any intervention to actually resolve this issue, given that this step is clearly a decisive one. It presupposes restricting other possible solutions, limiting the capacity for action to those adults who are related to the minor as well as the minors themselves. It would be of interest to note that we have begun to look into the resources which have been of help to people in solving their problems without having to bring the authorities into it."

[142] "There are many ways of protecting, or of protecting oneself. When someone who has an experience of this nature -- or knows of someone who is experiencing it -- decides not to report it, he or she may well be making the best possible decision for the well-being of the minor involved."

"[T]o believe that minors are incapable of protecting themselves is to rely on an over-generalized and over-simplified view of this population...I do not believe that the notion of childhood innocence, together with its fragility and defenselessness -- so much a part of the modern abuse discourse -- represents the entire -- or even a significant portion of -- minors who have erotic experiences with adults or older minors. Neither would it appear to be all that helpful to those who truly experience victimization...Minors...are, in the first place, subjects or individuals before they are objects or victims, capable of assessing their situation and choosing among various possible options. Often the best option is not to report or reveal what occurred. We should accept the fact that when they do not disclose, it is perhaps precisely because of their own assessment of the pros and cons has made them see that this is not the best course. Or, they may well see a chance to resolve the situation in a way that is less traumatic than an accusation, which perhaps would only complicate things further. Or maybe -- and we should acknowledge this -- because some simply do not wish to put an end to this so-called 'terrible abuse.' Abuse researchers and experts have been far too preoccupied with ending [143] what seems, to them, to be an unbearable silence. The question that I sometimes ask for is for whom it is unbearable, since it may well be that for many of the principal protagonists, what would be truly unbearable is its revelation.

"In order to protect minors, we should not give them carte blanche to accuse the people around them -- sometimes those whom we love the most -- but rather, give them agreeable and integrated positions within our society, in which they are able to share experiences with other minors but also with various trusted adults. It is a question of giving them the social space that they deserve. The problem that minors have is that as much as we want to protect them, we end up making them vulnerable."

[144] "[One] exemplary and preventive claim would be that of controlling potential perpetrators via the fear of the abuse being detected and the subsequent penal punishment. The idea is that society's pursuit and punishment of these acts will lead many to repress their desires and avoid abusive conduct. For it is important that said sanction be made more likely and inevitable; in order for this to happen, it is necessary that the crime be brought to light and reported. Nevertheless, the preventive utility of penal punishment is, at the very least, questionable. (Lamo de Espinosa, 1983) All the more so in certain types of crimes, where we know that no matter how much the punishment is intensified and made more certain for those responsible, they do not diminish. These would be the so-called expressive crimes, in which the criminal act is not a means but an end in itself.

"By contrast, those [crimes] that are carried out as means to attain other ends, which would be termed instrumental crimes , really would be amenable to prevention via better systems of social control and penalty assessment -- for example, traffic infractions or economic crimes. In the same way that it has been proven that the law is incapable of transforming the customs and values of a given culture, we know that resorting to punishment or its enhancement are not helpful in reducing so-called expressive crimes, among which we should also include the wide variety of acts that are subsumed under the heading 'child sexual abuse.' Increases in the number of accusations, in the sense of danger, and in prosecutions and punishments are probably not going to put an end to these sorts of acts.

"This is where the debate over the usefulness of the penal system in regulating sexual crimes -- above all those that might be considered less serious, and included in that category would be sexual abuse -- comes in. As Diéz Ripollés (1981) points out, there is a certain degree of agreement among experts concerning the limitations of the penal law in terms of its ability to act effectively in the face of the majority of these crimes...[145] The problem lies in the difficulties faced by the legislator in regulating sexual morality via the law, which can be done more effectively through other administrative strategies...or simply through pressure from the social environment.

"Undoubtedly the suggestion made by authors such as Tamarit seems reasonable enough, in the sense of proposing -- in the face of the prevailing wisdom which favors intervention -- a desirable equilibrium, whereby the penal code is not brought to bear on each and every permutation of abuse, which will permit -- in many cases -- alternatives to castigation, and which will avoid -- in many others -- the unnecessary clumsiness of the law in dealing with these questions.

"'For this road, one should resolve to have an attitude which places in a just equilibrium, and knows how to bring together, two urgent needs: on the one hand, a reasonable de-mythologization of abuse, which avoids exaggerating its effects, and on the other, the need to respond with proportionate penalties to attacks on what legally belongs to minors.' (Tamarit, 2000; 180)"

[147] " Victimologists , Money tells us, are professionals who are generally trained in psychology or social work, occasionally in medicine, and very rarely in sexology. Their area of intervention has been primarily -- though not exclusively -- the sexual, attending to cases of rape, abuse, incest, etc. Their job often consists of acting as witnesses in legal proceedings, in addition to their detection-related efforts and work with victims. What is paradoxical, this author points out, is that this necessarily produces a contradiction between their presumed professional goal of assistance, and that of punishment. That is so because it is explicitly defended by the professionals themselves or because legislation compels them to; as is the case virtually throughout the United States, these professionals end up being converted into paralegal agents of the system, actively participating in the prosecution and denunciation of those supposedly responsible for these acts.

"It is evident that professionals and particular social pressure groups need certain social or personal problems in order to continue to defend their interests and arguments. And the possibility that the problem is sometimes inflated, exaggerated and excessively problematized on the part of these groups -- consciously or unconsciously -- would not appear to be such a harebrained notion either, which was made evident when we exposed the recovery therapy movement ."

[151] "[A]s far as abuse is concerned, the child has become nothing more than a repository of evidence which must be unlocked in order to prove the crime. The minor has been unwittingly and quietly converted into a witness for the prosecution. Victim and witness simultaneously; often an ignorant victim, and frequently a silent witness. More than a person, the boy or girl is thus converted into a focus of professional interest and preoccupation. The child speaks without telling, and tells without knowing the truth which is hidden in his or her most recent past. The body, more than a subject who lives, feels, and thinks, is converted into law enforcement turf, the body of the crime.

"Nevertheless there seems, behind all of this language of expertise, of efficacious professional practice, to be a sine qua non of ideology. It can be difficult to understand the exhortations, the premises, the proposals, the standards of intervention, solely in terms of simple efficacy, mere professional effectiveness. The way in which adults -- parents, professionals, experts, politicians -- relate to children in these matters, or how we are told that we must do so, seems to conceal something more than objective success in professional practice, something different from the search for a rational response to these sorts of acts. Something which, as I understand it, points to the symbolic configuration of a particular notion of childhood, directly affecting the way in which adults must relate to it...[T]he image of childhood that is put across by the abuse discourse does nothing but shore up a particular notion of it.

"'There is a risk that in focusing on the welfare of presumed child victims of sexual abuse, one will overlook the children themselves. The child is a person, no an object of preoccupation." (...) It is a shame that the interest in direct communication with children has increased in relation to a particular problem and in the context of legal/criminal proceedings, given that it has so clearly been absent in the mistreatment of minors in general.' (Stevenson, 1989; 172 [citing the findings of the Cleveland Report from the UK])'

"The objective was clear: It was not really a matter of the children relating their experiences in the service of simply humane goals, but rather, of using the victims in order to uncover the abuse."'

"[What we have here is] a social transformation of a higher order. And the fact of the matter is that if we pay attention to the contexts in which it occurs and [160] implicit messages that it suggests, it would appear, in short, that the basic and more general problem is one of connections between children and adults. Or, to be more precise, men's connections with women and children."

[176] " 'No more secrets' proclaims that manual distributed to parents which is designed to prevent abuse. A relationship which is devoid of enigmas, mysteries, and silences. The diligent mother is encouraged to foster a dialogue which is ceaselessly preventive and investigative, a detector of lies and secrets. Transparent communication; the absence of any fog which might allow what is hidden to thrive...Along with mistrust on the part of grown-ups -- who have to be alert to any sign of hidden abuse -- there is trust infused in the children, who ought to be transparent, with neither secrets nor hidden rooms in which their drama is hushed up."

[178] " Sexual abuse is not reducible to the 'sexual.' And it may be that the sexual in and of itself, or what is considered as such, is not even the most important thing...That which is called abuse is, before anything else, a relationship, and it is that relationship and its implications which need to be evaluated. It is not a problem of a penis and a vagina or an anus in a vacuum, nor is it one of a hand passed surreptitiously under a dress; behind those elements, behind those gestures are people, individuals with such varied experiences and ways of relating to others that it may be difficult to squeeze them into rigid categories. I suspect that sometimes, it is not necessary to combat sexual abuse in order to help individuals. I suspect that sometimes it is even counter-productive."

[179] "In the face of modernity's moral crisis, it would appear that only the penal law can supply what is missing, But this is at the cost of conflating anew the penal and the moral, or of altering the modern justice system's minimal safeguards.

"The problem of sexual morality in the West is a long ways from having been resolved. Contradictions or dilemmas emerge in the most widely-varied of social, political, scientific, or professional contexts. A good example of this is the posture that is adopted towards persons who manifest some sort of sexual deviation based on the prevailing criteria -- pedophiles, voyeurs, exhibitionists, transvestites, sado-masochists, etc. -- or the debate over 'curing' these persons, in which there are established, for one thing, moral judgments in treatment; when maybe the right thing to do would be to help them live with that peculiarity or even to change existing social prejudices (Crawford, 1981), especially when the person perhaps does not even desire any help, much less to be changed.

Diéz-Ripollés (1985) noted that there was wide agreement concerning the need to reorient the entire sexual penal law towards the protection of a legal good clearly delimited as that of 'sexual liberty,' it being the objective of the law to punish all conduct which renders its exercise by a given individual impossible...For Diéz-Ripollés, the idea of sexual liberty as the crux of the law is based on the notion that sexuality is a good central to the life of every individual, which would have to rely, for its self-actualization, on the most minimal social limitations. That is, it 'presupposes a positive conception of sexuality' (Diéz-Ripollés, 1985; 23), with the objective being not so much to protect the right to exercise a given sexual feedom 'but the right of [180] every person to freely exercise sexual liberty.' (Diéz-Ripollés, 1985; 29)

"Looking at things in this way, sexual relations between adults and minors, or between two minors...form an interesting group of situations for putting the model's fundamental elements to the test and bringing them to their logical conclusions. The adult is depicted -- from the penal perspective -- as someone who sexually injures another, in this case a boy or girl, thus violating their sexual liberty ; and that would be the principal reason for reproaching, prosecuting, punishing, and re-educating him...[T]here will be minors who will try to exercise their sexual liberty with adults, which in turn would call for a limitation on their rights in order to protect them...[Minors] are sexually 'untouchable' on the part of adults..."

"Therefore the entire system maintains the impossibility of those affected being able to make decisions regarding their own sexual liberty."

[185] "In their analysis of the sin against nature in Baroque societies, Tomás & Valiente (1990) point out that when there was a desire to amp up the prosecution of a given crime, they would increase the penalties for it and, above all, introduce into the penal process mechanisms to facilitate both accusation as well as the introduction of evidence, in such a way that, 'even though the evidence would not be conclusive, though the proof of the commission of the crime of sodomy would not be as ironclad as it would be with any other crime, it would be sufficient.' (Tomás & Valiente, 1990; 43) That happened in the 15th century with the crime of sodomy in Spain; measures which, moreover, were enhanced a century later by Philip II. In the legal texts, courts were instructed that, even when there wasn't sufficiently solid proof, if the accused were discovered to have committed some other act that was sodomy-related, or if the propensity for engaging in it could be established, the culprit should be denounced as if said accusations were true." [Emphasis added.]

[188] "One runs the risk of insisting so much on protecting and helping the victims, on the part of the judicial organs, that the latter end up being converted into institutions for the assistance of the former, rather than places where objective and impartial justice is dispensed."

[210] "According to Victor (1996; 181), the social changes happening in the United States after the 1960s would have generated huge amounts of tension within the family, significantly altering the traditional relationships between the sexes as well as between generations. The number of divorces and intra-family conflicts increased, with the work involved in parenting becoming enormously more complicated. Many adults as well as children received less social support, and a greater number of people felt socially isolated. Family problems, frequently associated with separations and living in single-parent families or ones with stepfathers and stepmothers generated, in Victor's opinion, an intense discrepancy between the family ideal and the social reality, which in turn would have generated discomfort among many Americans.

"Family ties became extremely fragile for many, especially when expectations would continue to be elevated. In a social context in which a wide swath of the traditional population would have felt themselves to be under moral assault due to the existence of phenomena such as pornography, the acceptance of premarital relations, abortion, or a tolerance of homosexuality, it would seem that the role of parents became more problematic and anxiety-ridden. An increase in rumors concerning the dangers associated with ritual abuse coincided with an increase in American parents' fears about the safety and well-being of their children -- drugs, precocious pregnancy, suicide, abuse, kidnappings."

[211] "This social transformation also led to a widespread sense of moral decay which was shared by some very different groups, ranging from religious and conservative ones to progressive groups such as feminists or ecologists. According to Vicor, the United States is characterized by a historic tension between a Puritan moral ideal in the public discourse, and a pragmatic and -- in a certain way - amoral one in individual day-to-day practice. (Victor, 1996; 188) This trait would have led to an increasing hypocrisy between the apparent and the real that would generate, by extension, a more and more generalized sense of mistrust, moral corruption, and conspiracy. This generalized impression gives form to a widespread discontent about something that has gone wrong in a series of moral values in recent decades."

[214] "Victim's bodies are converted, by the abuse discourse, into a terrain to be shaped with a single goal in mind: to denounce a horror which, in the majority of actual cases, is more imaginary than real. Boys' and girls' bodies, and especially their orifices, are converted into unconsciously-altered symbolic elements for expressing a grievance whereby women and children are eternal victims.

"Children's bodies, transgressed or wounded by the insatiable desires of adults, almost always men, have gone on to form a part of our societies' collective imagination, reflecting, as no other phenomenon does, the fragility of the child victim exploited by the infamous world of men...[215] More than neglect, marginality, hunger, or labor exploitation, which are undoubtedly far more common, sexual abuse would serve as privileged expressive discourse."

[218] "In an impoverished, marginal, violent, corrupt, and disillusioned social reality, child sexual abuse assumed -- like no other experience -- the requisite symbolic freight to express the pain of childhood. Knowing which children have suffered sexual abuse and which have not is the least of it...Suffice it to say that a majority have endured it...and act accordingly, in order to reorganize the social order, establish a loving and compassionate approach towards children, understand their suffering, their tantrums, their hatreds, and their erotic disorders. All of it, these authors shamelessly suggest, has its origin in sexual abuse. The credibility of sexual abuse and the general discourse that supports it, as a fad that may pass, is therefore nothing more than the consequence of the intention of certain groups to establish a new social order in relation to childhood and women as victims of a patriarchal society.

"Women and children are victims of the same thing, and therefore would be defined as a group apart from the other one, that of men. The latter, potential abusers, are thereby denied any possibility of participating, in a meaningful way, in the education and protection of children, or at least maintaining a special relationship of affection with them.

"Nevertheless, if it is true that, as has been said, the final objective of this whole discourse is to protect childhood, there would have to be many arguments against it. In the first place we would have to say that, in essence, the problem of abuse, or its place in the discourse, a strategy in large measure symbolic, on its face, of certain political, social, or moral transformation is, in a certain way, configured as a fad in which solidarity with minors or their protection is not all that different from a short-lived empathy with the top model , or walks for a just cause. These are, as Bruckner (1996) would say, a good reflection of the nature of modern solidarity. A hew uneasiness that would permeate the daily social landscape in [219] as yet unrecognized ways. I highly doubt that a breathless struggle against the sexual abuse of minors, going far beyond what is reasonable, should be the principal priority in child protection. Neither, in fact, do I believe that what we are confronted with here is the widespread horror to which some have alerted us, beyond abuse's ability to generate intense and symbolically powerful emotions. I fear that the sexual abuse discourse is not the most desirable strategy for protecting childhood or granting it true social breathing room. No one doubts that it is necessary to avoid abuse. The question is at what cost, or whether a supposed end or benefit justifies any means, which, on the other hand, turns out to be doubtful enough in and of itself."

[223] "[T]he theory of trauma, the insistence on the harm that it incites, has come to be a necessary part of propping up a morality whose justification turns out to be rather weak, above all when it is a question of acts that push the limits of what is acceptable."

[225] "Returning to that moral crisis...which is characteristic of modernity, everything points to the fact that some groups -- to which would be added others, such as certain feminist ones -- have imposed a strict rule of thumb that is meant to do away with an unbearable sexual relativity. According to Okami, a significant portion of those citizens and professionals who are preoccupied with the problem of sexual abuse might be characterized as moral entrepreneurs ...who are preoccupied with establishing rigid rules for regulating the social order, above all out of a feeling that their movement and activism constitute part of a sacred mission...[226] In fact, a moral entrepreneur is one whose 'preoccupation has been converted into his or her occupation.'"

"[I]n the case of sexual abuse, as it [227] has been described in the expert discourse, we are frequently confronted with a...situation...in which what is experienced as immoral is confounded with what is defined as harmful.

"The trauma contributed by science would, therefore, only serve to shore up a pre-existing moral order which, in a certain way, would require said supports in order to reaffirm and maintain itself. The inflation of harm , as I have come to speak of it, is nothing more than the result of said strategy. A result because of which all that is defined as abuse is branded as potentially traumatic .

"In what may be a final irony, in avoiding any shades gray, and treating this wide variety of acts with similar levels of seriousness and traumatic power -- a good portion of which do not go beyond touching, kissing, or caresses in non-violent encounters -- what we end up with is indifference or insensitivity towards those cases which truly are grave...As Bruckner (1996) suggests, in insisting on the dangers of sexuality and the patriarchal violence implicit in all of them, one ends up trivializing significant sexual aggression.

"In the face of the moral crisis of modernity, only harm appears to be powerful enough to sustain ethical judgments. The morality of consent, which came to be a substitute for references to sin or honor, hasn't completely gelled yet, particularly when it involves persons -- such as minors of a certain age -- whose ability to consent is more debatable. Trauma, the search for it, and the labeling of victims...comes to situate itself at the center of the debate. It is in that context that we see the increasing presence of clinical, law enforcement, and penal means for managing the conflicts between the parties involved.

"Moreover, we see how the abuse discourse originating from disciplines like psychology and sociology has fostered a more expansive concept of abuse than even morality or the penal law might possess. Such a diffuse term has allowed its use as a wild card for responding to the variety of situations still affecting our society's morality which, in the face of the disappearance of traditional referents, must be evaluated through the [228] perspective of abuse. Abuse and its trauma...have come to establish a sexual morality where, it would seem, there either hadn't been one at all, or what did exist was unsatisfactory to many."

[229] "What was previously called rape or an offense against a girl's honor is now called abuse...The consenting girl who previously was called wayward or fallen is not pointed out and protected as a victim. The man who previously was a seducer or a Don Juan, or simply a young man in love, is now a perpetrator and an abuser...[T]he common denominator in all of these accusations is that they always include the consent of the 'victims,' who are robbed of their right to desire and to accede to these relations."

[232] "[W]e find that the modern discourse of sexual abuse simply ends up re-establishing a traditional moral order, in which women and children are once again sent -- in the name of protection -- to the private or home realms...In this discourse the woman once again becomes a passive subject, a victim, and the children along with her...One thereby reaffirms the image of the woman as sexually inert and without an erotic dimension of the same caliber as that of the man, added to the notion that every sexual interaction ends up being an act of violence in which a man dominates and degrades a woman or child.

"As Levine (2003) explains in detail in her book about the United States, via the discourse of sexual danger towards childhood and adolescents, there has been successfully established in that country a negative and problematized vision of the erotic. From the pedophilic danger to unwanted pregnancy, from child pornography on the Internet to abuse among [223] children themselves or 'statutory rape,' a powerful discourse of sexual dangerousness has facilitated, in terms of sex education, programs which promote abstinence and chastity while banishing any discussion of pleasure, masturbation, contraception, or desire. As parents are encouraged to remain on constant alert against the sexual dangers which threaten their children, something as basic as tranquilly and joyfully caressing them is made more difficult. In that country the exposed breast of a singer at a popular sporting event appears to be capable of shaking the moral edifice to its very foundations, and damaging for life the innocent children who gazed in amazement at that awful nipple.

"The insistence on the dangers of the sexual, with child-victims at the head of the line, is not going to bring us solutions to our problems, and will probably end up generating or exacerbating other ones. And this is so because the danger places any other discourse -- any other line of thinking -- out of bounds...The danger of the sexual abuse of minors, so part and parcel of our own [society], tells us a great deal about out weaknesses, about our problems. But in order to overcome or adequately confront them, it does not seem that the logic of combat and fear would be the most appropriate option.

"The discourse of abuse, as with that of harassment or sexual assault, is a phenomenon which is steeped anew in erotic miseries; miseries which undoubtedly exist, but which, perhaps, are not so numerous, not so terrible. It is a question of a phenomenon that reimposes the sexual, again making it omnipresent, because in order to escape abuse one can only decry it, over and over again, and 'end up being captive to that which one would have liked to get free of.' (Bruckner, 1996; 173) Sexuality and abuse were converted into an urgent priority for certain social movements, state organs, or research groups, but at the cost of re-establishing the erotic as danger. At the cost of forgetting its value."

[246] [from FN53:] "Another example from Ullerstam: 'Elsa-Brita Nordlund...dos not believe that sexual approaches can have pronounced pathogenic effects in and of themselves, provided that the guilty party does not employ violence. In reality, what traumatizes the child is his or her mother's harsh and hysterical response. Anne-Lisa Annell concurs with this. A priori, one may well imagine that children would be disturbed by the manipulations of an 'old scoundrel' when his/her parents had previously inculcated him/her with a fear of sexuality. In such cases, one could say that the parents are more pathogenic than the 'old scoundrel.' This problem of mental hygiene has, then, it solution in parents learning how to demonstrate common sense as well as calm.' (1999;71)"

[248] [from FN75:] "Abuse, whether merely suspected or already proven, is a weapon not only against persons, but also against factions, groups, or institutions. The theme of sects accused of committing abuses against minors has been a media staple for decades now -- recall...the Waco massacre where the FBI stormed the Branch Davidian compound...under the pretext, proven to be groundless, that all kinds of sexual abuse was being committed there. In that case it was Attorney General Janet Reno, famous fighter against the sexual abuse of minors and prominent defender of the reality of ritual and Satanic abuse, who had ordered the agents to enter the compound. Under the rationale of saving the children and protecting them from abuse, all of them ended up dead. (Concerning this see Nathan & Snedeker, 2001;177)."

[from FN76:] "'[C]hildren have been presented as innocent and defenseless. Not only do children not lie, but "childhood is presented as a period of play, of asexual and pacific existence within the protective bosom of the family." These romantic notions are not only based on idealistic visions of the normal nuclear family, but are in marked contrast to the experiences of children raised in families that are dangerous or mistreat them. This "innocence" by definition means that children are incapable of taking care of themselves, and that they don't really know what their interests are. Given that they are weak -- both physically and in terms or what they "know" -- they need protection. This paternalism does not locate the problem within the structural inequalities of power between adults -- especially men -- and children. The notion of protecting the minor confirms the stereotypes of the innocent and defenseless child, defends the nuclear family, avoids identifying male power, and denies the child access to both knowledge and power.' (Parton, Ch., Parton, N. (1989). 'Protección al menor, ley y niño maltratado . Barcelona, Paidos."

[251] [from FN98:] "[There is also] the scandal over the FBI assault at Waco and subsequent massacre under the pretext, never proven, that all types of sexual abuse were being committed there. The person responsible for this decision was Attorney General Janet Reno...who, when she was a prosecutor in Miami, actively participated in the prosecution of some high-profile cases of alleged -- or unfounded -- ritual abuse, the results of which were lamentable enough. (Nathan & Snedeker, 2001;177)"

[254] [from FN132:] "Only recently have there been allusions to a defense of the existence of a child sexuality, or a pleasure with sexual connotations which is beginning to be seen as positive. It has been said as well as shown that boys and girls masturbate, that they enjoy it, that they have sweethearts and orgasms, and that they seek out said pleasures and encounters. That is, for many, progress, which in some way recognizes the eroticized status of the boy and the girl. Nevertheless, if we examine these ideas closely, we observe that that defended child sexuality is repeatedly and insistently apart from that 'other' sexuality, that of infamous, base, and now adult sexuality, and therefore is not exempt from its evil potential. I am ever more dubious that any acknowledgment of child eroticism necessarily presupposes a de-dramatization of sexual relations between adults and children...[A]lthough there have been advances in recognizing that potentiality in children, their sexual rank is clearly seen as being of a different order. In fact -- we should not deceive ourselves -- it is seen as more pure, innocent, and above all, wholesome, for it is the new virtue of things. The notion of child sexuality that is being bandied about does nothing but reinforce the sacred status of childhood and, by extension, emphasize the 'non-sacred' status of adults, especially in matters relating to sexuality. Child sexuality is thus seen as non-genital, in contrast to that of the adult, which certainly is; as more diffuse, and affectionate. More feminine even. It is, in a certain way, ignorant of its own perversity, of its ever-latent darkness. It is that innocent ignorance which makes it sacred."

M42 "The only positive thing about Nicholas Sarkozy's [then-French-president] opportunistic demagogy concerning the chemical castration of some pedophiles and sex offenders is that it opens the door for deeper reflection on sexual experiences involving minors and adult persons. I have spent several years studying a problem which, though no one doubts that it is complicated, has nevertheless been rendered even more complex and unruly thanks to the omnipresent prudery regarding -- as well as social hypersensitivity to -- these types of experiences. The rhetoric of victimism and evil, the theory of trauma and the supposed destruction of innocent lives that certain social movements, NGOs, and researchers have indeed been imposing upon us for several decades now are merely smokescreens, impeding the majority of the citizenry from becoming adequately informed about what is being discussed and launching a true debate with respect to it.

"The stupidity and bas of the public debate along these lines, which extends to supposedly sensible and reasonable personages and resources, has made itself omnipresent even in the arena of scientific and professional knowledge. Researchers who approach this terrain do so, with some notable -- and ignored -- exceptions, under the modern child sexual abuse paradigm . The latter is an extremely ideologized frame of reference which emerged around the mid-1970s in the United States. In it, victimology is imposed as a new science, and as the only legitimate way of studying these relations and the individuals involved in them. But victimology -- as indicated by the name itself -- only looks for victims, which is all that it finds. And along with them there could only be villains, and so this is all that we see. It is evident that in this arena there are victims and there are villains, thereby paving the way for the protection of some and the control of others. But to say that this is all there is, that this is the only way of looking at the problem, entering into the miasmas of sensationalism and menace in order to demand protection from and a firm hand against all pedophiles is an absurdity, having neither a leg to stand on nor a brain.

"Given my interest in encouraging a debate over the matter from new parameters, I would like to introduce some ideas which, though they seem obvious to me, turn out to be very difficult to convey to society. My hope is that I may be able to help bring this about.

1. Pedophilia is not a crime . To assert this is to state the indisputably obvious. At least in our country [Spain], where it has been a long time since the erotic peculiarities of individuals were eliminated from the penal code. Any law student knows this or should know it, and we can't really blame them because no one has bothered to inform them regarding it. What concerns me is that for a large majority, it may turn out to be more and more difficult to understand a lot of what we have been explaining to them about it. One of the principal obligations of all representatives of the state is to educate; one good way to do so would be to start utilizing concepts properly, and demand of activists and the forces of safety -- as well as many politicians -- that they stop combating pedophilia. If pedophilia is not a crime, I do not understand why they say they are going after it; and if it is a crime that should be prosecuted then they should say so and modify the penal law so that the pedophile knows that he can be prosecuted for the mere fact of being one, independent of what he has done. [Emphasis added.]

2. Pedophilia is a fact . But if pedophilia is not a crime, one would have to explain what it is. A sickness? A vice? Prior to answering these questions, which are excessively enslaved to the moral codes of every era, we might begin by affirming that pedophilia is a constituent part of our sexual condition which is particularly intense and preponderant in some individuals. This gives the impression that this sort of erotic orientation has been with human beings for a long time now. In the arena of sexology in general, pedophilia is not an altogether unknown phenomenon. Quite the contrary -- it is a classic of human erotic peculiarities, which we know attained a certain degree of prestige and institutionalization in many socieities, including classical Greece. Though at this juncture in our history its public image and social acceptance are certainly going through a bad time, this has not always been the case, nor must it necessarily continue to be in the future.

3. An erotic peculiarity . Pedophilia is an erotic phenomenon fundamentally characterized by a marked interest -- temporary or permanent -- in having relationships with and bonding with boys and/or girls of prepubertal age. Though they do exist, cases of individuals interested in very small children are, in statistical terms, insignificant. Pedophiles feel their attraction towards mionors with the same intensity and depth as do persons who are attracted to other adults. Asking a pedophile not to love children is like asking Romeo not to love Juliet. The way in which this style of eroticization gestates throughout the life-process is something which we have not yet answered, as we also have not done vis-a-vis the remaining possibilities for human erotic attraction. The ways in which this attraction might be modified are also unknown, and at the moment, the individual's willingness to not act in certain ways is the sole guarantee that he will proceed accordingly.

4. The "sexual" question . Although the question of sexual experiences -- read: carnal and, above all, genital ones -- are what society is most obsessed about and what are punished under the penal code, a detailed study of pedophilia obliges us to acknowledge that these are not always the most important elements, nor do they necessarily have to be present. Limiting pedophilia to 'touching' or 'fondling' a child is like limiting relations between the sexes to our amorous encounters. Pedophilia, as an erotic attraction, assumes an interest in bonding with the other, in this case a minor. Whether this tie is limited to a single experience or is reduced to a carnal relationship is something that will depend on the circumstances of each case. But many relationships with an erotic component between children and adults extend over several years, and go beyond touching or not touching. In them, friendship and mutual support may be the fundamental elements. Whether we like it or not this is an evident fact, and we would do well to study and understand it a little better. Something very difficult in a context in which the adversarial paradigm has been imposed, that of guilty parties and innocents, and moreover the premise that children never seek out, sustain, or benefit from these relationships.

5. The pedophile's behavior . A pedophile's conduct is defined not by his erotic peculiarity but by the way in which he is capable of managing and governing this status. Many of them assert that confounding a pedophile with a rapist or child-abuser is like accusing all men of being rapists. Given the interest in and sincere affection for minors that many of them manifest, compared to the majority of the populace they are equally -- or even more -- critical of those who do them harm. In fact, if some pedophiles could be accused of anything, it would be of exhibiting a disproportionate idealization of these minors, and their relationships with them. Some pedophiles never come to a point of touching a child, though they may maintain intense relationships with them either because of their work or their inclinations. Many proceed in this way out of fear of punishment. Others because they believe that this is wrong, or because they regard the assertions concerning harm to the child to be true. Some end up touching only once, with others maintaining relationships with many children throughout their lives. A few, surely a minority, do so with violence and abuse, through deceit or material remuneration.

6. Violence and its prevention . The lion's share of individuals who are accused of sexually abusing children are not pedophiles -- or at least not genuine ones -- but rather individuals who, for various reasons, end up involved in this sort of behavior. In spite of this, the pedophile has been converted into our society's new monster. But being a pedophile makes you neither a better nor a worse person. There are pedophiles who commit brutalities, but these are not directly attributable to their peculiarity. The majority of pedophiles do not commit them. The only certainty is that a pedophile who has been brought up well will probably do less harm, to the individual and to society, than a pedophile who has been rejected or problematized. From my point of view, the current, hysterical witch-hunt that is unfolding against this group will do nothing but generate more suffering, because it will make it more difficult to govern their condition in a more appropriate way. Only the public legitimation of this trait, which would not necessarily imply the legitimation of any conduct, will be able to help us to better understand and manage it.

7. Open up the debate and make decisions . All that I have asserted up to this point does not imply that I am in favor of legitimizing pedophilic relations between adults and minors. Personally, in my status as a researcher, I do not have a firm position with respect to this; and so I continue to study it -- with a non-victimological orientation -- in order to try to better understand the phenomenon and contribute enriching ideas with respect to something we simply have to come to some agreement on, clarifying very precisely under what terms, ages, and circumstances they are or are not. But this more practical question, already embodied in our penal code, does not exclude other, parallel routes, not only of thinking and critiquing, but also in terms of coming up with alternative solutions to these sorts of offenses that do not necessarily follow the criminal model of punishment. For the moment, given the current panorama concerning this matter, it might be worthwhile to remember just one thing: At the 21st century, the following personages would now be in jail; some would be watched over and 'monitored' for the rest of their lives, and perhaps many others would be chemically castrated: Hadrian, Leonardo da Vinci, Francis Bacon, Lord Byron, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Benjamin Britten, Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, Benvenuto Celini, Mark Twain, Jean Genét, Sandro Penna, and of course the well-known and admired author of Alice , Lewis Carroll, and many others."

2) Abduction-Murder of Children Rare

S5 [12] "Federal data show that horrific incidents of child abduction and murder are relatively rare. A 2002 U.S. Department of Justice study analyzed cases from 4,000 law enforcement agencies over 12 months. There were an estimated 115 abductions committed by strangers or slight acquaintances...[13] During the study year, there were an estimated 155 stereotypical kidnappings, defined as abductions perpetrated by a stranger or slight acquaintance and involving a child who was transported 50 or more miles, detained overnight, held for ransom or with the intent to keep the child permanently, or killed. In 40 percent of stereotypical kidnappings, the child was killed...By way of comparison, Kids and Cars, a Kansas-based safety group, estimates that about 100 children are killed per year in parking lots and driveways when relatives or family friends accidentally back over them. The U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect [14] conservatively estimates that 2,000 children under the age of 18 are killed by parents or caretakers each year. These data show that strangers or slight acquaintances tragically killed 46 children in the year surveyed...Putting it into perspective...2,100 children wee killed through accidents and neglect in the same time period. Yet we don't hear heavy media coverage about these cases. The extensive media coverage of abducted children leads the public to falsely believe that stranger abductions and killings are far more common than accidental deaths, when they are not."

W14 "The fear that a child could be snatched away by a stranger nags at many parents. But...in New York, it is extraordinarily rare for children to be taken by someone they don't know. The New York State Division of Criminal Justice said...that 20,309 children were reported missing statewide last year. Just one of them was confirmed to have been abducted by a stranger, the agency reported.

"The vast majority of the missing children -- almost 94% of last year's total -- were runaways. Most of them were teenagers. The state maintains the Missing and Exploited Children Clearinghouse, a database tracking lost children since 1987. While stranger abductions raise alarm, they are uncommon.

"A spokeswoman for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said a 2002 Department of Justice study, the most recent national numbers available, showed that of approximately 797,500 children reported missing over the course of a year, 115 were kidnapped by strangers."

[That's an average of just two per state per year . And even these don't always result in a child's death.]

3) The Media

Nickel likes to tell the story of a local TV news person he saw attending his trial. 'Good,' he thought, 'maybe they'll report on the many glaring inconsistencies, etc. in this case.' But, as he left the courtroom for that first day of trial, he quickly realized that the only purpose for this person being in the courtroom, was so that she could notify her cameraman (waiting just outside) when Nickel was just about to leave.

J3 "Robert Longo, now the director of clinical services at Old Vineyard Behavioral Youth Services, a psychiatric hospital in Winston-Salem, N.C., remembers appearing on 'Donahue' and 'Oprah' in th 1980s, making pronouncements like: 'Sex offenders can't be cured,' and 'Victims are changed for life.' Neither statement was based on good research, he now says. 'We were desperately trying to bring attention to the issue,' Longo says of himself and other sex-abuse experts, 'and we went way overboard.'"

C3 [4] "More often than not, media outlets represent the world in terms of black and white and good and evil, just as the adversarial system of criminal law clings to the Manichean notions of guilt or innocence, even though the real world is often gray, filled with contradictions, and plagued by doubts...Generally speaking, the news media provide precious little independent or enterprising coverage of criminal cases. If the media follow these cases at all, they tend to dutifully rely on information provided by the police or the courts...Even if they are inclined to try, alternative newspapers or magazines generally lack the necessary credibility and stature to be effective. Local and even national news operations rarely initiate such reports...Yet without investigative reporting by a well-respected media organization, many cases of injustice probably would never result in...a reversed conviction...[W]ithout strong media support along with their legal assistance, some defendants would never stand a chance."

W2 [7] "Legislators often accept inaccurate descriptions of the causes and motivations of sex offenders. In their examination of Illinois legislators' view of sex offender laws, Sample and Kadleck (2008) reported that much of legislators' understanding of sex offenders comes from mainstream media depictions, particularly those reported in the news."

D15 [43] "[T]he news media present information that is invariably distorted and stereotypical."

B25 [913] "Public information about criminal justice is notoriously inaccurate and outdated...[T]he public must rely on sensationalist and often distorted media accounts of atypical, high-profile cases, from which the citizens overgeneralize about the system as a whole. Politicians seize on these salient examples to whip up popular outrage at what may be an aberration rather than a trend. Thus, surveys show that outsiders consistently underestimate the average nominal sentences for particular crimes and so believe they need to be stiffened."

[926] "[T]he general public does not see the aggravating and mitigating facts of individual real cases. When people receive too simple a description of a crime, they mentally fill in the blanks and base the sentences they would impose on stereotypes or on memorable or recent examples...[927] A set of four Canadian surveys had some respondents read newspaper accounts of a sentencing and others read court transcripts and the defendant's criminal record in the same case. Readers of the newspaper accounts consistently rated the sentences as more lenient than readers of the court transcripts."

F8 [308] "As long as the media addresses sexual abuse from a criminal justice perspective, the sensational headlines about a notorious sex offender will continue to instill fear in the American public regarding sexual abuse. These horrific emotionally charged headlines leave people with a sense of hopelessness and helplessness in addressing the problem. It is no wonder we feel the need to punish the criminal.

"If we generate new ways of thinking about how Americans can prevent sexual abuse, prevention efforts and effective legislation can occur. Knowledge is power. I firmly believe that Americans can make [309] proactive decisions regarding sexual abuse prevention when the media give them accurate information. Accurate and complete information is the best building block for knowledge and the road to change. It is the foundation for building public policy, especially on an issue that is complex and multifaceted."

[310] "[T]here is little information written for or directed to Americans regarding this most serious social issue. The little bits and pieces of information given to the public about sexual abuse are often incomplete, inaccurate, or biased toward a particular position.

"Most important, the sexual abuse cases that make national news and headlines do not represent the average sexual abuse case in America. The sexual abuse that happens each day in America is not newsworthy. Therefore, the public's image of what sexual abuse is and who is a sexual abuser is usually based upon the most extreme cases that account for less than one percent of sexual abuse and sexual crimes in America. Unfortunately, these unique cases are often the catalyst and basis for developing new legislation to address sexual abuse. Changing public opinion is difficult when the sources of information for public education are not comprehensive and/or representative of the problem. However, misinformation compromises our ability to create laws that will be effective in reducing sexual abuse."

W35 [184] "Similar to the news coverage of most crime, news reports on sex offenses tend to focus on the atypical. A study of the newspaper coverage of child molesters arrested over the course of one year found that media coverage tended to focus on 'the extreme and the unusual,' while the reporting of typical cases, such as those involving family members or acquaintances, was infrequent to nonexistent." [citing Ross E. Cheit; "What Hysteria? A Systematic Study of Newspaper Coverage of Accused Child Molesters"; 27 Child Abuse & Neglect 607 (2003).]

B31 [397] "[C]ommercial pressures are determining the news media's contemporary treatment of crime and violence, and that the resulting coverage has played a major role in reshaping public opinion, and ultimately, criminal justice policy. The news media are not mirrors, simply reflecting events in society. Rather, media content is shaped by economic and marketing considerations that frequently override traditional journalistic criteria for newsworthiness. This Article explores local and national television's treatment of crime, where the extent and style of news stories about crime cases being adjusted to meet perceived viewer demand and advertising strategies, which frequently emphasize particular demographic groups with a taste for violence. Newspapers also reflect a market-driven reshaping of style and content, resulting in a continuing emphasis on crime stories as a cost-effective means to grab readers' attention. This has all occurred despite more than a decade of sharply falling crime rates."

[430] "Various studies in the 1990s found that crime is the number one topic on local television news...Crime coverage dominates local news programming, and local stations manipulate crime and violence as a marketing strategy. Viewers with a taste for violent entertainment media also have a taste for local news with an emphasis on crime, and stations treat local news, like entertainment programming, as a commercial product that they adjust to meet their target audience's interests. For that reason, the incidence of crime stories in the local news bars no relation to crime in that area. James Hamilton's study of 16,000 local news stories from fifty-seven stations in nineteen different markets found that the emphasis on crime in the local news depends not on actual crime in the area, but on viewer interest in violent programming. Furthermore, a station's selection of news topics and style of presentation is critical for establishing a brand identity in the local television market, which in turn influences its value to various advertisers."

[431] "Hamilton found that a wide range of crime coverage existed, from 17% to 42% of the newscasts...The '[h]igh-crime' stations shared many commonalities. They were more likely to present crime in a style that evoked entertainment: fast-paced, heavy use of dramatic video clips, fewer verbal explanations, and teasers throughout the broadcast for multiple stories on crime. Crime coverage was negatively correlated with coverage of hard news on public affairs, and positively correlated with accidents, military stories, health stories, and 'news you can use.' Given its feature focus, high-crime stations not surprisingly trained their stories more on the crime commission and the alleged perpetrator than the workings of the criminal justice system.

"High-crime coverage by a station did not reflect high crime in the local area. Hamilton showed that the number of crimes occurring in a given market did not have a statistical impact on the proportion of crime stories."

[432] "Economic factors have also reshaped the newspaper industry and its crime reporting. In newspapers, as in television, we are in an era of market-driven journalism. In general, newspapers are publicly owned, and they face pressures to generate high profit margins for shareholders at a time of declining readership and intense competition from other media sources. In response to these pressures, newspaper owners and top management have emphasized cost cutting and content designed to attract readers, and as a result the traditional wall between the editorial and marketing/advertising departments in newspapers has dissolved...Newspaper editors are increasingly expected to consider marketing as well as traditional journalistic considerations. Stories in newspapers are often determined not by what the press thinks the public needs to know, but on what the public wants to know...[433] Crime reporting continues to be a popular theme because of the low cost to produce the stories and the potential for particularly sensational crime stories to attract readers' attention. The cost-effectiveness of crime and its attractiveness to readers are critical in an industry that is increasingly focused on the bottom line."

C27 [208] "Writing in a death penalty context, Craig Haney defines 'media criminology' in this manner:

'Media criminology is a commercial product rather than a body of what is ordinarily called "real" knowledge. Obviously, it is not based on a collection of systematically deduced theoretical propositions or carefully arrived at by empirical truths about the realities of crime and punishment. Its substantive lessons are intended to generate audience share rather than to convey accurate information to provide a framework for understanding the nature of crime.'"

[209] "It is not the actuality of crime, but its 'symbolic display' that has captured the nation. Between 1990 and 1993, crime leapt from the fifth to the first most covered topic on the national evening news...The resulting over-reporting of crime itself may cause the populace to believe crime runs rampant, resulting in calls for 'more punitive responses to crime,' notwithstanding the reality that crime rates have declined. The crimes least likely to occur in real life are te ones most likely to be emphasized by the media."

[210] "Crime reporting is not only superficial, it is also prosecution-biased. By way of example, Michael Tonry places the inspiration for much of the sexual predator legislation on the 'national media, especially television, [that] permeate nearly every pore of American life in vivid, repetitive, often hysterical colors, and [on] conservative American politicians [who] have for nearly two decades been playing the crime card and exacerbating public fears and then proposing or enacting repressive legislation in order to allay them.' Crime reporting is, also, factually, often simply wrong. A study of crime reporting in Australia, by way of example, concluded that reportage was frequently incorrect as to prevalence of violence, the individuals responsible for violence, and distribution of violence."

[211] "According to Professor Deborah Denno, earlier sex crime panics -- from 1937 to 1940 and from 1949-1955 -- were similarly fueled by 'a vast change in media reports of sex crimes that were independent of the rise or fall of the actual number of reports of sex crimes.'"

[212] "[T]he public continues to consciously close its eyes to empirical realities and, rather, choose to believe, as unquestionable truth, the incessant distortions of reality that are repeated in an endless loop by the media."

G29 [5] "When a social problem is legitimated by the media, policy makers often respond with crime control strategies that address the socially constructed reality vis-a-vis the moral panic, rather than creating policies that are responsive to empirical data...Griffin and Miller (2008:160) describe the process as crime control theater -- 'a public response or set of responses to crime which generate the appearance, but not the fact, of crime control.'" [Emphasis original.]

"Media present the public with 'an increasingly distorted view of sex offending' which, in turn, molds public attitudes (Soothill 2010: 151). Through the process of crime control theater...these distortions lead to the adoption of policies that may be responsive to the moral panic of the public, but not necessarily to their actual safety needs..."

[16] "[W]e are concerned about how sex offender myths are reified in the media in a manner which may contribute to the development and implementation of non-evidence-based policies that are ineffective or downright counterproductive vis-a-vis the process of 'crime control theater'...The media have a social responsibility to stop their complicity in the passage of ineffective crime control policies. Quite simply, media must provide the public with better, more accurate information regarding sex offenders and the policies used to control them."

S36 [284] "[R]esearch has shown [that] the media...overreport sexual crimes...by a factor of almost 14 times compared with their actual rate of [285] incidence (Ditton & Duffy, 1983) and...present sexual crimes in a manner that inspires fear significantly more than it does when reporting a homicide, robbery, or assault (Dowler, 2006)."

D18 [385] "[In the present study,] news broadcasts in the cities of Detroit, Toronto, ad Kitchener were acquired."

[387] "There were 108 stories involving sex crime in the newscasts...Sex crime could be divided into several types, which included: child molestation with forty-two stories, sexual assault/rape with fifty-four, indecent exposure with four stories, voyeurism with three stories, sex with minors with two stories, and child pornography with one story."

[388] "Not one sex crime story used experts to help explain the incidents...News reports employed sex crime stories as a means to disturb and upset viewers, not to educate or inform them about the reality of crime in contemporary society."

F8 [327] "Unfortunately, much of what Americans know about sexual abuse and criminal sexual behavior, comes from television shows and abbreviated newscasts. I have witnessed time after time inaccurate figures, statistics, and statements that appear in magazines, news articles, and television. Very little information that Americans have about sexual abuse and criminal justice behavior comes from the professional literature and scientific journals."

J11 [147] "Increased concern for and awareness of sexual violence in general, and child sexual abuse in particular, led to a rise in the number of reported sexual assaults against children, from 6,000 cases in 1976 to over 500,000 in 1992. The media latched on to this dramatic increase, leading the public to believe that there was an epidemic of sexual violence against children. This belief led to a disproportionate official response to sexual offending -- a response many commentators have described as 'moral panic.' [148] An example of this moral panic is the political response to the publication of a psychological study by Bruce Rind and colleagues. Published by the Psychological Bulletin, the peer-reviewed journal of the American Psychological Association, the study reported on the researchers' meta-analysis of child sexual abuse research. The authors concluded that, in contrast to popular belief, the 'negative effects were neither pervasive nor typically intense.' The study did not assert that child sexual abuse was never harmful. Nevertheless, the United States House of Representatives unanimously condemned the study, calling it 'the emancipation proclamation of pedophiles.' Despite the sensitivity of the issue, the fact that a legislative body criticized and discouraged scientific study demonstrates the potential dangers of acting in response to moral panic."

[This Rind et al. study is examined in detail in the Harm section of the present site.]

W27 [Patty Wetterling's son, Jacob, was kidnapped back in the 1980s. It would not be until Labor Day weekend of 2016 that his fate would finally become known. Sadly, his remains were discovered in a field not far from his home, after law enforcement officials were led to the scene by the person who murdered him, a man who had been interviewed as a potential suspect shortly after Jacob's disappearance. The following is part of an interview:]

[110] Wright: From your experience, what distinguishes the news media that do a responsible, sensitive, thorough job from the sensational?

Wetterling: The wording. They tend to right away call someone a rapist, or a child molester. The wording that they use is very inflammatory...They only report the stranger cases. The sad reality is, they so overemphasize the stranger cases, it suggests that those are the only thing that's happening...So we have to have a place for discerning the differences between these people. They are still human beings."

L22 [2] "Less about the protection of children than about the preservation of adult fantasies of childhood as a time of sexual innocence, sex panics give rise to bloated imaginings of risk, inflated conceptions of harm, and loose definitions of sex."

[21] "We twenty-first century Americans seem to be exhilarated by fear; we relish the magical power of the allegation, which, like a psychic time bomb, flattens all that stands in its way; we savor the heady rush of panic as one might thrill to an amusement park ride.

"Panic, for all its destructiveness, is also seductive, productive. See how the heroism of the security mom sands out against the terrors of imagined childhood victimization? See how the familiar practices of shunning, ostracism, and expulsion have been updated to vouchsafe communal purity in the age of digital communication? It would seem that the monster in the mirror produces and stabilizes a sense of who we are. Perhaps this has always been true for Americans."

[75] "The Boston case of Father Paul Shanley is extreme but revealing. In 2002, as trial attorneys pressed for settlements in civil cases at the peak of the priest abuse scandals, the Boston press buzzed with reports that Shanley had admitted to past rapes; that he had received a psychiatric evaluation that concluded that 'his pathology is beyond repair'; and that he was a founding member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association. Independent journalist Joanne Wypijewski was virtually along in picking through these misrepresentations. So Shanley was shaped in the image of a pedophile monster. In fact, Shanley's journals and letters recount that he had a great deal of noncoercive sex with teenagers and young men...No doubt Shanley's relations with teenagers and young men in his professional counsel were inappropriate and unacceptable. Some of these relations violated statutory rape laws. Some of the alleged involvements may have violated more serious child abuse laws. But inaccurate statements, conveyed in sensationalist reportage, created a prejudicial environment for Shanley's trial on other, very different charges: the former priest was accused of repeatedly raping a young boy for several tears in the 1980s, beginning when the child was six.

"At twenty-seven Shanley's original accuser in the case had a long history of mental illness, drug abuse, and violent outbursts. He and three other men, all of whom knew each other, began having 'flashbacks' only after reading news reports of Shanley's past involvement with adolescents in the 1960s and 1970s. Represented by the same trial lawyer, all four men collected settlements from the Catholic Church in 2004. All four accusers also were originally part of the criminal case against Shanley, but prosecutors trimmed charges before trial -- apparently out of concern about the weakness of the case. They nonetheless pressed forward. During the eventual trial the prosecution claimed that the single remaining plaintiff had immediately repressed his memory of every attack, which allowed him to greet Shanley anew without fear, as though nothing had happened, over several years. Such claims would seem implauisible. In the end, Shanley was convicted in 2005 based on testimony about 'recovered memories,' that troubled relic from the SRA ['Satanic Ritual Abuse'] panics; prosecutors produced no corroborating evidence or testimony. In fact, testimony by others who worked at the school at the time when the events were said to have taken place strongly suggested that the alleged rapes did not occur. Hoary standards of 'reasonable doubt' seem to have eroded in the Shanley case."

[The latter was certainly true of the Nickel case as well.]

"[U]nder classical norms of jurisprudence, a defendant is to be judged based on some specific act that he is charged with committing, not based on what others did or other things that he may have done. Legal grandstanding and media frenzy in this case produced what might well be described as a show trial, that is, a trial staged for the purposes of shaping or satisfying public opinion."

[There are several parallels between the Shanley and Nickel cases. The latter, too, was judged 'on what others did or on other things that he may have done'; in any event, certainly based on who he is , as opposed to what he actually did . And the characterization 'show trial' is surely equally applicable to Nickel's case: Rather than being about ascertaining the truth as to what actually occurred , it was about parading a 'pedophile monster' before the public, precisely 'for purposes of shaping or satisfying public opinion.' Moreover, it is likely that a large percentage -- perhaps even the majority -- of child sexual abuse trials that have been held in the United States -- since, say, the mid-nineties -- have met the definition of a 'show trial.']

[117] "[Discussing a friend of his, a junior-high school teacher, who was falsely accused of] touching a male student on his inner thigh or on his [118] buttocks.

"By Friday, when Ritchie was released on bail...his name, address, and photograph had been published in local newspapers and aired on local television news shows. I call attention to the details of the reportage -- which anyone who follows the news has seen played out dozens of times in dozens of local news stories -- because they illustrate how journalism today essentially operates as a propagandistic extension of policing and prosecution . Journalism is panic, officially induced state-sponsored panic, in the reportage of sex crime accusations." [Emphasis added.]

"The story recounted by talking heads and newspaper reporters was nothing more than a press release drawn up by the police, dutifully conveyed, sometimes word for word, as 'news.'"

[135] "Joe [Ritchie's partner] too has been affected. He would not call 911 when he witnessed a burglary in progress in his own condo parking garage; he is unable to deal with the police. And when a small boy fell face forward on the street across from him, I watched Joe take a step forward, as though to pick the boy up -- then stop dead in his tracks. Someone else came to the aid of the wailing boy, but my mind flashed on the news story of the Englishman who froze as a child drowned in a pond. He was terrified of being dubbed a pedophile if he waded in to the rescue the girl."

G15 [233] "Our destination is a meeting of lawyers. The royal fuckup was the kind that only they could love, an opportunity buried deep in the interstices of the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychological Disorders] text, ready to be excavated and exploited -- in this case by prosecutors who, aided by psychiatrists, can use it to keep certain sex offenders locked up well beyond the end of their sentences, indefinitely and maybe even forever.

"That wasn't what [Dr. Allen] Frances and the rest of the DSM-IV-TR crew had in mind when the decided that meeting Criterion A for Pedophilia -- 'over a period of at least six months, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges or behaviors involving sexual activity with a pre-pubescent-child' -- was not enough to diagnose a patient with a mental disorder. The offender also needed to meet Criterion B: 'The fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.' This was only the boilerplate clinical significance criterion that had been added to many diagnoses in DSM-IV, and all Dr. Frances and [Dr. Michael] First had intended by it, they wrote in a 2008 American Journal of Psychiatry editorial, was to remind clinicians that, as they put it in DSM-IV, 'the symptom criteria alone are insufficient to define mental disorder.'

"But that's not how Linda Bowles, a contributor to the Christian news site WorldNetDaily, took it. To her, it was just more evidence of the secular humanist conspiracy to further the gay agenda. 'While we have been preoccupied with dangers posed to our children by inanimate objects, namely guns,' she wrote in the summer of [234] 1999, they were under a much more dangerous assault from animate objects, namely psychologists and psychiatrists.' The blitz had begun with the deletion of homosexuality from the DSM, she continued, and had gotten worse with Criterion B, which she read to mean that 'no mater how heinous the sexual perversion, if the pervert does not feel shame or remorse, he does not have a psychiatric problem.'

"Bowles's accusations rocketed around the right-wing blogosphere, picking up endorsements from the head of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, the medical wing of the pray-away-the-gay movement, and Charles Socarides, the psychiatrist who led the opposition to the deletion [of homosexuality as a disorder in the DSM] in 1973, along with the radio scold Laura Schlesiner. It also made its way to the APA, whose lawyers wrote to Bowles demanding that she 'acknowledge the "APA's clear opposition to pedophilia".' The APA also issued a press release reiterating its stance that 'an adult who engages in sexual activity with a child is performing a criminal and immoral act which can never be considered normal or socially acceptable behavior.'

"But as any scandal-scarred politician will tell you, vigorous defenses against charges of moral turpitude are mostly self-defeating. If you run an organization of helping professionals, you don't want to have to prove that your members aren't really human missiles intent on blasting us all into a secular humanist hell. To forestall the necessity of further defenses, Frances and First recalled in their editorial, they removed the clinical significance clauses from the diagnosis when the DSM-IV-TR came out in 2000. In its place was the older DSM-III-R version of Criterion B, according to which if someone 'has acted on these urges or is markedly distressed by them,' he qualifies for the diagnosis. This was the royal fuckup: the offender no longer had to be 'impaired' to warrant the diagnosis. All he had to do was act. In the original DSM-IV version, the offender also had to have children as his primary sexual object. The attraction was the 'impairment,' the thing that made him disordered rather then simply repellent or [235] unusual. But in the DSM-IV-TR, this requirement was gone, and since, according to Criterion A, 'fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors' were symptoms of Pedophilia, all the offender had to do to warrant the diagnosis was to commit the offense. This meant that, starting in 2000, a person who had sex with a child was ipso facto mentally ill."

4) Anti-Crime Hysteria

B29 [1] "John Randolph Tucker...when asked how he could serve as counsel for the Haymarket Anarchists...reportedly answered: 'I do not defend anarchy. I defend the Constitution.'

"Such a voice is needed in this country's crime debate today to remind Americans that those who argue for fairness in our criminal justice system do not defend crime, they defend the Constitution. Such a voice is needed because, increasingly, due process and other guarantees of the Bill of Rights are regarded as little more than inconvenient impediments to ridding our society of murderers, rapists, robbers, and other criminals.

"That voice has been missing in the exceptionally one-sided debate on crime that has dominated politics for the last thirty years [i.e., ca. 1967-1997]. Americans have been told that the answer to the crime problem is longer prison terms, harsher conditions of imprisonment, greater use of the death penalty, less due process, and less judicial review. There has been [2] virtually no debate among politicians about the wisdom of these measures -- whether they constitute an effective crime control policy or whether they will actually make Americans safer in their homes and on the streets.

"Instead, politicians have engaged one another over the question of who is the 'toughest.' Those who promised 'three strikes and you're out' -- life imprisonment for persons convicted of three felonies -- were quickly topped by those promising 'two strikes and you're out.'

"Those who promised to imprison more were topped by those who promised to make conditions within prisons even harsher by removing exercise equipment, eliminating educational and vocational programs, and even restoring chain gangs. Those who promised the death penalty for some crimes were topped by those who supported the death penalty for even more crimes."

Y4 [436] "The last great criminal war, the War on Drugs, resulted in an erosion of civil liberties, mass incarceration, and a fundamental reorientation of American criminal justice. As criminal justice priorities shift, there is an opportunity for a war against sex offenders to replace the War on Drugs. If such an eventuality takes place based only upon the body of laws currently targeting sex offenders, the likely social effects will be similar to the War on Drugs. If, as occurred during the drug war, the laws are expanded to further restrict sex offenders, the social abd financial costs to America could be enormous."

[450] "Importantly, while sexual violence continues to be a problem around the world, only the United States has enacted such laws and ordinances [registration, community notification, residency restrictions, and other 'scarlet-letter,' sex-offender-specific laws]. Only a small handful of nations have adopted registration requirements (normally without corresponding community provisions). * None of the other laws and policies discussed above has been emulated in other countries."

[453] "As was the case with the War on Drugs, certain myths about sex offenders have already gained acceptance in the general population. In particular, some myths such as stranger danger, unusually high post-release recidivism, sex offender homogeneity, that rape is a fate worse than death, and enemy creation have served as cornerstones of America's sex offender policy. Together, the myths support political efforts to vilify and restrict the liberties of sex offenders even when such policies are ultimately counterproductive."

[461] "[T]here are unique dangers associated with a shift to a criminal-war-fighting strategy. It is also unclear if the elevation from ordinary law enforcement actually results in a decrease in the targeted offenses. Certainly, if the drug war is used as the example, success for criminal wars does not seem attainable even with decades of effort. Thus, a move to a criminal war may only carry the drawbacks of such a shift without achieving any of the proposed benefits.

"If, in 1968, scholars, activists, commentators, and the general public were shown the financial and social costs that would result from the War on Drugs with little to no benefit achieved, it seems unlikely that they would support the American course. The United States has a chance to prevent a repeat of the damage that the drug war has wrought."

C3 [ix} "The United States has since the 1970s, experienced an anti-crime hysteria of unprecedented duration and intensity. It has precipitated adoption of crime-control policies that are conspicuously ill-informed and treat the worst possible incidents as if they are the run-of-the-mill norm. These social pathologies do little to help victims and so much unnecessary harm to offenders. They are most acute concerning sex offenders and sexual offenses."

5) Politicians' Demagoguery

E10 "It is easy to understand blame's appeal. It offers a simple narrative of how problems and tragedies arise, and a beguilingly simple solution: sack [i.e., fire], punish, excoriate the culprits. It is doubly alluring for politicians and newspapers...The trouble is that it is not always the worst or most culpable people who are targeted for blame or offers to appease it; it is sometimes the weakest and most expendable instead. And too often the blamers are cynically opportunistic...Moreover, by fixing blame in individuals, complex failures and hard decisions can be missed and wider culpability can be ignored...As well as vengeful and primitive, [this] kind of blame...is also, in its way, naively optimistic. It contains a fairy-tale idea of the future: if the guilty are identified and punished, it (whatever it is) will never happen again...There is even, perhaps, a faint trace of magic in the blame syndrome. Somehow, subliminally, blame may seem to mend not only the future but the past too. Finding and removing an offender can sometimes make it feel that his crime has not only been avenged, but undone; that time has been expunged...[A]n excess of blame -- blind and unthinking as it often is -- can be as dangerous as the deficit of it. Vitriolic blame...can inhibit decision-making and worthwhile risk-taking. And it can be both intellectually lazy and delusional. The wrong kind of blame reflects a false, dangerous simplification -- and a false, childish hope."

M6 [582] "The approach is that of the meat axe. 'Do the crime, do the time.' It's a great slogan for a politician on the make, but sadly, it is the ideology of the militant ignoramus."

Throughout this site, for purposes of brevity sources are abbreviated ('A1,' etc.). However the titles of some are so good, they bear repeating outside of the 'Bibliography' itself. The following is one of them:

"Pedophiles and Cyber-Predators as Contaminating Forces: The Language of Disgust, Pollution, and Boundary Invasions in Federal Debates on Sex Offender Legislation"

L5 [545] "[W]hile the speakers [in congressional 'debates' on proposed sex offender legislation held between 1994 and 1998] relied on (inaccurate) actuarial/risk-based determinations to play up the sex offender's dangerousness, the ultimate goal seemed aimed at constructing the sex offender as uniquely threatening even in comparison to the run-of-the-mill felon. Thus, in each debate at least one speaker pointed to unspecified 'scientific studies' which confirm that 'those who commit acts of sexual violence against children have the highest rate of recidivism among all criminals and crimes.' (Lampson...1997) Congressman McCollum described the recidivism rate of registerable sex offenders at, '10 times greater than other criminals' (...1996...), and Congressman Jackson-Lee argues that 'it is a known fact that the scientific community has concluded that most [546] pedophiles cannot control themselves' (...1996...). Senator Gramm cited the same 10-fold recidivism rate, here compared to convicted robbers again and again without indicating where this figure originates, as he notes that 'sexual predators have a recidivism rate that is higher than any other known class of criminal activity' (...1996...)."

[All of these members of Congress were and are flat wrong . See Recidivism section of this site.]

"And the sex offenders' pollution infects not only the unfortunate, innocent victim, but the entire social body. Therefore, the law must work to prevent contamination of all that is good in this country. Thus, Congressman McCollum suggested that 'sexual offenders not only victimize women and children upon which they prey, they victimize society as a whole.' (...1996...) Congresswoman Lofgren expounded on the crucial role that the law plays in protecting the larger body from the contamination of the sex offender: 'When I think about the damage that abuse of children does, not only to that individual child, but to our entire fabric of society, I am even more enthused about Megan's Law' (...1996...).

"Ih the case of the 1998 Act, which specifically aimed to control Internet pornography in one of its provisions, the lawmakers were also explicit about what they saw as the major tool used by molesters for spreading pollution and facilitating contamination, and that was through the transmission of child pornography via the Internet. Like the conductive, pollution-spreading powers attributed to cotton cloth, cookware, and straw by Havic Brahmins [in India] (Douglas 1976), pornographic images were represented as a form of conduit used by the polluted predator to facilitate communication with his innocent prey:

'Child pornography is a horrible tool for child molesters to recruit new victims. Often used to break down inhibitions and validate specific acts as normal to a child, pedophiles frequently send pictures to young people to gauge a child's interest in a relationship.' (McCollum...1998...)"

W27 [Patty Wetterling's son, Jacob, was kidnapped back in the 1980s. It would not be until Labor Day weekend of 2016 that his fate would finally become known. Sadly, his remains were discovered in a field not far from his home, after law enforcement officials were led to the scene by the person who murdered him, a man who had been interviewed as a potential suspect shortly after Jacob's disappearance. The following is a portion of an interview:]

[104] Wetterling: I believe that much of the legislation and much of the initiative in this country is to use fear and anger to keep people on guard...Just having this absolute anger and pointing our fingers at one or two people as the bad guys, we're denying the realities of sexual offending. We're denying it.

[107] Wright: I want to talk about Congressional campaigns in a minute, but I want to go back to this question about the legislator's role. . .

Wetterling: First of all, they don't understand the problem. Second...they usually propose legislation after another really horrific crime...These are people who have to get re-elected, and the goal is to look like they are the toughest on crime, that they've done the most to go after the bad boys... There are so many [laws] named after children, Dru's Law, Jessica's Law. It gives the sense that this is compassionate and caring and that it will make the world safer. Often, it doesn't...[W]hen Jacob was abducted, I didn't want a law...I wanted my son.

[111] Parents are very vulnerable when legislators approach them. They tell them things like 'if we had a law, your child would be safe.' That's not true, so often that's not true. But the parents are hurting and they are very vulnerable. They feel like it will make my child's life have meaning to the rest of the world. Nobody will forget there's a law. We are very vulnerable."

U15 [849] "Crimes involving the exploitation of children provide fertile ground for grandstanding politicians."

G5 [243] "The latest flavor in American crime politics is the sex offender, a special breed of criminal aid to -- as Alberto Gonzales puts it -- 'lie in wait, studying, planning to ensnare and violate the innocent.' Bravely denouncing the evil lurking in the shadows, politicians promise to intervene and defend all that is good and pure -- to 'protect our children,' as they inevitably put it...A massive Department of Justice study of offenders serving time for sex offenses against children found '88 percent had a prior relationship with their victims.' The numbers are similar in other countries. But politicians focus on the 12 percent, not the 88 percent, because winning the votes of parents requires a threat 'out there' which the politicians can promise to fend off.

"Press conferences in which politicians are flanked by grieving parents are a standard feature in this brand of political marketing. And legislation named for children who died under circumstances that are both exceptionally awful and exceptionally rare -- something that would have been considered unspeakable in another era -- have become routine...The thinking behind Jessica's law is that any sex offender -- a term that covers everything from violent pedophiles to a 19-year-old who has consensual sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend -- is an irredeemable creature whose crimes will inevitably escalate to raping and murdering children if he isn't taken out of circulation. This belief is popular but wrong: Many studies, including those of the U.S. Department of Justice, show sex offenders are actually less likely to commit another crime after release than other sorts of criminals."

[See Recidivism section of this site.]

[245] "Having warned of a threat, politicians must also come up with new ways to deal with it. In one month in 2006, the Louisiana state legislature passed 14 laws targeting sex offenders...But after giving first offenders an automatic 25-year minimum sentence; after ordering released offenders to register and making their names, faces, addresses, and places of employment available on the Internet; after barring offenders from many forms of work; after banning them from living within 1,000 feet of schools, parks, and so many other places that they are often rendered homeless and driven out of town; after requiring released offenders to wear satellite tracking devices for the rest of their lives -- after all that, what's left? It's a dilemma. The latest rage is for measures dealing with Internet luring but those opportunities won't last long and anyone aspiring to high office had better have something more to offer.

"Few of these policies are inspired by criminological research and even fewer actually contribute to public safety."

[The following is from a court decision:]

W11 [381] "New Jersey contends that sexually oriented materials will disrupt its treatment of sex offenders at the ADTC [Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center]. Thus, New Jersey argues that rehabilitating sex offenders is a valid penological interest. Plaintiffs vehemently counter that New Jersey does not have a legitimate penological interest because sexually oriented materials may aid their treatment by helping them refocus their deviant sexual desires to normal sexual wants."

"New Jersey did not have a valid penological interest when it enacted [this statute banning ADTC sex offenders from having pornography] because rehabilitation does not appear to be the true reason why the New Jersey Legislature passed [it]. The legislative history does not mention rehabilitation, and Dr. Nancy Griffin, the Director of Psychology at the ADTC did not testify before either the Assembly or the Senate, and learned about the statute after it was enacted. Most importantly, the Department of Corrections formally opposed the statute before Governor [Christine Todd] Whitman signed it because the Department believed that adult pornography for inmates at the ADTC was a step in the right direction. Thus, the true reason for the enactment of [this statute] appears to be public outrage over some of the heinous, pedophiliac [sic] crimes that occurred in New Jersey."

[382] "The New Jersey Legislature's attempt to patronize this anger for political purposes with the enactment of [this statute]...fails to pass constitutional muster.

"We, as a community, imprison offenders for our protection. Proscription on thoughts and ideas, however, falls outside that protective cloak, a concept not lost on the framers of the Constitution. The right to freedom of expression transcends prison walls and any constraint on such freedom must be consonant with the principles that support that right.

"There are occasions when the application of constitutional rights will protect a disfavored minority of society to the consternation of the vocal majority. Nonetheless, the Constitution is the lifeblood of our country, and this Court has a sworn duty to uphold the Constitution against all competing interests. Arbitrary enforcement of the Constitution debases its purposes and diminishes the protections it provides to all citizens. Thus, denial of a right or privilege to a citizen is a denial of that right or privilege to every citizen.

"Here, the fault lies not with the prisoners who seek freedom of expression, but with an ill-considered and ill-conceived law that deprives them of that freedom. A law born in haste merits an equally speedy demise."

6) 'Violent'

N10 "[New York State] Penal Law §70.02(1) currently defines a 'violent felony offense' by simply listing...those offenses that are to carry the 'violent felony' designation. The legal impact of categorizing a crime as a 'violent felony offense' is significant in that offenders charged with or convicted of these crimes are generally subjected to higher mandatory prison sentences, tighter plea bargaining restrictions, and more limited eligibility for DOCCS' inmate programming and early release, to name just a few.

"Notably, some of the crimes currently defined as 'violent felony offenses' do not require the use, or even the threatened use, of actual force or violence...The use of the 'violent felony' designation for those offenses creates a perception that the crimes are inherently violent when they are not."

[This is certainly true of the crimes Nickel was convicted of. In New York, the vast majority -- if not all -- sexual offenses are automatically categorized as 'violent,' by legislative fiat. Whether any actual force (or even the threat of it) was used is irrelevant, except perhaps at sentencing. (And even then , only its presence will be used as a reason to increase punishment; its absence is rarely used as a reason to mitigate punishment.)]

S5 [27] "According to Wordnet 2.022, the definition of 'violent' is: adj. 1. acting with or marked by or resulting from great force or energy or emotional intensity; 2. effectuated by force or injury rather than natural causes.

"Thus, one would expect that acts involving physical force and/or injury would legally be considered violent, and acts not involving physical force and/or injury would not be considered violent.

"However, the term 'violent' when used in the definition of the [federal] Title 18 is not based on the details of the crime, but on the age of the victim; if the victim is either 16 or under, or 12 or under, then the crime is considered violent, whether or not any actual violence occurred."

"[We suggest] that the definition of 'violent' be related to the details of the crime (such as force, weapon, injury inflicted), not on the age of the victim."

[This would seem a modest proposal indeed.]

N8 [11] "There was a broad consensus that the ranges for truly non-violent offenses should not be the same as those for homicide offenses, which New York law peculiarly classifies as 'non-violent.'"

[Thus, in New York State law, the word 'violent' has been drained of any meaning whatsoever.]

7) 'Predator'

S5 [28] "The [Wordnet 2.022] definition of 'predator' is: n. 1: someone who attacks in search of booty; 2. any animal that lives by preying on other animals.

"Based on this definition, the public assumes that a person deemed a sexual predator would be someone guilty of 'staking out' or stalking his or her potential victims and abducting them. The definition of 'predatory' in current sex crime law is not based on the dictionary definition, which implies stalking or abduction...By misusing and over-applying this term, it will lose any impact that it might have had in the past. If almost everyone is a predator, then no one is a predator."

[In Nickel's case, at sentencing Judge Paul Czajka called Nickel a 'predator,' though he was never even alleged to have stalked or abducted anyone.]

8) Glee at Suicides and Murder

K2 [11] "Just as savage is the glee that greets the news of a suicide of those accused or convicted of sexual crimes involving children; joy at the efficiency of it all or rage that our delight in their torture has been cut short. [FN8:] As for glee, I can recite the reaction of policemen attending a special all-day seminar conducted at the University of Southern California's Delinquency Control Institute by an expert in child-molesting crimes, R.P. 'Toby' Tyler, in October 1988. When the previous year's figures for convictions were announced, there were murmurs of approval; but the figures for suicides brought forth hearty applause. We include within the Gothic circuitry even prisoners, who are provided a role that allows them rewarding social responsibility, making the murder of jailed sex offenders not uncommon."

[For some or perhaps many inmates, particularly career criminals, assaulting or murdering a sex offender may well be their only means of either attaining social acclaim, or maintaining a belief that at least they're better than somebody .]

9) Projection Issues

L22 [24] "Manufactured to be tracked, hounded, and pummeled, the scapegoat can also serve as a repository of secret desires, his or extravagant evil a projection and condensation of widely distributed feelings."

L6 [941] "We choose all forms of arousing entertainment, accept the commercialization of sexiness and support the sexualization of youth through the media; but we remain rather puritanical when it comes to the sexual impulses of youth and ourselves. Sex offenders thus evoke a fear of our own sexuality, a fear that it will spiral out of control or that it can be disgusting and ill-placed. In over-punishing sex offenders, in creating monsters, we differentiate us from them and ease our self-conscious fears about our own sexuality. More importantly, by turning them into monsters, we separate them from the people we know and love, fathers, stepfathers, uncles and cousins who are much more likely to be the sexual offenders in the lives of little boys, girls and women. The real fear is that someone like a father, someone who was meant to protect children, caused harm. When that happens, a [942] primitive fear is aroused that necessitates seeing an offender as alien, a 'loner,' not like us, and therefore, condemnable."

B3 [58] "'They are not monsters,' Joan Tabachnik told me. 'They are us.' Tabachnik is the director of public education for Stop It Now!, which was founded by a sexual abuse survivor and which is among the most prominent national organizations devoted to the prevention of child sexual abuse. 'It's so much easier,' she said about the prevailing public vision, 'to think only of the most sadistic, most dangerous pedophile,' the predator who kidnaps and abuses and kills. 'It's very comfortable. We can say, They're not who we are.' But they're also not, she pointed out, the typical offender. They are the rare extreme. 'It's very uncomfortable,' she went on, 'to say, I know what it means to look at my child as a sexual being -- I know what it means to want to touch my child.' She was not excusing molestation; she was calling for a complex understanding of a widespread and often devastating crime, because without it, she said, efforts at prevention are crippled. She drew a comparison with adults acknowledging their wish to hit their children in moment of rage -- mere acknowledgment can make the impulse easier to quell, and those drawn hard to such violence can seek help. 'It's far more difficult to be candid about sexual urges,' she said, and so it's far more difficult for those on the edge of offending -- those for whom cultural taboos, legal prohibitions and empathy for the child aren't powerful enough to keep desire deeply submerged or to choke it off if it rises to the surface -- to find a way to stop themselves."

J11 [145] "Central to the development of the sexual predator laws is the idea that sex offenders are moral monsters who must be excised from the community to protect the rest of society. The desire to eradicate a 'contaminated' group is not unfamiliar in our nation's history -- '[i]n the past, we have used categories such as race, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, and disability to put people into reduced-rights zones.' Fear and loathing are instinctual psychological responses when confronted with the 'other.' By disseminating the idea that the out-group is contaminated, society infuses the group with an internal quality that distinguishes its members from the rest of the public. This frame views the sex offender as a 'degraded other,' and encourages the 'paradigmatic example of sexual violence [as] the rapist who was a deranged stranger.'" **

M32 [1562] "[T]he prevailing criminal regulatory regime applied to persons convicted of sex offenses imagines sexual pathology to be located in dangerous strangers, who may be identified through often minor deviant behavior...and physically excluded from U.S. communities. This reduces collective anxiety and uncertainty by purporting to identify those persons likely to perpetrate sexual harm...This framework enables a greater sense of perceived safety and smooths the relationships in families, schools, churches, and other central social institutions, as the locus of any sexual threat is understood to be external to these spaces."

[1565] "[D]espite the fact that it does more harm than good, this regulatory approach [registration, community notification, and civil commitment] continues to capture widespread popular and political support -- namely, because it alleviates social anxiety about the depth and difficulty of addressing pathologies in our schools, families, and churches, and instead locates the problems of sexual violence and abuse in a fantasy about how sexual harm might be eliminated, primarily by identifying dangerous individuals to be publicly shamed and physically excluded from communities otherwise presumed to be harmonious."

L5 [529] "[A] significant force propelling the current panoply of sex offender containment strategies is a constellation of emotional expressions of disgust, fear of contagion, and pollution avoidance, manifested in a legislative concern about boundary vulnerabilities between social spheres of the pure and the dangerous."

[545] "In these [congressional] debates [on proposed sex offender legislation, held between 1994 and 1998], every gender-specific reference to the offender was masculine...And this male predator was never described as a family member, neighbor, or friend of potential victims. Rather, this threat came from outside the realm of the pure and innocent. The prototypical offender/perpetrator was always characterized as a stranger and an outsider, even though only about 3% of sexual abuse against children is committed by strangers...and just about 6% of child murders are committed by strangers...Indeed, the majority of children who are sexually abused, physically abused, neglected, and killed in this country have suffered the harm from someone in the family...Nonetheless, the imagery in these debates projected an outsider who creeps and seeps with an incredible knack for invading the pure space of his prey."

[547] "'[Most people] are surprised when they learn that child pornography is the tool of choice used by child molesters and pedophiles to entice young children into sexual activities. . .Bottom line, let us remember that child pornography is used in every community to lure children into this child abuse.' (Bachus...(1998)...)"

[549] "The debates conveyed a sense that the very fiber of traditional family units is under siege by sex offenders, and that the only way to save the sanctity of the traditional family is through passage of these bills."

"The space where the innocents dwell -- a sphere of purity that deserves protection from intrusion -- was also defined in these debates. It includes the [550] traditional, idealized havens of family homes, schools, communities, and neighborhoods."

"The Internet, for many who [551] spoke in the 1998 debate, is at once a technological marvel and a danger zone.

"And cyberspace not only represents contested terrain; it also has created new breaches in traditionally solid boundaries, such as between the family home and the larger world."

[554] "It is also clear from these debates that, in conformity with the laws of contagion, the legislative efforts must focus on maintaining boundaries...[O]nce touched by the pollutant, the victim is lost to the contaminating forces, and there is no going back."

[from FN22:] "[T]he transcripts read less like contested debates than like pep rallies, with each speaker trying to top the list with enthusiastic support for the bill at issue."

[557] "The legislators' discourse in large part reveals an almost visceral repulsion and disgust reaction to an imagined toxic threat, rather than an articulated concern based on rational, dispassionate assessment of a known social risk.

"Specifically, an underlying theme to the narratives offered by the bulk of the federal legislators in these debates seems to be that the sex offender is essentially, supernaturally dangerous and contaminating to the idealized social body."

[558] "[T]he pieces of legislation generally created a pool of targeted offenders that extends well beyond the relentless predator/psychopath prototype. Perhaps because of the shapelessness of disgust -- just as disgust elicitors seem to seep and ooze across boundaries -- the disgust reaction here appears indiscriminate rather than distinguishing between subtypes of sex offenders by true level of threat. Thus, these lawmakers (at least verbally) imagined the most vile example and generalized from that by legislating punitive responses that affect huge classes of criminal actors."

[559] "The debates consistently raise the theme that the measures are necessary to protect an idealized version of the family from harm. Sex offenders armed with child pornography are the external contaminating threat that jeopardizes the innocence of our children and the sanctity of families by working to invade the boundaries of their uncorrupted homes, neighborhoods, communities, and shopping centers. Further, by rhetorically linking 'sex offenders' as a generic category to the components of disgust, these lawmakers help shape political discourse about a number of related social realms -- gender roles, family, sexuality and sexual morality, purity, and decadence."

[560] "It is men lurking outside the home who are the danger, who will harm these innocents if the legislators don't diligently reassert the protective strong arm of the law and if women and children move beyond the traditional boundaries that mark zones of safety and purity. Conversely, in these debates, women, 'the children,' and even the elderly are not at all conceived as being capable of such contaminating power, nor of the power to protect themselves from contagious and corrupting forces in the larger world. Ths may explain why the threat was uniformly portrayed as coming from somewhere beyond the boundaries."

[Constantly emphasizing children's (supposed) powerlessness may well make them even more powerless than they might otherwise be.]

D10 [39] "Civil commitment laws also express horror toward certain acts and actors who commit them, where 'horror' can be understood as a mixture of fear and disgust. Sex offenses are abominable acts; we loathe them and their perpetrators. This disgust goes well beyond the fear of the harm sex offenders may cause...Laws that express disgust toward certain kinds of conduct, and the values associated with disgust, are far less likely to be supportable by public reasons than laws that express fear of the harm...Sex offenders are not simply different, or examples of a kind of spoiled or rotten nature; they are regarded as morally abominable. Sex offender statutes...to the extent they express disgust or horror and not simply fear, are deeply morally problematic. In the United States, attitudes toward sex offending are distorted by the ways they are framed: that they are the acts of moral monsters and that recidivism rates are extremely high."

[Which they are not -- see Recidivism section.]

"A common metaphor for the sex offender -- 'predator' -- conveys a medieval image that has never entirely been eliminated from Western images of the frightening, the disgusting, the horrible, the dangerous and the unbearably, and erotically, fascinating: the human monster. Psychiatric diagnoses ground our loathing of the sex offender in a context of disinterested scientific risk assessment, but in the background of our sex offender civil commitment statutes lurks the pre-modern monster."

[40] "An important recent analysis of sex offender narratives critically examined the 'monster' metaphor, with the aim of uncovering the sources of the social hysteria over sex offending and restoring humanity to the offender." ***

"Civil commitment statutes...are expressions of disgust that reflect a distorted vision of the sex offender as a modern moral monster that threatens to disrupt the natural, and normal, order of sexual conduct."

[41] "Monstrous anatomy sets the limits of human anatomy...[T]he fear of monstrosity is necessary for setting the limits of normal mental functioning: 'We need to believe in the danger of monstrosity in order to not allow ourselves to be distracted from our straight path. . .'" ****

[43] "Sex [44] offenders are construed as predators, in much the same way as the monsters that populated the medieval imagination were construed as a combination of human and animal in some manner associated with sinful sexual contact.

"Objects that trigger disgust...must be eliminated from the environment, segregated to prevent them from being ingested, literally or figuratively."

"[M]any sex offenders engage in conduct that is not as deviant as we want to believe...I am suggesting...that the fear of contamination expressed in our sex offender statutes is a fear of our own dark desires." [Emphasis added.]

"The fear of contamination triggers a need to establish boundaries between 'us' and 'them.' If no sharp, impenetrable (pun intended) boundary exists between 'normal' people and 'abnormal' sex offenders, we may be compelled to confront our own animal natures, our own desires to act in violation of the norms established for many centuries by the civilizing process. Sex offenders must be expelled from 'our' community. Hence the prevalence of the term 'predator' in sex offender statutes, and in the media reporting of sex offending. By segregating sex offenders as moral monsters, we construct the boundary that protects us from contamination.

"When I identify a monstrosity, I am engaged in an effort to prevent contamination of my self. The fear of contamination is nothing but the fear that I might become monstrous. By externalizing the monster, I make it possible to segregate and render harmless the violent desires that threaten my sense of worth as a person . More specifically, when I externalize my monstrous desires...I can constitute the Other (in this case the sex offender) as a sacrificial alternative to self-destruction." [Emphasis added.]

"Just as Oedipus is 'responsible for all the ills [that] have befallen his people,' ***** the modern-day sex offender is responsible for all the dangers that threaten or children. But ritualized, sacrificial violence must not be recognized as such if it is to do its work. In the case of deviant sexual desires...our therapeutic culture has medicalized the sin, thereby masking the ritualized nature of scapegoating sex offenders."

[47] "[S]ex offenders...are the current folk devils in the United States."

H13 [1716] "Overall, the rate of child sexual abuse in the United States dropped sixty-two percent nationwide from 1992 to 2010."

[1717] "[E]mpirical studies indicate that most sexual abusers of children are family members or are otherwise known to them; few are strangers. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that the majority of perpetrators of sexual abuse against children are parents, partners of a parent, or other relatives.

"In contrast to the stereotypical pedophilic man molesting children, statistical measures show that perpetrators of child sexual abuse are often not adults. In other words, a substantial percentage of offenders who sexually abuse children are themselves underage. Two national surveys of youth victimization reveal that approximately one-third of sexually assaulted juveniles are victimized by their peers. Similarly, according to statistics of crimes known to police from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), juveniles commit over thirty-five percent of sex crimes against minors."

[1721] "[T]he stereotypical view of the child engaged in a sexual act as an always-unwitting victim in need of protection is too simplistic. As an indication of cultural standards, youth are often portrayed in sexual ways. Recent commercial campaigns and popular media offer numerous depictions of sexualized children."

[1726] "From a broad criminal justice perspective, an obvious curiosity emerges: have we not learned from the war on drugs? In the drug war, the United states waged battle without much differentiation among producers, importers, distributors, or users. It is mostly a bottom-feeding exercise whereby low-level drug users are easy targets, presumably useful to bolster statistical measures of performance for criminal justice personnel. Seldom has law enforcement apprehended those most responsible for causing the greatest harm, i.e., drug producers. For this reason, the drug war is widely considered an abject failure, costing billions of dollars and contributing to prison overcrowding without substantially reducing demand. The analogy here is that the war on child sexual abuse snares the more easily identifiable child pornography downloaders and traders, thereby attracting law enforcement resources to these offenders. Yet there is little or no evidence that this approach has yielded the expected deterrence value or has succeeded in protecting children."

[1729] "[F]rom a punishment-theory standpoint, crimes and sentences are appropriately based on the level of suffering involved. Thus, a system that strives for proportional and rational punishment requires laws that differentiate between unequal harms."

[1730] "[T]he ideology of the modern sexual predator as a stranger lurking on the Internet is itself potentially dangerous to the safety of children. It obscures that the persons they might really need to be wary of are those closest to them since the vast majority of those who commit sexual abuse against the underage are family members, friends, and peers."

K8 [829] "'Whoever fights monsters should take care that in the process he does not become a monster.'

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Think of the following three terms: drug dealer, child molester, and violent crime. In the abstract, each term is usually taken to refer to the most monstrous offense and offender possible. The term 'drug dealer' conjures up an image of an Uzi-toting, gold-chain wearing, remorseless urban predator. The term 'child molester' elicits images of a strange man who cruises playgrounds in the hope of luring unattended children into his van, where he commits kidnapping, rape, murder or all three. 'Violent crime' triggers thoughts of a vicious assault, if not a rape or robbery involving a weapon. In each case, the [830] linguistic category used to describe crime and criminals evokes images of the most serious offenses and offenders. Such offenders do exist, but there are nowhere near as many of them as society imagines, and they constitute a tiny fraction of the actual population of offenders prosecuted. The monstrous images evoked simply do not correspond with the average offender in the legal category of offense to which the term refers. For example, most 'violent crimes' are simple batteries which involve no physical injury, most physical injuries sustained in such cases do not require medical treatment, and most cases requiring medical treatment do not require hospitalization. Similarly, the average offender convicted for drug sales is probably a drug user who sells two rocks of crack cocaine in the hope of clearing enough to be able to smoke a third himself, and the average 'child molester' is not a stranger but a household member who molests without kidnapping or raping. Why are we so preoccupied with the worst case? Why are we so eager to believe in monsters?

"Monstrous crimes and monstrous criminals provide appetizing fare for a society hungry for agreement and cohesion. Indivodials in our society attempt to forge solidarity through the process of punishment by focusing on the worst possible offenses and offenders. Simply put, we exaggerate the worst in order to experience the best: moments when we feel as a society that we have transcended the many differences that keep us apart. My primary thesis is that the changes, divisions, and tremors in our social solidarity have manifested themselves both in the way we speak and think about crime and in the hyper punitiveness of our criminal justice practices as well. Crime has [831] served as the rallying cry for a divided and insecure society, and many in our society use the criminal justice system, to send symbolic messages reaffirming and defining core values during this time of flux...Criminal punishment has come to serve as the new civil religion of sorts for a society which worries about its ability to cohere, and the depths of our anxieties about our social solidarity express themselves in our conceptions of crime and in the corresponding severity of our punishment."

[832] "Ultimately, the severity [of penal punishment] revolution is best understood as an exercise in scapegoating by people who are desperately trying to forge a greater sense of solidarity in a time of unprecedented change and division: Not just scapegoating in the traditional sense (the [833] demonization of minorities and other outsider groups as the source of criminal activity) but scapegoating in a subtler and more pervasive form as well. The essence of scapegoating is the attempt to identify the sources of social problems as external to the group, and an analysis of some of our society's crime obsessions of the eighties and nineties -- drug use, the sexual abuse of children, random violence and serial killers, juvenile 'super predators' -- reveals a common pattern. In each case, people eagerly believe in a populous category of 'monstrous offenders' and then project onto those offenders more basic anxieties about social problems that are both widespread and intractable. As a result, the abstract categories of offenses in our penal laws are tied to sentences that are disproportionately harsh for the average offense. We have developed a draconian system of punishment for dealing with the monsters that we have imagined being everywhere, a system that swallows up hordes of lesser offenders."

[834] "Criminal punishment serves as a communicative realm for the expression of sacred values within our society...[T]he more diverse and more secular a society, the greater the need for belief in some set of core values around which the disparate elements of our society can coalesce. These core values constitute what I call the secular sacred, and I will further argue that the secular sacred is the most easily expressed in societies such as our own through stories about its violation. In this sense, criminal punishment performs an internal communicative function whose importance deepens in times of flux and acute anxiety about social cohesion. The more we fear division in our society the more we invest in stories about society's response to terrible crimes..."

"The social thinker who thought the most about the connection between punishment and social solidarity was Emile Durkheim...While the emphasis of the rhetoric which has accompanied contemporary severity in punishment often emphasizes deterrence of wrongdoers, Durkheim would most probably see the true audience of the 'message' sent by these punitive practices as the 'right-doers,' the people in society who accept the society's moral framework and who wish to see it affirmed. For Durkheim, punishment's primary function was not to 'correct the culpable' or to 'deter potential wrongdoers.' Punishment's core function was to maintain social cohesion by affirming the moral order by which upright people live their lives...The punishment of crime in the Durkheimian view provides 'an occasion for the collective expression of shared moral passions, and this collective expression serves to strengthen these same passions through mutual reinforcement and [836] reassurance.'

"Social scientists raising Durkheimian questions have found evidence that the public's attitudes towards issues of punishment are driven more by symbolic concerns about values than by instrumental concerns such as the actual reduction of crime...A survey exploring support in California for that state's Three Strikes Initiative recently found that 'support for the three strikes initiative, as well as for overall punitiveness, are linked to judgments about moral cohesion and not to judgments about dangerousness.'"

[882] "Concerns about sexual predators of children offer an archetypal example of the ways in which a monstrous offender can serve as a vessel into which society can pour far ranging concerns about the difficulties of protecting children in contemporary society. During the ongoing child abuse panic in the eighties and nineties, the sexual predator served as a scapegoat for problems that are both subtler and far more difficult to deal with. The essence of scapegoating lies in the attribution of an internal problem to an external source. In the contemporary child abuse scare, the violent sexual predator of children, whose sexual appetites and violent tendencies are so deviant from social norms as to place them outside of normal society, is that external source. The violent sexual predator becomes a scapegoat, however, when the scope of social suffering laid at his feet is far greater than the facts merit, when a problem that is actually internal to society is projected onto someone who is clearly outside of society in an important sense of the word. For example, focusing our attention on the violent sexual predator diverts our attention from the difficult and often divisive issues raised by child abuse within [883] the family."

W27 [107] Wetterling: These people are not monsters. They're living and functioning amongst us, and we've got to figure out a way for them to live among us and not harm another [person]."

M14 "'Sex offenders' have replaced drug addicts as the scapegoat for society's anxieties about raising children in a complex world. A few years ago the bogeyman was the drug dealer hanging around schoolyards getting your child addicted to drugs. Before that, it was the Communist brainwashing your child to take orders from Moscow. Before that, it was the witch in the gingerbread house. How much easier to rail against 'sex offenders' than deal with the more intractable and controversial problems of parenting, health care or education."

Throughout this site, for purposes of brevity sources are abbreviated ('A1,' etc.). However the titles of some are so good, they bear repeating outside of the 'Bibliography' itself. The following is one of them:

"Sex Offender as Scapegoat: The Monstrous Other Within"

D11 [32] "[S]ex offenders in the United States are scapegoats, and for that reason are subjected to social violence far in excess of the dangers they pose."

[33] "[T]his extreme response is best understood as a reaction not simply to the risks posed by sex offenders, but to our fear of acknowledging that acts we criminalize and condemn as monstrous sex offenses are nonetheless acts of persons with very human, if often deviant, desires."

[35] "The term 'monster,' like its semantic cousin 'predator,' is a common metaphor for persons who commit horrifying, unnatural acts...Monsters, we learn from the history of the concept, may serve as sacrificial surrogates to purify sexual conduct of dangerous forms, because monsters symbolize our moral infirmities. The language we use today to describe sex offenders retains the historical association of half-human monsters with deviant sexuality. Sexual offenders are referred to as predators in the law, as well as the media, suggesting that a sex offender is not a member of civilized society."

[39] "By framing sex offenders as monsters, we not only dehumanize them, we also hide from our own anxieties about deviant sexual conduct and the damage it causes."

[40] "[Law professor Joseph] Kennedy suggests that the sex offender becomes a scapegoat when the scope of social suffering attributed to him is far greater than the facts merit."

[41] "In addition to providing a focus of social solidarity, scapegoats absolve us from guilt."

[44] "I suggest that the sex offender, while certainly not innocent, is also being used as a scapegoat for our anxieties about the sexualized role of children in American society, and our fear that sexual desires, including harmful sexual desires, are part of the human condition.

"Sex offenders are scapegoated, but does scapegoating sex offenders effectively combat the crimes they commit or assuage our guilt?...[T]he value of stigmatizing the crime [of child sexual abuse] does not warrant stigmatizing the offenders through disgust, humiliation, isolation, and exclusion, because in doing so, we undermine efforts to understand and treat sex offenders. Scapegoating does not identify and operationalize a social problem; it increases the likelihood we will avoid the problem. The socially constructed image of the sex offender as Monstrous Other ironically imbues the crime and the perpetrator with mythological import, allowing society to view the sex offender as one who cannot engage in self-reflection and restraint, and is incapable of the degree of rational control we attribute to persons."

[48] "We remain in the grip of moral panic, which I will now argue has less to do with fear of the outsider's harmful conduct than fear of contamination by monsters. For sex offenders to serve as scapegoats, and targets of moral panic, they must remain outsiders."

C18 [184] "Ultimately, we make scapegoats of those we have come to believe are incapable of suffering -- we dehumanize them, making them easier to hate. We create the idea that these other people are inferior to us. That develops into the idea that they therefore deserve their treatment. We deny them the same capacities for thought, emotion and values as us, and treat them accordingly. We can do this consciously or unconsciously, but the results are the same."

[185] "To see how innate this instinct is to us we can refer to Jungian psychology. Jung...believed that we all share the archetype of the shadow -- the innate psychic structure that personifies everything we will not acknowledge about ourselves...We deny the existence of the shadow, and instead project its characteristics onto others, allowing us to preserve our sense of goodness."

10) Sex Offender Laws Not Based on Reality

C1 [251] "When some doctrine has such a powerful grip on the intellectual imagination over such a broad range and when it has little in the way of empirical support but is rather in conflict with the evidence at every point, it is fair to ask why the beliefs are so firmly maintained."

G2 [5] "This book is about the development of the sexual abuse industry in the Western world in the last decade. My basic assertion is that there are some very faulty premises at the core of this field, and that these have far-reaching and tragic consequences...I was one of the pioneers of this field. I am now viewed as a traitor to the cause."

N2 "[T]he solutions to sexual predation are not solutions at all, but frustratingly inadequate, and often ethically and legally murky, tools. Continuing to hold offenders, after their prison sentences are completed, under the guise of 'treatment'? This punishes people for crimes they have not committed, awaiting cures that never happen, at huge expense...None of these efforts, of course, address the reality that the overwhelming majority of victims are assaulted by people the know, who never appear in any database...The list of registered offenders is so large as to be almost useless...While officials ponder what to do, many states and cities have adopted another flawed strategy: severely limiting where offenders may live...That faith in buffer zones ignores the fact that offenders move around and that zones drive predators into ghettos or homelessness. Sick people living marginal lives, away from the stability that jobs, medication, parole officers can ensure, are more likely to offend again, not less."

D10 [561] "[W]e must be aware of the tendency to rely on science as a ruse for moral condemnation."

[562] "The United States should build strategies to prevent sexual violence and improve community safety on 'a sound empirical foundation, not on the latest tragic sex crime showcased by the media.' @ The laws further the public perception of sex offenders as dangerous, incurable, evil people who should be locked up indefinitely instead of focusing efforts on treating the offenders and helping them reintegrate into society.

"The New York Times noted [an] anecdote in which a search beginning in 2003 for housing for a 77-year-old offender was still unsuccessful as of 2007. In a continuous exercise of irrationality and unfairness: [563]

'These men are shunned and sent away not because the threat they pose is demonstrably greater than that of the murderers ad other convicts who return to the streets everyday through the routine -- and entirely justified -- exercise of judgment by judges prosecutors and parole boards. They are singled out because of the loathing they inspire and the ferocity with which residents and their elected representatives can be expected to fight any permanent relocation to a given neighborhood.'" @@

[566] "It has also been said that '[r]esearch on risks and risk assessment had no influence in guiding the response to sex offenders. The political and judicial language reveals itself as mere rhetoric that camouflages a decision-making process that pays lip-service to risk assessment but does not accept the risks.'" @@@ [Emphasis in secondary source.]

F8 [317] "Legislation to punish sexual offenders is trendy, while the politics of sexual abuse are appalling. We are passing laws at both the federal and state levels, in the name of prevention, that are untested and expensive. I believe that we will see these laws fail and, in some cases, backfire, which will only make the problem worse."

L5 [557] "The prototypical sex offender constructed by speakers [during congressional 'debates' held on proposed sex offender legislation, held between 1994 and 1998] [558] was consistently the most despicable of the lot, an outside predator who relentlessly lusts after the innocent and pure, and who will both psychically and physically destroy his victim if left to his own devices. And while this kind of offender, though quite horrible, is statistically anonymous, therefore not the kind of pervasive threat to the well-being of the nation's children that is imagined here, the speakers held him up as the prime, if not the sole, target of the new laws.

"Thus, the lawmakers, in voting for these four bills, committed considerable resources and massively expanded the reach of federal criminal law in response to an unrealistic, emotionally drawn monstrous figure. In the articulated view of almost all the speakers, the pernicious nature of the sex offender's contaminating powers demanded that as a legislative body, they enact whatever 'extraordinary measures' are necessary to monitor and contain him, even if it means sacrificing the very foundational rules of federal lawmaking."

[558] "The language of risk, and the articulated goals of risk management in these sex offender legislative efforts are both driven by and mediated by strong culturally shaped emotional forces rather than purely 'rational' and calculative ones. Indeed, it would be [559] hard to argue that these legislative efforts are simply an appropriate response to a well-documented threat. The policies developed here are clearly not based on a careful assessment of the most effective interventions to enhance children's safety and well-being."

[560] "Disregarding statistics indicating that children face much greater risks and dangers within their homes at the hands of family and friends...the prototypical offender/perpetrator in these debates lives outside the homes and neighborhoods of innocent children."

W2 "The social pathology leading to adoption of overbroad and intemperate policies for dealing with sex offenses and offenders is well-known...One or more notorious sexual crimes, often against child victims, receive enormous media attention, which precipitates law reform proposals based more on imagination and emotion than on evidence and experience...[Historically,] laws are in due course followed by a decline in application of the laws which come to be seen by most judges and prosecutors as unwise and immoderate, and to be applied if at all to serious and repeat offenders...That cycle has been unusually protracted in our time but there are signs that the fever finally is abating in relation to crime generally and sexual crime in particular."

W28 [17] "Sex offender legislation is built on nonscientific premises that are skewed by public perceptions that all sex offenders are the same, that they reoffend at extremely high rates, that treatment does not work, and most importantly that most sexual assaults are committed by strangers -- implying that if the public knew who the offenders were, the assaults would not [18] occur. Almost 40 years of research into sexual victimization and offending debunk these premises."

W2 "Feel-good legislation may not be the most effective for sex offenders; sex offenders constitute a heterogeneous group of individuals who offend for a variety of reasons..."

[93] "The aim of all sex offender legislation is to protect the community. However, much of the legislation is based upon flawed assumptions about sex offenders or it is based upon the high-profile cases of stranger abduction and murder of children -- rare occurrences. These occurrences cause a moral panic in the community, resulting in knee-jerk legislation that is not supported by the research.

"Sex offender legislation has been criticized for providing a false sense of security and for potentially increasing, rather than decreasing, risk in the community. Harsher regulations, such as residence restrictions, might cause offenders to abscond from registration requirements. Evidence of this is seen in the fact that states that have more restrictive policies have lower compliance rates (Bedarf, 1995). Recent research suggests that sex offender laws make treatment compliance difficult and other collateral consequences, such as inability to find suitable employment or housing, and put offenders at a greater risk of reoffending (Earl-Hubbard, 1996; Levenson & Hern, 2007; Tewksbury, 2004, 2005)."

[273] "Though we would expect lawmakers to consult with experts when developing bills, all of the politicians interviewed by Sample and Kadleck acknowledged that the media were by far the primary sources of information about sex offenders."

A10 [401] "Sex offender legislation aims to protect the community, and community members think they are safer by knowing who and where sex offenders are. Unfortunately, at the time these laws were passed, there was little preliminary research conducted considering their effectiveness or whether they were based on valid assumptions (Lotke, 1997; Thomas, 2003)...Some studies even have indicated that the legislation may increase the risk of recidivism or at least cause unintended consequences, such as the inability to find adequate housing, unemployment, isolation, strain, and decreases in social support (Lees & Tewksbury, 2006; Levenson & Cotter, 2005; Tewksbury, 2004, 2005)."

[410] "[T]he researchers [in the 2007 Minnesota Department of Corrections study]...cautioned that increasing the length or intensity of supervision (e.g., lifetime supervision or registration) would produce [411] diminishing returns and would not be worth the resources...[T]he authors warn that the cost of providing the resources for the treatment may not provide the intended outcomes, as rates of recidivism, at least in regard to sex crimes, are already low (Minnesota Department of Corrections, 2007)."

[413] "As of the writing of this chapter, Minnesota has not implemented the Adam Walsh Act; and no proposed legislation has been written in regard to incorporating it into state law. Minnesota focuses on utilizing evidence-based practices when managing sex offenders in the community. Under this approach the state's recidivism rate for sex crimes has continued to decrease for more than 15 years (Minnesota Department of Corrections, 2007)...[U]ntil there is evidence that the [Adam Walsh Act] is effective in reducing recidivism, Minnesota does not plan on incorporating it into the sex offender management policies."

A1 [336] "The [New Jersey Kelly Ann] Michaels case will eventually come to be seen as exemplifying the best of psychology and, although not the best of law, at least the law's capacity to correct its errors. A wrong was done by overzealous investigators, some of whom purported to be expert psychologists. This wrong was rectified, in no small measure because of the amicus brief that carefully explained both what we know as well as the limits of our knowledge. This brief obviously educated the Supreme Court of New Jersey and, in so doing, helped bring the legally sanctified torture of Ms. Michaels to an end. The main regret is that the educational effort came rather late rather than early in the day."

[The Michaels case is discussed extensively in the Suggestibility section of this site.]

[337] "What will the future hold? We can answer that question only with a plea. The law is hostage to the knowledge possessed by others; it needs data, good data. It can well do without the biases and prejudices of related disciplines -- it has enough of its own to deal with. We need, in short, just what was provided by the amicus brief in Michaels, which we have obviously come to praise, not bury. And the law needs one thing more. It needs disciplines such as psychology to tell us with candor when knowledge is lacking. The amicus brief in Michaels was an effective presentation of what is known...Even more useful...would be candid appraisals of the outer perimeter of our current knowledge, appraisals that would effectively point out to trial judges what feats of imagination underlie much purported 'expert' testimony. This will not be easy to provide, for it entails, among other things, a willingness to lay bare the motivations of those who develop new theories -- to expose, for example, the feminist goals that spawned the contemporary resurgence of repressed memory theories. This must be done not because feminist goals, or any other politically aligned set of goals, are in and of themselves lamentable. Far from it. Such goals must be exposed because they may be, as they were in Salem, inimical [338] to a dispassionate search for the truth, and the subordination of the pursuit of truth to some other political objective is unacceptable in any court of law, and in any society dedicated to justice." [Emphasis added.]

S5 [4] "Before presenting solutions, it is necessary to address some common misconceptions regarding sex crimes against children. It is because of these misunderstandings about the real nature of sex crimes, victims of sex crimes and sex offenders that federal and some state governments are spending large sums for ineffective policies that do not increase public safety. One indicator of this lack of effectiveness is the continuance of sex crimes against children despite a huge increase in the number of sex offenders that are incarcerated."

[37] "[T]he states are most interested in punishing the offenders rather than actually protecting the public by preventing further offenses."

W2 [4] "The central thesis of this work is that these policies have failed by choice. Policymakers choose to focus on the most heinous sex offenders while ignoring the most common threats that people face. Policymakers are disproportionately influenced by isolated, high-profile cases of sexual assault committed by strangers, to the neglect of the everyday sexual violence committed by known and familiar family, friends, and acquaintances. This choice gives lawmakers simple and clear benefits but overall has made the public less safe."

"[P]olicymakers have chosen to allow sex offender laws to be driven by the demonization of offenders, devastating grief experienced by a subset of victims, exaggerated claims of law enforcement, and media depictions of the most extreme and heinous sexual assaults."

"[T]he greatest risk of sexual violation comes from one's partner, mother, father, sister, brother, family member, or family friend. As horrific as stranger-predator assaults are, they are far less common than violence committed by an intimate assailant. To the detriment of society, stranger-assaults are the guiding force behind today's ineffective sex offender laws."

[5] "Once the identity of the perpetrator is known and proven, law enforcement officials, prosecutors, and legislators state definitively that new and amended laws would have prevented the murder from occurring. Authoritative claims are made that with legislative action, no child will be harmed in the future and offenders will be severely punished and prevented from [committing] further offenses...New and amended sex offender laws are introduced with minimal debate, and no effective opposition is voiced, with those who promote moderation being dismissed as being soft on pedophiles."

"[I]n the face of such pain, the government has a responsibility to enact the laws that have the greatest chance of success."

[7] "With all these laws dedicated exclusively to sex offenders, this book seeks to answer one question: Are they effective?

"In his commentary on juvenile sex offender laws, Chaffin (2008) argued that policymakers routinely choose to ignore empirical evidence in pursuit of punitive, simplistic policies designed to win political points."

[8] "[There are] several common factors influencing the passage of sex offender laws. These include an overreliance on less common, high-profile, stranger-initiated sexual assaults and murders; quick legislative action; and exaggerated claims from law enforcement about the preventive aspects of future legislation."

[9] "A common criticism of sex offender laws...is that policymakers have allowed a subset of victims and their tragic, heartbreaking cases to define national policy..." [Emphasis added.]

J11 [148] "[T]he confluence of the feminist movement, conservative movement, and intense media coverage in the early 1990s led to the enactment of a series of laws addressed at the control of 'sexual predators.' Many of the laws claimed legitimacy through some reliance on the behavioral sciences. But as a matter of fact, these laws were largely enacted in a typical pattern of moral panic. First, a horrific [149] and highly publicized sexual homicide of a young woman or child captured the attention of a community. The main suspect was usually a released sexual offender, igniting public outrage at the ex-convict's presence in the community. Lawmakers then responded to the public outcry and quickly passed legislation that either created or expanded sexual predator laws on the pretense that loopholes in the previous iteration of legislation led to this crime."

W33 [266] "Studies have shown that not only do the majority of citizens think [267] that sex offender residence restrictions are an effective way to reduce sexual offenses but also that sex offender registries effectively meet this goal...One survey found that...44% of respondents thought it was acceptable for sex offenders to be harassed, 35% thought it acceptable for sex offenders to be injured, and 28% thought it was acceptable for sex offenders to have their property damaged because of their status as sex offenders...In one 2007 study, researchers discovered that almost half the population would support sex offender registries even if there was no evidence that these registries reduced sexual assaults..."

C5 "History is littered with failed attempts to deal with vexing social problems. New York's latest social policy challenge involves 'sexual predators,' an ill-defined and diverse but hated group that has become the No. 1 target of punishment-oriented politicians...Yet nobody seems inclined to address the causes of such behavior or to try to devise ways to prevent and treat it before it becomes so serious...Instead of favoring indefinite commitment for pedophiles, Richard Hamill, ® president of the New York State Alliance for Sex Offender Services Providers, has urged the state to support more community-based treatment in conjunction with parole or probation supervision, claiming it can reduce recidivism rates. Both the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors and the American Psychiatric Association have called for early intervention, increased investment in research on sexual disorders and better clinical training of mental health professionals regarding assessment and treatment of people who engage in such behavior. But New York, like other states, has failed to implement or fund such programs. Treatment experts observe that New York hasn't developed, improved or supported effective prevention and treatment options for sex offenders, preferring instead to respond very punitively after the deeds have been done. It remains to be seen which get-tough-on-predators plan the state will adopt. But serious sex crimes pose too deep-seated and complex a problem for New York to be treated as a political football...In 1973, Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller rammed through the penalties for drug offenders, thereby causing a huge increase in the prison population without stemming the drug problem. Many lawmakers still rue the day they voted for it. Legislators shouldn't make a similar mistake now. If a tiny fraction of what is now proposed were spent instead on sex offender education, prevention and treatment, the problem would be much better handled. Until New York starts to address underlying social causes and commits to preventing, understanding and treating the behaviors, tax money regarding sex offenders will not be wisely spent."

[ ® Richard Hamill is also discussed in the Prosecutor Peter Torncello section of this site, in the context of his 'expert' testimony in the Philip Riback case. (It should also be noted that Hamill, as part of the 'sexual abuse industry,' has a vested interest in the provision of therapy in this area.)]

11) Sexual Abuse by Other Minors

S5 [5] "Data from the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics 2000 report, 'Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement: Victim, Incident, and Offender Characteristics' show that a surprising 40% of reported sex crimes against children are committed by other children (under the age of 18)..."

F8 [317] "We must acknowledge that as many as twenty-five percent of all sex crimes are now perpetrated by juveniles, including as many as one-third of all rapes and almost fifty percent of child sexual abuse incidents." @@@@

12) Severe Punishments Don't Deter

S5 [7] "The vast majority of sex offenders are first-time offenders who have no knowledge of the severe legal penalties, and the small percentage of repeat sex offenders are addicts and/or mentally deranged [people who] cannot control their own actions and are not capable of connecting their actions to potential consequences.

"Because sex crimes are not committed by the types of people originally assumed by lawmakers, the policy of deterrence through the use of expensive mandatory minimum sentences will be completely ineffective in preventing sex crimes against children...At the same time, this policy will result in a burgeoning prison population, huge incarceration costs, and a great increase in the number of people on welfare and Medicaid. It will also drastically reduce reporting of child sexual abuse."

F8 [304] "In quelling our fears, we have not taken the time to look at the [305] fact that our laws have not worked nor have our more stringent penalties served as a deterrent."

[312] "There is little evidence that the third strike laws deter criminal behavior, the rationale for their implementation. Most crimes are committed without rational forethought. Those who know the law may become more violent so as to eliminate possible witnesses." @@@@@

W27 [103] Wetterling: [I]f you make it possible to use the death penalty for a child rape situation, the perpetrator might as well kill the child because there's the same consequence, and if offenders are cognizant of these kinds of consequences, then they have no motivation to keep the child alive."

[It has been noted that America is a country that doesn't actually solve its problems; it just amiably bids them goodbye. 'Zero tolerance' for 'child sexual abuse' (and many other things of late) demands the maximum punishment possible, regardless of the facts or the degree of harm. There is no such thing as a 'minor' incident; all are equally abominable. But what does this actually accomplish?

Two centuries ago, English pickpockets were publicly hanged for their crimes. Though this was designed as a strong deterrent, it was eventually abandoned because the authorities realized that their well-attended executions merely provided venues for other pickpockets to ply their trade.

Are we 'soft on crime' because of our present failure to kill petty thieves? Fortunately, modern-day justice systems generally consider a range of crimes, meriting correspondingly severe punishments. A serious offense is one that involves violence (or the threat of it), and/or is (or is likely to be) very traumatic for one or more of its victims.

What would happen if we made mugging a capital offense today? Muggers who otherwise would have simply run away would now have a strong incentive for murder . Though this sounds far-fetched, it's actually quite close to today's reality in cases of 'child molestation.']

13) The Pendulum Has Swung Too Far

S5 [26] "All unwanted sexual advances are wrong, possibly criminal, and have the potential to do psychological harm to the victim. As a society, however, we need to decide whether we wish to count an unwanted touch on the buttocks as an unreported sex crime...Decades ago, the bar was set too high, and many victims suffered in silence, unable to get the help and protection they so desperately needed. Now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction."

14) Sex Offenders Can Never Pay Their Debt

R4 [7] "I am not on the sex offender list...but...I find it funny that murderers, drug dealers and the like can walk out of prison a free person, but sex offenders and their families will never be free, not until mentalities and laws change..."

D11 [43] "[W]hereas criminal offenders released from prison are generally described as ex-offenders, sex offenders are called sex offenders even after they are released from prison. Individuals convicted of sex offenses cannot escape the sex offender designation, in part because they are not simply perpetrators of monstrous crimes, but rather they are believed to have monstrous characters."

[50] "Sex offenders are a convenient target of legal scapegoating because, according to our social mythology of the mental disorders that are thought to cause deviant sexual conduct, they can never be reintegrated into society. They are forever outsiders who can be subjected to loss of liberty -- legal violence -- without triggering much sympathy. Our anxieties about social anomie, especially with respect to sexual disorders, can be blamed on sex offenders with impunity. Moreover, the law can be deployed to legitimize scapegoating sex offenders."

W27 [112] Wetterling: "[W]ith all of our anger and all of our tough laws, there is no safe place for these guys. There are a lot of people who succeed. They do these terrible offenses and they go to jail and do their time. Then they get out and never reoffend. There is no place to share their stories, because you can't say, well, yeah I was a sex offender once and then I got some help, and I got off alcohol and drugs and I'm cured. As a culture, we don't tolerate that. We have not built into the system any means for success, and I think that's really sad."

W10 "[P]lucking just a few headlines from the recent past, it cannot matter that Michael Jackson was acquitted of child molestation, since he was frequently remembered in death as a pedophile. It cannot matter what happened all those years ago between Roman Polanski and Samantha Geimer in a mansion on Mulholland Drive, just as it cannot matter whether others who plead guilty to a sex charge really did it, or whether evidence to convict was nonsense, or whether the guilty serve their time. They can never 'pay their debt to society.' Guilt is the presumption, forever. One who pleads on the promise of a deal can no more realistically retract that plea than the ex-cons wrongly accused can shed the label 'sex offender.' Martha Coakley [then Massachusetts Attorney General] says she still believes the Amiraults -- whom she helped put away on preposterous charges of daycare horror and who were later vindicated -- are guilty. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court suggests it may not let other convictions stand on repressed memory alone but it has no problem doing so in the case of defrocked priest Paul Shanley (another prosecution initiated by Coakley), ignoring the reams of scientific research offered by the defense. And dozens of people who have done their time are still living under a bridge in Miami, quaking in the unwonted cold, because the city's residency requirements for sex offenders afford no other place for them...But the definition of sexual danger has become endlessly elastic. Like the terrorist, the sex offender is a new category of human being."

15) Abuse Concept Arbitrary

F4 [73] [In his chapter entitled, 'The Culture of Abuse,' this author writes:] "If any enlightened American or British social commentator living around 1900 had been informed that by the end of the century their society would revert to witch hunts, they would have responded with incredulity...Yet today something has changed. Not since the [74] Dark Ages has there been so much concern about organized forces of evil."

"Children as young as 5 and 6, who have been 'sensitized' to be 'aware' [of abuse], are growing up with the value of mistrust deeply embedded in their imaginations."

[75] "[T]he expectation of abuse serves to create an atmosphere that is both prudish and misanthropic."

[78] "The amplification of abuses by family violence research is realized through a conceptualization of abuse which is entirely arbitrary. The act of abuse lacks any structure or fixity because it is defined through the eyes of those who believe they have been abused. One of the most absurd consequences of this perspective is the belief that truth is always on the side of those who claim abuse. Consequently, insistence on evidence and the close interrogation of the claim is often dismissed as irrelevant or insensitive to the condition of the victim... By placing the emphasis on the importance of believing the accuser, experts in the field of family violence have freed themselves [79] from being accountable to the facts...By stigmatizing the refusal to believe, the accuser is accorded monopoly over some transcendental truth. In this way, thinking the worst about people is interpreted as an act of courage rather than what it really is -- an expression of misanthropy." [Emphasis added.]

[82] "Acts which are ambiguous and which at the most constitute a minor irritation and which involve no violence are now classed together with rape and battering. In this way, every unsolicited touch helps to increase the numbers of victims of sexual violence...[83] 73 percent of those classified as rape victims by [one researcher] did not think that they had been raped...Once researchers feel comfortable with disregarding the views of their sample [as often occurs with reports of neutral or positive adult-minor sexual experiences] and assuming a monopoly over the definition of rape, then the numbers can become astronomical...[This is a] methodological fusion of qualitatively different experiences."

[85] "This misanthropic tendency to define a growing range of experiences as potentially abusive represents an important condemnation of the human condition...[90] Unfortunately, the pathology of abuse will probably have the effect of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. People who are forever told that they need help to deal with difficult experiences will find it hard to tackle problems on their own. The culture of abuse flatters personal weakness and lowers the aspirations of people."

[98] "It is interesting to note that most of the early initiatives that were implemented to help victims came from above...[B]efore the construction of [99] the child victim, children were not striving to gain that status..."

G38 [37] "Sexual abuse workers usually operate under the assumption that all sexual activity between adults and children is inevitably harmful. This is not actually supported by the limited sociological and psychological evidence currently available."

[57] "Adults are more powerful than children, but this does not mean that children are not able to influence what happens to them in any way. Children know what feels pleasurable and what hurts. A child that squirms, struggles or cries is letting an adult know very clearly that it does not like what is happening. A child that chortles and asks for more when tickled and stroked, even if the touching includes the breast and genital areas, is unlikely to be feeling traumatized. Reframing this in later childhood or adulthood is unlikely to be in a person's best interest. Great care must be taken that any intervention by a therapist or researcher does not itself cause damage."

[59] "Everyone is likely to agree that genital contact between adults and children involving force or coercion is sexual abuse. Broadening a definition beyond this, however, means each case requires complex judgment as to whether it is abusive...[60] [G]reat care should be taken when looking retrospectively at the effects of early sexual experiences. Deciding that they are inevitably detrimental can be a self-fulfilling prophecy...[61] Experiencing love and affection through physical contact is essential for [children's] healthy development. There is a very grey area between loving sexuality and abusive sexuality."

16) True Dangers to Kids

L22 [87] "All sides, it would seem, single out sexual assault -- more so than grievous physical battery or sustained emotional abuse, not to say the experiences of grinding poverty, homelessness, or acute personal upheaval -- as the exceptional, unspeakable, irreparable act of harm against children." [Emphasis original.]

S5 [13] "Kids and Cars, a Kansas-based safety group, estimates that about 100 children are killed per year in parking lots and driveways when relatives or family friends accidentally back over them. The U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect [14] conservatively estimates that 2,000 children under the age of 18 are killed by parents or caretakers each year. These data show that strangers or slight acquaintances tragically killed 46 children in the year surveyed...Putting it into perspective...2,100 children were killed through accidents and neglect in the same time period. Yet we don't hear heavy media coverage about these cases. The extensive media coverage of abducted children leads the public to falsely believe that stranger abductions and killing are far more common than accidental deaths, when they are not."

G5 "If a little boy in a German city falls in front of a tram and is killed, it is a tragedy and any feeling person will experience a tinge of sorrow on hearing of it. The newspapers in that city may briefly mention the death, but that is the only notice it will receive and the family will grieve alone. But if that same little boy gets on the tram, meets a pedophile and is raped and murdered, it is not merely a tragedy. It is an outrage, and it may become news all over the world."

D10 [44] "One important consequence of moral panics is that they displace all other, more significant, dangers to society. As historian Philip Jenkins points out in his book about moral panic and child molestation,

'Predators, psychopaths, and pedophiles represent a very minor component of the real sexual issues faced by children, while even sexual threats must be considered alongside many other dangers arising from physical violence, environmental change, and the myriad effects of pervasive poverty. During the twentieth century, however, such dangerous outsiders have attracted a vastly disproportionate share of official attention, precisely because they represent the easiest targets for anyone wishing, however sincerely, to protect children.'" #

"In other words, moral panic...succeeds in pushing into the background virtually all other real threats to children...[T]he moral panic over sex offending amounts to a social interpretation of such conduct that is not supported by the data."

17) Sexualizing Children

W27 [104] Wetterling: "What concerns me now, and what I think has grown progressively, is that we are no longer shocked and horrified over the sexualization of our children. The video games -- for example, Grand Theft Auto, you get points for picking up a prostitute, you get points for going back and killing her. We're grooming our children to be sexualized; you know the 'pimp-ho' mind-set genre, glamorizing that kind of dominance and objectification of young girls. They sell pole dancing kits to young girls, we are encouraging these behaviors. Then when our children do what we've taught them to do, and act the way we've taught them to act, the only answer we have is to arrest them, register them as a sex offender, and change their lives forever so they have no possibility of regaining themselves. It makes no sense."

F8 [305] "People...describe children with sexual messages (e.g., 'isn't he going to be a ladies' man,' National Tiny Miss Beauty), they use children in sexual poses to sell products and clothing..."

B33 [346] "Scholar Germaine Greer argues that '[a]t the end of the twentieth century guilty panic about paedophilia completed the criminalization of awareness of desires and charms of boys.'"

[364] "According to scholar Anne Higonnet, 'eroticism in mainstream images of children. . .[and] sexualization of childhood is not a fringe phenomenon inflicted by perverts on a protesting society, but a fundamental change furthered by legitimate industries and millions of satisfied customers.'"

[365] "[O]ne can understand why society, both through what it consumes and where it places its implicit and explicit interests, supports the sexualization of children, as it has ab initio ."

A6 [212] "I explore the possibility that certain sexual prohibitions invite their own violation by increasing the sexual allure of what they forbid. I suggest that child pornography law and the eroticization of children exist in a dialectic of transgression and taboo: The dramatic expansion of child pornography law may have unwittingly heightened pedophilic desire...[213] The legal discourse on prohibiting child pornography may represent yet another way in which our culture drenches itself in sexualized children. Child pornography law requires us to take on the gaze of the pedophile in order to root out pictures of children that harbor secret pedophilic appeal. The growth of child pornography law has opened up a whole arena for the elaborate exploration of children as sexual creatures. Cases require courts to engage in long, detailed analyses of the 'sexual coyness' or playfulness of children, and their potential to arouse."

[248] "[T]he heightened anxiety about child sexual abuse is closely related to repressed pedophilic desire."

[249] "To exploit its pleasures to the fullest, we need to experience sexuality as forbidden."

[250] "The social climate of anguish over child sexual abuse, and the expanding laws of child pornography that [251] express and reflect this anguish, have made children all the more sexually alluring...Explaining the paradox by which 'many of the institutions designed to discourage deviant behavior operate in such a way as to perpetuate it,' [Kai Erickson] writes [in Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance ]:

'[A]ny community which feels jeopardized by a particular form of behavior will impose more severe sanctions against it and devote more time and energy to the task of rooting it out. At the same time, however, the very fact that a group expresses its concern about a given set of values often seems to draw a deviant response from certain of its members. There are people in any society who appear to "choose" a deviant style exactly because it offends an important value of the group. . .'"

[254] "As the crisis over child pornography mounts and legal proscriptions multiply, the sexual allure of children does too. A cultural scholar reports that 'there [now] circulates more disguised kiddie porn than at any other period in history. . .[T]he late twentieth century has seen children emerge as the principal incitements to desire. . .'"

[256] "I argue that child pornography law requires us to scrutinize pictures of children -- and ultimately children themselves -- as pedophiles do...[T]he law presents a problem of 'resignification': It strips the sexualized child out of child pornography, inserts him into a new context, and inadvertently reifies what it attacks...[266] The growth of child pornography law is comparable in effect to Foucault's view of the power of eighteenth century sex manuals that warned parents of the dangers of child masturbation."

[FN39:] "...Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America 5 (1996) ('Pedophilia is the new evil empire of the domestic imagination: now that communism has been defanged, it seems to occupy a similar metaphysical status as the evil of all evils...')."

[FN47:] "Another expert explains that although it has been 'demonized' and 'branded heresy' to admit, children 'sometimes participate without protest -- and with apparent enthusiasm -- in their victimization.' [Frank Bruni, In an Age of Consent, Defining Abuse by Adults, M.Y. Times, Nov. 9, 1997, at 3]."

A13 [147] " I have previously written about child pornography law as a realm of discourse that inadvertently replicates the sexualization of children that it fights. I believe that [the] 'To Catch a Predator' [series, which aired on NBC from 2004 until 2008, essentially entrapping those who were interested in engaging in sexual activity with young teenagers] not only repeats but complicates the problem. The show offers yet another venue in which we are enthralled -- anguished, enticed, bombarded -- by the spectacle of the sexual child. It purports to be a public service, a crime-fighting program that gets predators off the streets and stamps out the horror of child predation. Yet the show continually stages the spectacle of the sexual child that it disavows. As [Judith] Butler tells us, '[l]anguage that is compelled to repeat what it seeks to constrain invariably reproduces and restages the very speech that it seeks to shut down.' [from FN62:] "[Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative] at 129; see also id. at 117 ('[D]esire is never renounced, but becomes preserved and reasserted in the very structure of renunciation.')"

"In my view, 'To Catch a Predator' functions as a displaced and disavowed form, of child pornography."

[148] "Consider this scene between ['host' Chris] Hansen and a predator called Robert. While Robert insists his online chat with an imaginary 13-year-old boy was just 'rhetoric,' the avenging Hansen replies:

'Rhetoric? I've got the transcripts of your conversations here. . .What it sounds like, Robert, is that you wanted to. . .have [sex] with a 13-year-old boy. You said, "I want to see you and taste your beautiful body, make love to you. You are a gorgeous 13-year-old boy."'

"Safe within his disgust and contempt, Hansen luxuriates in the details of these imaginary sex scenes, conjuring up again and again another 'beautiful' sexualized teenage body. And with righteous indignation, Hansen broadcasts these words to a national audience.

"Nothing deters Hansen from doing his duty of conjuring up the gory details, not even a predator who says in effect 'you're right, I'm wrong, I confess, please arrest me right now and take me to jail.' There is no apparent reason to go on, yet Hansen persists, dragging up more sexual details of the chat. Oral sex, [149] group sex, S/M, Hansen soldiers on. 'Please stop,' says the man. But Hansen can't stop. Even when the man says, 'I confess, I'm guilty, there's nothing to dispute,' Hansen can't stop. It's the best part of the show.

"In this way, 'To Catch a Predator' fits within a long tradition in pornography: the exploitation film. As Eric Schaefer describes in his history of the exploitation film genre, risqué pornographic films would come with an extra reel that offered a prefatory statement about the moral ill the film claimed to combat. [from FN69:] Eric Schaefer, 'Bold! Daring! Shocking! A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959,' 69-75 (2d Ed. 1999)]. In that pornographic tradition, 'To Catch a Predator' packages titillation as if it were a public service.

"The repetition of the prohibition on pedophilic desire becomes a new, displaced site of pleasure. In psychoanalytic theory, a prohibition curiously can preserve rather than obliterate the desire it suppresses. In fact, the pleasure of enforcing a prohibition may serve as a substitute for the satisfaction of violating it: this substitute becomes all the more pleasurable because it is experienced under the veil of condemnation. Many have observed the salaciousness of the censor; the leering, suggestive ebullience that can accompany a vigorous censorship [150] campaign. As Butler has shown in other contexts, 'the prohibition pursues the reproduction of prohibited desire.' It 'sustains' [and] is sustained by the desire that it forces into renunciation.' [Emphasis appears in secondary source; unclear if original to primary source.] [from FN72:] Butler...at 117.

"In this way, the show may be comparable to Foucault's view of the power of eighteenth century sex manuals that warned parents of the dangers of child masturbation. As Foucault writes:

'One might argue that the purpose of these discourses was precisely to prevent children from having a sexuality. But their effect was to dint it into parents' heads that their children's sex constituted a fundamental problem. . .[T]his had the consequence of sexually exciting the bodies of children while at the same time fixing the parental gaze and vigilance on the peril of infantile sexuality.' [Emphasis appears in secondary source; unclear if original to primary source.] [from FN74:] Interview with Michel Foucault (1977), reprinted in 'Contemporary Sociological Theory' 204 (2007).

"Ultimately, 'To Catch a Predator's' restaging of the sexuality it condemns works to preserve, disseminate, and, in my view, even inadvertently normalize the predator's sexual fantasies. After all, as the show's spectacular ratings attest, it is no longer merely the 'predator,' but we, the viewers of NBC, who gain some sort of disturbing satisfaction from these fantasy scenarios. Even though our pleasure is experienced through the veil of disgust and condemnation, doesn't our experience of pleasure align us with the predator? His fantasy is no longer the stuff of furtive, clandestine chats. Now the 'pervert's' fantasy is mainstream entertainment, packaged for sweeps week, repeated again and again, long after it is useful or accurate [at least as of 2012, MSNBC continued to re-broadcast the series], for a seemingly insatiable viewing audience. Transforming the 'pervert's' fantasy into mainstream entertainment, the show spreads and [151] inadvertently normalizes the very imaginings it purports to condemn."

18) Pretending Children Are Adults for Punishment Purposes

S5 [30] "Consider, that currently a 16-year-old would be immediately charged as an adult for consensual sexual activity with a 14-year-old. This 16-year-old would also be charged as an adult if they got into a fight, were caught possessing illegal drugs, for petty theft or a host of other crimes. However, the same 16-year-old would be considered a victim with respect to consensual sexual activity with a 20-year-old."

B32 [149] "A sixteen-year-old boy who rapes a woman after she rejects his solicitous advances would typically be punished as an adult. But if a woman encourages a solicitous sixteen-year-old boy [150] after he tries to kiss her, he'd be regarded by criminal prosecutors as a child victim. In other words, legally, the minds of minors matter only when they've caused adults sexual pleasure."

[On July 4th of 2022, a television series called 'Killer Kids' profiled several thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds who were charged as adults. In fact, children as young as 10 have been so charged.]

19) State-Induced Harm

W6 [250] "The real victims of [the] sexual abuse of children include all of us, because the system we have set up to eliminate [the] abuse of children may be doing more harm than good."

S6 [104] "Labeling the child a sex victim, or assuming a symptom complex may have a self-fulfilling potential when coming from persons of expertise or authority. Marked effort by professionals must be made to control for medical process trauma or trauma from court testimony or social service interaction..."

M32 [1595] "By constructing relatively minor offenses as deserving of extreme punishment, these practices may...increase the likelihood that the experience will be remembered as especially painful and traumatic rather than inappropriate and unwanted but not permanently damaging."

S5 [34] "Child-victims are crying themselves to sleep at night, suffering daily and berating themselves for even disclosing the abuse in the first place, and would rather have endured the abuse than the nightmare 'cure' offered by the state."

W25 [335] "When treatment is given to a child who does not need it, a relatively brief, though possibly distasteful, act in the child's perception, with few long-term consequences, is blown up into a major catastrophic event. The child is forced to accept and internalize confused and irrational adult prejudices as to what sexual abuse must be like for a child. The child is also forced to take responsibility for convicting the offender in a confusing law enforcement process. The heavy emotional investment in seeing child-adult sexual contact as the most reprehensible of behaviors ensures that the child victim has no chance to escape the imposition of that belief and the harm it causes to the child."

W6 [224] "Every...analysis of the decisions made by the child abuse system that we have found concludes that the most probable and most frequent type of error is false positive, that is, identifying an individual as abused or as an abuser when it is not true...Much has been made of the harm done to children if there is a false negative decision, that is, a failure to identify a child as abused when it is true. This conclusion ignores the damage done to innocent people who represent the false positives generated by the system. Also, the severity of damage may be greater when a non-abused child is not correctly identified."

[226] "Mantell (1988) notes that the process of evaluating an accusation may result in more damage to the interests of the child and to the child's primary relationships than the original act in question."

{227] "Jones (1991) describes nine possible components of iatrogenic [therapist- or 'helper'-induced] harm by the system when children have actually been abused. They are 1) overzealous professional intervention, (2) repeated interviewing, (3) repeated physical examinations, (4) decline in living standards, (5) defensive decision making, (6) attendance in court, (7) withholding treatment, (8) over-treatment, and (9) foster care.

"If an abused child is traumatized by the consequences of a sexual abuse disclosure, investigation, and justice system involvement, the effects can be even worse for a child who has, in fact, not been abused...[T]he child is often put in sexual abuse therapy where the [228] false allegation is encouraged and reinforced. The child may be forced to be fixated on feelings of having been abused and to talk about the abuse and the abuser for months or even years."

G2 [47] "There is considerable evidence that many children are much more emotionally traumatised by the questioning and reaction which follows disclosure than by the actual sexual encounter."

G37 [160] "[R]esearch suggests that cases leading to official legal action -- rather than being dealt with informally -- produce more severe and lasting ill effects on children. An American report concluded: 'Most of the psychological damage, if any, stems not from the abuse but the interpretation of the abuse and the handling of the situation by parents, medical personnel, law enforcement and school officials, and social workers.' [Walters, 1975] Similarly, an English court concluded: 'The degree of lasting harm suffered by victims...seems to flow predominantly not from the sexual nature of the experience, but rather from other sources of shock associated with it, notably the use of violence or intimidation or the abuse of parental powers. The subsequent intervention of parents, or other authorities, in order to bring the offender to justice often seems to aggravate the damage caused by the offence itself.''

I4 [511] "It has been noted in recent years...that the legal distinction between assailant and victim in sexual offences does not fully represent the true facts of the case...Children can...suffer greatly when the acts are discovered and there is a family scene followed by police investigation and court proceedings."

[517] "I feel that in the circumstances violent reaction to the discovery of such activity can do a great deal of harm, while the activity itself evidently performs some function for the child, or fulfills some need, or is a passing act of little significance. Therefore, the response to the act should be calm, and counselling should replace prosecution except where there is violence or sadism or some other reason for intervention by the law."

S7 [6] "[C]hildren in these cases [where the allegation originated from the interviewer rather than the child] began showing symptoms of abuse only after disclosing -- the reverse of [7] abused children's usual response to counselling." [Emphasis original.]

[In the Nickel case, this was certainly true of 'Arthur' .]

C2 [261] "Although many accept as a tenet of faith the need for disclosure as a prerequisite for healing, this may or may not be the case, and such pursuit may create more problems than it solves."

[291] "When therapists enter the forensic arena, as happened in some of the cases studied, they sacrifice their 'help-providing' mission. They construct a setting whose major purpose is to generate disclosures or allegations rather than one that attempts to help the child cope with his experiences or fantasies. According to a prominent psychoanalyst who was an expert for the defense in the Little Rascals [North Carolina daycare] case, the therapists did not address therapeutic issues but saw their main role as collecting allegations from the children. This stance, according to the expert, had devastating consequences for these therapists' clients, who sometimes became more and more disturbed over the course of treatment. If this defense expert is correct in his assumptions, then by putting forensic concerns first, these therapists [292] sacrificed their primary professional responsibility to take care of these children's needs.

"Our opinion concerning the ethical unacceptability of some of these interviews is shared by a number of our fellow researchers."

[299] "Although social scientists are increasingly creative in the paradigms that they devise to study components of suggestive interview techniques, we will never carry out studies that perfectly map many of the factors operating in any one case because researchers and their institutional review boards would consider many of the interviewing procedures that have been used with actual child witnesses grossly unethical to experiment with." [Emphasis added.]

B1 [310] "The authors of this [legal] brief wish to convey their deep concern over the children in this case. Our concern is that if there were incidents of sexual abuse, the faulty interviewing procedures make it impossible to ever know who the perpetrators were and how the abuse occurred. Thus poor interviewing techniques make it difficult to detect real abuse. But we have further concerns. And these involve the interviewing techniques which we view as abusive in themselves. After reading a number of these interviews, it is difficult to believe that adults charged with the care and protection of young children would be allowed to use the vocabulary that they used in these interviews, that they would be allowed to interact with the children in such sexually explicit ways, or that they would be allowed to bully and frighten their child witnesses in such a shocking manner . No amount of evidence that sexual abuse had actually occurred could ever justify the use of these techniques...Above and beyond the great stress, intimidation, and embarrassment that many of the children so obviously suffered during the interviews, we are deeply concerned about the long-lasting harmful effects of persuading children that they have been horribly sexually and physically abused, when in fact there may have been no abuse until the interviews began . The authors of this brief will be permanently disturbed that children were interviewed in such abusive circumstances regardless of the ultimate innocence or guilt of the accused." [Emphases added.] [Signed by 45 Ph.D. psychology professors from colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and Canada.]

C2 [241] "[S]ome children in the case studies appear to have developed severe behavioral problems and sexually explicit behaviors only after they were repeatedly interviewed."

G2 [7] "I became worried about the effect of what I saw as over-intervention and false allegations."

U1 [107] "When a non-abused young child is taught by adults to produce false accounts of sexual abuse...[t]he child may come to believe that events happened and are real that did not happen and are not real. This is an assault upon a child's ability to distinguish reality from unreality. It runs the risk of training a child to be psychotic.

"A basic adult responsibility toward young children is to help them understand the reality of the world in which we live. When adults elicit preposterous accounts from children, fail to exercise any critical rationality, but instead lend credence to a child's improbable accounts, those adults are abandoning one of their fundamental responsibilities to children. Reinforcing and rewarding a child's fantasies as if they were true makes the world into a confusing and threatening place for the child."

[113] "The tragedy with the children is that if adults believe such statements and reinforce fantasies as if they were real, the children are being trained to be psychotic. Their ability to distinguish fact from fantasy and to sort out the real world is impaired, possibly permanently. Taking seriously highly improbable allegations and fostering confusion of fantasy with reality is neither a benign nor innocuous process. It constitutes emotional abuse of the children."

C2 [25] "[E]ven when the rate of reporting sexual abuse has skyrocketed, the number of cases that are classified as 'substantiated' has remained constant or dropped slightly. That is, although there has been a dramatic rise in the raw number of reports, this has been accompanied by an increase in the number of 'unsubstantiated' reports, yielding nearly constant numbers of substantiated cases."

[Therefore, the hysteria over child sexually abuse is actually not helping to root out true cases of it.]

"[A]llegations of sexual abuse are far more prevalent in the United States than in most of our industrial partners, often by a factor of 2 to 3...[W]e are inclined to agree with the view that the real rate of abuse in the United States is roughly comparable to that of most industrialized nations."

Y4 [457] "The emphasis on punishing sex offenders is based on another myth: the idea that being raped or molested is a 'fate worse than death.' This myth is based upon patriarchal notions of innocence and virginity and encourages persons being sexually assaulted to risk their lives rather than be violated. When that myth is used to support policy, the result is over-punishment that creates incentives for perpetrators to kill their victims."

R4 [7] "I am not on the sex offender list...but I've seen first hand the hurt that the laws being enforced at present can inflict...I had the honor and peivilege to help with the Georgians for Reform [of Sex Offender Laws] Conference this past March 6th...I stood outside the door for hours and spoke with wives, mothers...[8] Strangely enough, the one that touched me the most and continued to visit the registration table several times throughout the day, was an older lady who had been molested by her brother and uncle for years...It uplifted me to know that this woman has every right to be angry, but she is not. Still, those who crucify sex offenders every time a child comes up missing or someone is arrested for a crime connected to a child, are angry and ready to burn them at the stake."

20) Leaving Victims Behind

J11 [158] "Here is the sad irony of current legislation: although politicians name sex offender laws after victims of horrific and publicized crimes -- the Adam Walsh Act being the piece de resistance with seventeen victims being 'memorialized' in its provisions -- the laws focus on a small, atypical group of offenders without providing meaningful relief to victims. If sex-offender laws were truly abut the victims and preventing sexual abuse in the future, they would include provisions allocating funds for vicitim counselling and research into programs that address the underlying causes of abuse."

L6 [560] "[T]he lawmakers [in congressional debates on sex offender legislation, held between 1994 and 1998] appear to be overwhelmed by a drive to eradicate the contaminating forces of sex offenders without evaluating exactly who needs to be targeted for further restriction, with what specific measures to achieve the desired goals, and at what legal, fiscal, and social costs. As a result, those who are identified as needing protection from social harm are left behind, since the resources and efforts are singularly aimed at eradication rather than remediation, and constitutional rights are chipped away in the process."

W27 [105] Wetterling: "I think we should...be teaching children how to talk to people, how to have respectful relationships, how that interaction can work, because then they'll know when somebody has bad intentions, when they're treating them in a way that makes them uncomfortable."

B27 [485] "Rebecca, a 44-year-old professor, was sexually assaulted by a date in college...She does not believe that, generally, the sex offender legislation of the past decade has provided any improvement of victim treatment or rights that she would define as 'meaningful'...stating: [486] 'It's complete political bullshit to say that these so-called tough-on-crime sex offender laws are supposed to help victims. If they [politicians] wanted to help victims, they'd address issues like free or affordable [counseling] services. . .access to safe housing, and comprehensive sex ed in the schools. They just pass these laws to get reelected.'"

[488] "When a family member or a loved one is the perpetrator, disclosure -- and what will come of it -- becomes more complicated for victims. Conflicting loyalties are a serious concern for many sexual assault victims and their families. Many victims know -- and even love -- their offenders...According to two CASAs [state-level Coalitions Against Sexual Assault], sex offender laws such as residency restrictions and juvenile offender legislation have inadvertently created a disincentive for victims to disclose.

"Because legal sanctions have been elevated in profound ways for almost every sexual offense category, some victims and their families are hesitating to disclose because they fear there are no intermediate interventions available.

"The West Coast CASA notes an increase in defense attorneys counselling their clients to refuse plea bargains and/or guilty [489] pleas 'because the stakes are so high.' (Personal interview, March 5, 2008)

"Amelia, a 28-year-old lawyer from a prominent family, was molested by her uncle when she was approximately 11. When her parents learned of the abuse, they put her in therapy but did not press charges or cease contact with the perpetrator. During her teens, she developed an eating disorder and was hospitalized. Because she refused to continue with therapy and her parents refused to cut her uncle out of her life, the juvenile courts ordered her into a residential treatment enter (RTC), where she lived for over a year with youth adjudicated for crimes ranging from armed robbery to drive-by shootings. Her placement in the RTC reinforced to her that she, not her abuser, did something wrong. Amelia explained her reaction to her family's handling of the abuse: 'I'm pretty sure what messed me up the most was the fact that my parents picked him over me...I didn't want his life to be over -- I just wanted hm to admit what he did was wrong.' (Personal interview, March 2, 2009)"

"[The victims interviewed] wanted some [490] control in deciding what sanctions to impose against their perpetrator, whether that be court-ordered therapy or prison.

"Tammy, a 41-year-old stay-at-home mother who was molested repeatedly by her father, explained her dissatisfaction with laws that attempt to restrict where a sex offender can live: 'I get why people care about where an offender lives. I've got kids and I care, but my offender lived in my house. No law was going to change that -- at least not one that was being enforced.' (Personal interview, February 10, 2008)

"Carol, a 63-year-old retiree, was sexually assaulted when she was 21, while on a date with a man who was considered in her hometown to be 'quite a catch.' (Personal interview, December 30, 2007)...[491] 'If that boy had been forced to list his whereabouts [on a public sex offender registry], I doubt anyone would have acted any differently towards him or his family. It's like because he didn't look like a rapist, he wasn't one.'

"All CASAs interviewed for this study observed that one of the most confounding impacts of sex offender laws is their power to misinform the public about the issue of sexual violence. As a result of these laws, several coalitions believe that the public is actually less safe from sexual abuse. The Southeast CASA noted, '[These laws] shift the focus from the majority of offenses to the minority.' (Personal interview, March 5, 2008)

"The Northeast CASA offered, 'If these sex offender laws have done anything they have confused the public by emphasizing the least common offender.' (Personal interview, March 21, 2008) The West Coast CASA stated, 'Vulnerability [to sexual abuse] is actually reinforced by these laws because it turns the attention [of the public and criminal justice system] towards one-percent of the crime.' (Personal interview, March 5, 2008)"

[49] "Some sex offender laws have served to reify a victim hierarchy -- that is, a spectrum of victim types categorized according to the sympathy (or lack thereof) each invokes from the public and policy makers. Laws named in honor of certain sexual assault victims inadvertently prioritize the suffering of one victim over the suffering of another (Wood, 2005). The victims for whom these laws have been named do not reflect the common story of victimization or victim type.

[500] "Some respondents reported well-intentioned boyfriends or fathers wanting to hunt down their attacker and beat him up. Although some victims appreciated the sentiment, none thought it would have benefited them."

[501] "The West Coast CASA offered that an enormous number [502] of resources are used for initiatives such as GPS tracking, with absolutely no corresponding increase in material support for victim services -- yet these are the very laws named for victims..."

[504] "The research findings presented here indicate that the host of sex offender laws passed in recent years have had lttle to no impact on the aforementioned victim- and CASA-identified needs...[V]ictims and CASAs consistently identified only one sex offender policy as having a positive impact on victims' needs: mandatory HIV testing. Other policies were viewed as negatively impacting victims and/or having no discernible victim impact.

"Several CASAs observed that sex offender laws have nothing to do with victims. They argued that victims may be used as a political tool to pass the law but in reality, few -- if any -- tangible benefits are realized by victims. Garland (2001) identified the naming of laws in honor of victims as 'the new political imperative. . .[These named laws] purport to honor them. . .though there is undoubtedly an element of exploitation here, too, as the individual's [505] name is used to fend off objections to measures that are often nothing more than retaliatory legislation passed for public display and political advantage.' (pg. 143)" [Emphasis added.]

"CASAs are invested in the outcomes these laws have on offenders, as well. According to several CASAs, these expensive laws have demonstrated little to no discernible impact on reducing recidivism...The West Coast CASA believes, 'These policies are about a sense of safety, not real safety.' (Personal interview, March 5, 2008)" [Emphases original.]

"It appears as though the fragile alliance between victims' rights groups and criminal justice actors has been reconstituted of late, as more and more of these groups have come together to publicly oppose sex offender legislative initiatives. Although at first blush it may seem strange that victim advocates, sexual assault coalitions, and some victims themselves would oppose laws ostensibly aimed at increasing public safety, they are actually best suited to know the real impact these laws have on the public, the criminal justice process, and sexual assault survivors. Fittingly, several respondents in this study advised against policies in which a zero-sum relationship is falsely created between victims and offenders."

[One of the best-ever TV series, in terms of its 'morality plays,' was The Twilight Zone . In one episode, set in the old west, a young man has been sentenced to hang for accidentally killing a young girl whilst 'driving' his horse-drawn wagon, drunk. Into the sheriff's hot, dusty office walks a smarmy character peddling rope for the event. Upon the latter's departure -- the sheriff having expressed some degree of sympathy for the condemned man -- the peddler inquires: "Sheriff, when they hang that boy tomorrow, who will you be weeping for -- the boy, or the poor little girl he butchered," to which the sheriff replies: "I have tears enough for both."]

C33 [25] "Few victims or persons who had known victims (13.3 percent) adopted a punitive approach towards child sexual offenders. About one in three (35.7 percent) called for counselling for victims, family members and offenders. There was little concern among this group about the need to amend legislation or how the helping services might be better organized or coordinated."

"Two in five of the professional briefs (38.6 percent) condemned the law as obstructive to the effective provision of care and harsh in its consequences for the victims of child sexual abuse. About half of these briefs (47.7 percent) recommended the treatment of victims, their families and offenders as an option that was preferable to the intrusion of the law."

21) First They Came for the Socialists...

W11 [Inmates at a treatment center for sex offenders sought a court injunction of a statute prohibiting them from having sexually oriented materials. The (New Jersey) District Court (Wolin, J.) held that the statute was 1) unconstitutionally overbroad and vague, and, 2) not rationally related to rehabilitation; permanent injunction ordered.]

[379] "The Court reiterates that it is sensitive to society's concern and interest in defending against and punishing sex offenders. Moreover, the Court is cognizant of the public outrage that the preliminary injunction created. The Court's disapprobation of this statute, however, flows from is duty to uphold [380] the Constitution, which protects all citizens, including convicted felons. History teaches us that when society stands idly by as the state violates the rights of one segment of the body politic, the rights of others will eventually be diminished. The flashback of Pastor Niemueller, a Protestant anti-Nazi who was imprisoned in a concentration camp during the war, exemplified the currency of this principle:

'First they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist;

'Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist;

'Then they came for the Jews and i did not seak out because I was not a Jew;

'Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.'"

L5 [560] "Of course, once constitutional protections are eroded for this extreme threat, they will likely not be resurrected. Rather, we should expect the new principles to be applied more broadly to other crimes du jour ."

[561] "So in practice, as in nearly all criminal law, these laws will be applied in such a manner that the powerless will disproportionately feel the brunt of them.

"And ultimately, disgust elicitors so change over time, but we will be left with the artifacts of the initial disgust reaction in the form of far-reaching laws and accepted penal practices that are both extreme and constitutionally suspect. As we have seen with the federal mandatory minimum sentencing legislation that stemmed from the 1980s drug panic (arguably a racialized disgust reaction in itself) a decade earlier, the outrageous becomes the norm in the wake of the emotional wave, and criminal law is fundamentally changed as a result. Indeed, rather than ceasing these practices after the current sex offender hysteria runs its course, it is more conceivable that preventive post-sentence detention, registration, and notification will be [562] applied to the next dangerous and/or disgusting class of offender to emerge in the national consciousness."

R7 [873] "It often takes a generation or two for reforms to move from unthinkable, to merely acceptable, to things that should be considered, to things that should be done."

--------------------------------------------------------------

* [FN103:] [citing "No Easy Answers":] ("To our knowledge, six other countries (Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Japan, and the United Kingdom) have sex offender registration laws, but the period required for registration is usually short and the information remains with the police. South Korea is the only country other than the United States that has community notification laws.")

** [from FN110:] Eric S. Janus, Failure to Protect: America's Sexual Predator Laws and the Rise of the Preventative State (2006), pgs. 5, 75.

*** [from FN22:] Pamela D. Schultz, Not Monsters: Analyzing the Stories of Child Molesters (2005). Schultz interviewed several pedophiles serving prison sentences, and presents their stories as well as her own with intelligence and sensitivity, framed by the concept of moral panic.

**** [FN29:] Zaniya Hanafi, The Monster in the Machine 217-218 (2000).

***** [from FN58:] René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. P. Gregory: 77 (1977).

@ [FN56:] John Q. Lafond, Preventing Sexual Violence: How Society Should Cope With Sex Offenders, 243 (2005).

@@ [from FN61:] The Toxic Offender, N.Y. Times, Mar. 4, 2007 at LI.

@@@ [from FN82:] Hans-Jrg Albrecht, Security Gaps: Responding to Dangerous Sex Offenders in the Federal Republic of Germany, 161 Fed. Sent'g Rep. 200 (2004).

@@@@ [FN28:] See John Hunter, Ph.D., Panel Presentation at the Dep't of Just. National Summit: Promoting Public Safety Through the Effective Management of Sex Offenders in the Community (Nov. 24-26, 1996).

@@@@@ [FN18:] Gregg Schoenfeld, Are the "Three Strikes You're Out" Laws Working?, Justicia (Judicial Process Commission, Rochester, NY), Nov. 1996, at 5-6.

# [from FN40:] Philip Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Conceptions of the Child Molester in Modern America (1998): 238.