| DanaC |
09-11-2009 02:45 PM |
From http://www.seattlepi.com/local/36800...fenders23.html
Quote:
They were neighbors, aged 13 and 10, who played together in a toy fort at the older boy's home. But one summer afternoon, the teen began talking about masturbation, then performed oral sex on the younger boy. He said they should do it again the next day. And they did.
Soon after, two sheriff's deputies arrived at the adolescent's Eastside home to read the seventh-grader his rights. Within two months, he was a registered sex offender, convicted of first-degree child rape.
"I didn't know that what I was doing was a crime -- that's not to minimize it -- I just didn't know," said Tyler, now 23, who agreed to talk with the Seattle P-I if identified only by his middle name.
"I was just some stupid kid growing up, who had an urge and he didn't know how to cope with it. Afterward, I always wondered, 'Is there something wrong with me? Is there some malfunction in my brain? Am I a pervert?' But it was just my inability to understand what I was feeling."
Since 1997, more than 3,500 children in the state -- some as young as 10, though on average about 14 -- have been charged and convicted as felony sex offenders, a mark that remains on their records forever, barring them from careers in medicine, teaching or a host of other professions that serve the vulnerable. It also frightens many into under-the-radar housing arrangements to avoid landlords who require background checks.
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and this from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/ma...uvenile-t.html
Quote:
Sex-offender therapy for juveniles was a new field in the 1980s, and Longo, like other therapists, was basing his practices on what he knew: the adult sex-offender-treatment models. “It’s where the literature was,” Longo, a founder of the international Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, told me not long ago. “It’s what we’d been doing.”
As it turns out, he went on to say, “much of it was wrong.” There is no proof that what Longo calls the “trickle-down phenomenon” of using adult sex-offender treatments on juveniles is effective. Adult models, he notes, don’t account for adolescent development and how family and environment affect children’s behavior. Also, research over the past decade has shown that juveniles who commit sex offenses are in several ways very different from adult sex offenders. As one expert put it, “Kids are not short adults.”
That’s not to say that juvenile sexual offenses aren’t a serious problem. Juveniles account for about one-quarter of the sex offenses in the U.S. Though forcible rapes, the most serious of juvenile sex offenses, have declined since 1997, court cases for other juvenile sex offenses have risen. David Finkelhor, the director of Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, and others argue, however, that those statistics largely reflect increased reporting of juvenile sex offenses and adjudications of less serious offenses. “We are paying attention to inappropriate sexual behavior that juveniles have engaged in for generations,” he said.
....
Longo and other experts have increasingly advocated for a less punitive approach. Over the past decade, however, public policy has largely moved in the opposite direction. Courts have handed down longer sentences to juveniles for sex offenses, while some states have created tougher probation requirements and, most significant, lumped adolescents with adults in sex-offender legislation.
...
Community notification makes people feel protected — who wouldn’t want to know if a sex offender lives next door? But studies have yet to prove that the law does, in fact, improve public safety. Meanwhile, when applied to youths, the laws undercut a central tenet of the juvenile justice system. Since juvenile courts were created more than 100 years ago, youths’ records have, with exceptions in some states, been sealed and kept out of the public’s hands. The theory is that children are less responsible for their actions, and thus less blameworthy, than adults and more amenable to rehabilitation. But by publishing their photographs and addresses on the Internet, community notification suggests that juveniles with sex offenses are in a separate, distinct category from other adolescents in the juvenile justice system — more fixed in their traits and more dangerous to the public. It suggests, in other words, that they are more like adult sex offenders than they are like kids.
...
Last year, an eighth grader at a Delaware middle school arrived one morning to find kids in the hallway pointing at him and snickering. At first, the boy, Johnnie, who asked me protect his privacy by identifying him by a friend’s nickname for him, was confused. He thought it might be because of his new haircut. Then one kid called him a rapist. Another jeered, “Hey, aren’t you a sex offender?” One teenage boy threatened to beat him up.
Four years earlier, when Johnnie was 11, he put his hand on his 4-year-old half-sister’s vagina over her underwear. And then several months later, he told her to perform oral sex on him, which she did. When Johnnie’s mother found out, she called the police. She may have felt she could no longer control Johnnie, who, according to his grandmother, both adored his sister (he made pancakes and snowmen for her) and tormented her (he punched and bullied her). Perhaps his mother also worried that her son might abuse other children. It’s hard to know what went through her mind that day, because she never explained it to Johnnie or to her own mother, with whom Johnnie eventually went to live. And she did not return my phone calls.
Johnnie, who has sandy-colored hair and freckles, did not resort to violence or use a weapon, according to police records, and when a detective interviewed him, the fourth grader admitted what he’d done. Soon after, Johnnie was sentenced to a residential juvenile-sex-offender program, where he spent 16 months. By the time he was released, he was considered a role model in his program, according to records that Johnnie’s therapist, Marc Felizzi, of the Delaware Guidance Services, received from the facility. His mother, though, had little interest in reuniting the family, so Johnnie bounced from a foster home to his uncle’s before going to live with his grandmother and then, ultimately, his father.
It was just two months after starting at a new school near his grandmother’s house that Johnnie’s childhood offense became the gossip of the hallways. It wasn’t entirely clear how kids found out. Johnnie heard that the mother of a girl to whom he’d written a love note discovered him on the Delaware Sex Offender Central Registry Web site. The mother may have typed in Johnnie’s last name. Or she may have been scanning her ZIP code for local sex offenders. In any case, she found him. And there on the Internet was a photo of Johnnie when he was 11, along with his address, birth date, height and weight at the time of his offense. Below that were two police charges: one was a misdemeanor for the touching over his sister’s underwear; the other was a felony for engaging his sister in oral sex, which because it involved mouth-to-genital contact was charged as “rape second degree.”
In dozens of interviews, therapists, lawyers, teenagers and their parents told me similar stories of juveniles who, after being discovered on a sex-offender registry, have been ostracized by their peers and neighbors, kicked out of extracurricular activities or physically threatened by classmates. Experts worry that these experiences stigmatize adolescents and undermine the goals of rehabilitation. “The whole world knows you did this bad thing,” notes Elizabeth Letourneau, an associate psychology professor at the Medical University of South Carolina and an expert on juveniles with sex offenses. “You could go to treatment for five years; you could be as straight as an arrow; but the message continues to be: You are a bad person. How does that affect your self-image? How does that affect your ability to improve your behaviors?”
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Just because we haven't caught the news stories doesn't mean they aren't there. And not all incidents make the news. Sex crimes in adults are on the wane. Juvenile offenders are increasing. Some of that may be an actual increase, but some of it may be classifyling as a crime an instance where the child didn't know or understand boundaries. Perhaps the part of sean's post which you considered insincere and dishonest may actually have some foundation. I'm not suggesting that the young lad who abused his little sister didn't need teaching those boundaries; nor am I saying it wasn't abuse. But I am suggesting that he may have been engaging in sexual curiosity; the two young lads who'd been friends for years, though there was an age gap, may have been experimenting. I'm not even suggesting that classifying these as assult is wrong: but I think it does show that there may be some basis for sean's claim that child sexuality is in itself deemed a problem, even if there is no 'abuse'. You don't need to agree with him. But I think it's unfair to take that as an indication of any lack of sincerity on his part. |
