Rethinking Juvenile Sex Offenders

Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine cover story about juvenile sex offenders titled “How Can You Distinguish a Budding Pedophile From a Kid With Real Boundary Problems?” offers an interesting (and uncharacteristically non-exploitative) introduction to the topic, even as it failed to touch its titular question.

The author devotes much of the article to describing the current state of on line sex offender registries; publicly accessible repositories of photos, names, descriptions of offenses, and current street addresses for those listed, and their potential impact for both offender and community (which is clearly negative for the former, and completely unknown in terms of protective effects for the latter). These registries represent the government’s attempt to protect us by building higher and wider walls with “offenders” on one side and “victims, family, and community” on the other. These registries constitute virtually all public discussion about sexual offenders.

The problem with this approach, what makes it completely futile in my opinion, is that these are false distinctions. We are not, in fact, a society easily divided into “offenders” and “victims, family, and community”. Even from a strictly statistical perspective this distinction doesn’t hold: Many, but not all, “offenders” are also victims of sexual abuse. And, as the Times article itself reports, between 80 and 90 percent of offenses are committed by people known or related to the victim, in other words members of their family or community We can build walls as high and wide as we like, but those walls don’t weed out bad seeds waiting to grow, and worse, they ostracize and isolate offenders which only puts them at greater risk of both offending and being offended against.

Given this, wouldn’t a more effective approach be to include everyone in the solution? This isn’t a new idea (it’s the basis of Circles of Support and Accountability models of rehabilitation, to offer one example). And by the end of the Times article there is a brief mention of attempts to integrate people into their communities, rather than further marginalize them and of one form of treatment, referred to as “multisystemic therapy” which is showing some success.

The title of the article points to the delicate and difficult distinctions between sexual problems and sexual pathology and between behaviors we think of as bad, and that we think of as dangerous. The fact that this distinction is hardly discussed in the article indicates how problematic it really is. Those walls that we build may make ‘us’ feel safe, and equally important, different from ‘them’, but they block us from seeing that they were once us and that some of us are like them.

Read more - New York Times Magazine: Can You Distinguish a Budding Pedophile From a Kid With Real Boundary Problems?