I am feeling hopeful for minors on the Sex Offender Registry these days. Things seem to be turning in favor removing them from the registry, especially very young “offenders” who never should’ve been placed on it to begin with. The Lincoln Journal Star’s editorial board a couple days ago published a piece on a thirteen-year-old boy whose Nebraska-based family filed a lawsuit on behalf of the boy, who was only eleven when he was charged and convicted of a sex offense, for which he was forced to register as a sex offender. The family won their lawsuit, and the editorial staff approves.
Good article by Sarah Morehead on Friendly Atheist
Yesterday Sarah Morehead made a guest post on the Friendly Atheist site, called Sex Offenders Can Be Nice Guys: How Making Jared Fogle a Monster Encourages Abusers. In the article, which is a plea for sane treatment of sex offenders by society, she says:
Cheering the abuse of sex offenders may feel good in the moment — it’s the only thing we feel like we can do in the face of feeling utterly helpless — but it dehumanizes offenders into monsters deserving of violence, which (albeit unintentionally) creates a perfect scenario for future sex offenders to pluck future victims. After all, if offenders act like “nice guys,” they won’t risk being seen as “monsters” like priests, or Jared Fogle, or Jerry Sandusky, and their victims (and their families) will be summarily dismissed and disbelieved.
I think she makes a very good point. The article is not an easy read, but it’s well worth reading.
And another good one from Psychology Today
It warms my heart to see the psychological community finally addressing pedophilia as it should have all along: as a psychological problem deserving of sympathy rather than as a social taboo deserving of shame and stigmatization. All I can say is, it’s about dang time. And here is another good article from the preeminent publication on mental issues, Psychology Today. Written by Dr. Robert T. Muller, it’s called Non-Offending Pedophiles Suffer from Isolation. It mentions the German program Prevention Project Dunkelfeld, which should serve as a model for other such programs, and quotes the wonderful Elizabeth Letourneau.
Another solid VICE article
VICE has been on a roll over the last few months when it comes to fair-minded pieces on pedophilia. Well, here’s another one: I Asked a Leading Expert on Paedophilia to Explain My Former Headmaster, written by Charlie Braithwaite. My friend Ethan Edwards (co-founder of Virtuous Pedophiles) was interviewed for it, as was the esteemed Dr. James Cantor.
Good New Yorker article on juvenile offenders
I just finished reading this incredible article written by Sarah Stillman and published in The New Yorker called The List: When juveniles are found guilty of sexual misconduct, the sex-offender registry can be a life sentence. It’s quite long, but it’s an emotional roller coaster. I highly recommend it.
Article of relevance to us on Kotaku
Gawker Media site Kotaku just published a long article called The Ugly New Front In The Neverending Video Game Culture War. At first that may not seem relevant to readers of this blog, but the article addresses one of the more notable victims of the raging vehemence of these disgruntled gamers, Alison Rapp. Apparently many of them have decided that Rapp, an employee of Nintendo, is responsible for censoring some of the Japanese games retooled for American audiences, and because of that they have dug up every bit of dirt they possibly could on Rapp, including a college essay she wrote called Speech We Hate: An Argument for the Cessation of International Pressure on Japan to Strengthen Its Anti-Child Pornography Laws, in which Rapp argues that Japan’s culture of being more open to child pornography, specifically the type of cartoon pornography known as lolicon, is too poorly understood by Westerners, and that our tendency to pressure Japan into conforming with our laws and taboos is disturbingly imperialistic. Make no mistake: Rapp is no fan of child sexual abuse and certainly thinks there should be strong laws in place to punish such offenders. But she also recognizes that Japan’s extremely low rate of hands-on sex crimes owes a lot to the fact that the Japanese have plenty of outlets for their more taboo sexual desires like pedophilia. I absolutely agree with Rapp on this. The proof is in the pudding.
This case just made my point for me
Two days ago an article came out in the the British newspaper The Guardian called Rotherham woman offered safe haven to troubled girls – then pimped them out. It explains how one woman, Karen MacGregor, used her youth support organization KinKids to take in teenage girls who were homeless, but then she would get the girls drunk and sell them to men for sex. Moreover, as the article says, “MacGregor was an energetic, high-profile campaigner on behalf of abused children . . .”
In this post I said it was unfair to always treat non-offending pedophiles as if they were potentially guilty, as Glori Meldrum, founder and head of the advocacy group Little Warriors, seems to want to do. I then pointed out how anyone could potentially be an offender, including someone like Meldrum herself:
It’s true that you ultimately can’t prove that we have never done anything to kids, but that can be said of anyone, even Meldrum. Who’s to say she hasn’t used her organization as a front to cover her own abuse of children? Obviously I don’t believe this, and I doubt anyone else does either, but that’s the thing: often the real hardcore abusers turn out to be those we least suspect, people in positions of authority who work regularly with kids. And being the founder of an anti-child abuse organization, what a perfect cover it would be for her! I mean, who would ever suspect someone like that, right?
And there you have it. Now we know that just such a person has been arrested for doing exactly that. Let this be a lesson: don’t single out self-confessed non-offending pedophiles as potentially more guilty than anyone else. Remember, most child sex offenders aren’t actually pedophiles anyway, and there is no way to know in the current environment how many pedophiles (people with a primary or exclusive attraction to children) are actually sex offenders. Meanwhile, the worst offenders are often the people you least suspect.
