Minnesota Sex offender program is unconstitutional

Eventually the courts will reach that judgment about what is essentially indefinite incarceration.

What do you call a forced in-patient treatment program that has never successfully treated and released a patient?

Either it is a complete and utter failure, or you call it what it really is -- a prison.

That is the problem that Minnesota faces. It has 605 sex offender inmates who have no pending charges or convictions.

They are not on probation. In fact, all of these people have already been convicted and have served their debts to society.

However, some Minnesotans feel that is not enough. Rather, Minnesota is holding them for what they might do.

While both state and federal courts have called this dubious decision constitutional, they have done so only because it is "treatment."

Otherwise, the program would be considered unconstitutional. Which takes me back to my initial point.

If there has been no successful treatment, then it is nothing but incarceration.

You doubt me?

Minnesota started its Sex Offender Treatment Program in 1994. The number of inmates is growing by about 50 a year.

They are held at the Minnesota Security Hospital in St. Peter and at a facility in Moose Lake. However, both are running out of space.

St. Peter is looking to expand its facility by an additional 55 beds, while Moose Lake is seeking to expand by some 400 beds. At a cost of about $96,000 per inmate per year, this is not a cheap proposition.

And how successful has the treatment been? Not one person forced into the Sex Offender Treatment Program has ever been released.

I repeat: Not one!

As we speak, one man is trying to be the first person ever released from the program.

Admittedly, he has done some horrible things, but he has been held for decades and has done everything -- everything -- asked of him.

However, while the Special Review Board may go along with the release, state Human Services Commissioner Lucinda Jesson opposes the release. Frankly, she is a politician, and nobody would want an albatross like this around their neck if things went south.

But that is the ultimate problem. Again, these convicts have done some pretty terrible things.

As a result, the standard refrains seem to be "lock 'em up and throw away the key" or "shoot 'em out of a cannon." Of course, these arguments are irrelevant to the point at hand.

It is not about what one should do to those who commit these types of crimes in the first place.

If Minnesota thinks they should never see the light of day, the Legislature should consider that issue. This is about what we as a society should do once people have fulfilled their obligations.

If the state continues to do as it has done with this program for 16 years, the courts will see it for what it is: a prison.

When that happens, this entire system will be justifiably shut down.

Then what do we do?

Jack Rice is a criminal defense attorney , former prosecutor and former CIA officer. He also is the former host of the "Jack Rice Show" on WCCO Radio.

Are Sexual Offense Laws Too Harsh? And Do They Work?

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- University at Buffalo Law School Professor Charles Patrick Ewing has added to his series of critically acclaimed books on some of the most unsavory but attention-grabbing aspects of the law, this time with a book questioning the legal logic and effectiveness of the country's increasingly harsh sex offense laws.

In "Justice Perverted," Ewing examines what he calls "radically reshaped" laws dealing with the country's sex offenders. These laws include ordering sex offenders to register with authorities, punishment for people possessing child pornography that "dwarfs" sentences for more violent crimes, including murder, and a federal law that requires a minimum 10-year prison sentence for those using the Internet to lure minors for sex.

All these dramatic changes in sex offender laws have come about at least partly from input from the fields of psychology, psychiatry and the social sciences, according to Ewing, whose extensive writing credits include several books on forensic psychology, which is the application of psychological principles and methods to legal issues, and how they play out in the courtroom. And Ewing's research and experience in many trials -- both nationally notorious as well as obscure -- conclude that enforcement and administration of many of these significantly more restrictive sex offense laws rely heavily the opinions of mental-health professionals.

Working from that conclusion, Ewing takes on an original and intellectually courageous direction of answering questions about and evaluating this established legal environment:

Are these laws supported by empirical evidence, or even by well-reasoned psychological theories? Do these laws actually work? Are mental health professionals capable of reliably determining an offender's future behavior, and how best to manage it?

"All of these laws are purportedly designed to enhance public safety by reducing the incidence of sexual offending," says Ewing, whose work in forensic psychology has involved using psychology to understand legal issues such as insanity, competence to stand trial and future danger. "Not only is there no evidence that these laws have had their intended effect, but there is some evidence that some of them may in fact lead to an increased threat to society.

"The economic costs of these laws are staggering and seem indefensible at a time when other valued government programs are being cut to avoid fiscal disaster," says Ewing. "There can be little doubt that sexual offenses bring great harm to individuals and society or that we should do all that we can reasonably do to prevent them from occurring. The question is what is reasonable. It is neither reasonable nor responsible to spend billions of taxpayers' dollars on laws with no proven value."

The questions Ewing takes on in "Justice Perverted" go beyond the arcane procedures of the nation's courtrooms to issues of justice and fair treatment of all parties. Are experts capable of providing effective treatment for sex offenders, Ewing asks, for example, treatment that actually reduces the likelihood that an identified sex offender will repeat a similar offense?

Ewing is a nationally known expert on the criminal mind, a SUNY Distinguished Service Professor who has taught at the UB Law School for 25 years. He is an expert witness who has testified or been closely involved on some of the most celebrated and often grisly criminal cases in the country.

Ewing's past accomplishments have earned him a reputation for capturing the world of courtroom drama in books both scholarly and captivating. His "Insanity, Murder, Madness and the Law" took readers inside the minds of some of the nation's most heinous murderers, including David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy and Andrea Yates.

His previous book, "Trials of a Forensic Psychologist," was another example of Ewing's talent to produce a work of scholarship that is informative and still retains the ability to be darkly entertaining.

"Justice Perverted" has already earned impressive kudos from law and university professionals.

"A remarkable, eye-opener of a book. Professor Ewing brings to this highly controversial subject his knowledge as both a law professor and as a practicing forensic mental health expert," according to Alan M. Goldstein, a board certified forensic psychologist and professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

"'Justice Perverted' is informative, readable and should be required reading for attorneys, judges and forensic psychologists and psychiatrists working in this area. Ewing's specific recommendations for public policy reform should make all of us re-think our immediate 'gut reaction' as to how those who commit these horrific crimes should be treated."

"This book is a breath of fresh air," says Michael L. Perlin, professor of law, director of the International Mental Disability Law Reform Project and director of the Online Mental Disability Law Program, New York Law School.

"It debunks the media-driven frenzy of fear, hate mongering and utterly irrational laws that do far more harm than good. Professor Ewing writes thoughtfully, carefully and persuasively. This book should be read by all who care about -- and think about -- this topic."

Good riddance to the society of suspects

Ed: Is it possible the Brits are regaining a bit of sanity? After several decades of a spirited competition with the U.S. to see who could achieve an Orwellian fantasy soonest, it appears that there is growing concern for the costs it has exacted upon society. It would seem that they are somewhat less prone to having their motives impugned by speaking up against the witch hunt than are those of us in the States, where to decry an emerging police state is still regarded with suspicion.

You don't build a Big Society on the back of mutinous, resentful volunteers, nor in a climate in which all are treated with suspicion

"All men are rapists" was the pernicious slogan of radical feminists in the 1970s. "All adults are paedophiles" has been the governing rule of authority in the past decade. The two assertions are as false as each other and just as damaging, for they fill people with anger, fear and corrosive suspicion.

Society can't function without trust. Nor can individuals. As the sociologist Niklas Luhmann reminded us: "A complete absence of trust would prevent [one] even getting up in the morning." We generally assume that the commuter standing next to us on the platform won't push us in front of the train, or that the shopkeeper on the corner will give us the right change. A few paranoiacs have acute suspicion as their default, but most of us are more prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to others than we realise.

We might be scared, in the abstract, of a paedophile taking advantage of our child, but do we really think that the nice mother of our son's playmate is going to put her hand down his pants during a school trip? Of course not. So why should it ever have been necessary for her to undergo an expensive and intrusive Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check before she was allowed to give up her free time to help supervise the class on the bus?

It is deeply insulting to treat people as potential paedophiles when, out of sheer goodness, they want to help others. At the moment, anyone who has contact with children, even just helping out with football club or arranging the flowers in a cathedral, has to go through the CRB procedure. It was one of the most ill-thought-out and socially damaging laws that the last government brought in. Now, thankfully, the Coalition's Protection of Freedoms Bill will lift the requirement for all but those with "close or regular" contact, taking more than four million volunteers out of the net.

At the crudest level, it has hurt the very people it was supposed to protect. Adults have been deterred from volunteering, not because they have convictions for kiddy-fiddling but because they don't. The last thing most adults want to do with kiddies is fiddle with them. The assumption that they might even consider it makes them understandably livid. Why should they volunteer if they are going to be treated like dirt?

As a result, activities for children have been closing down all over the country for lack of volunteers. Who suffers? The budding football players and the children struggling with their reading. Real paedophiles can find other ways to ensnare their victims.

Even those volunteers who have obediently undergone their checks are left with a sense of grievance. A government which was asking us all to do more for others (yes, the last one was keen on it too) was at the same time impugning our motives as soon as we answered the call. You don't build a Big Society on the back of mutinous, resentful volunteers.

Nor do you build it in a climate in which we are all encouraged to treat each other with suspicion. The message the CRB checks have been sending is that we can never be too careful. That public-spirited dad who gives up his Saturday mornings for soccer coaching could be another Ian Huntley. But how many men – let alone women – really have sexual designs on children? Very, very few.

The reason child murders and sexual attacks get so much news coverage when they happen is precisely because they are so rare. To treat the innocent 99 per cent of us as potential Ian Huntleys is as grossly disproportionate as putting handcuffs on everyone who enters a bank in case they plan to rob it.

In fact, it's even worse. For this unjustified paranoia is infecting our children. They are growing up to believe that most adults are dangerous and that the world is unsafe for them. Of course they should be warned not to accept sweeties from strangers or to get into a car with someone they don't know, but beyond that, why should we poison their childhood with unnecessary fear? Only a vanishingly small minority of adults want to hurt them; all the rest of us are benign.

The trouble is that many of their parents have become infected too. That makes blameless adults scared of showing kindness to other people's children. Rush to help a child who has grazed his knee near you in the park and the mother is likely to advance on you, scowling. Smile at a cute little toddler and her father may misinterpret your motives. As a result, the paranoia becomes self-reinforcing: children encounter fewer acts of compassion from adults who aren't in their family, so they are even more inclined to view strangers as dangers.

Then, as they grow up, they suddenly become independent and find themselves exposed to far greater perils. A 16-year-old girl is much more likely to be sexually assaulted than a six-year-old one, simply because most men fancy post-pubescent, not pre-pubescent, females. And she is also much more vulnerable: six-year-olds don't walk back from the bus stop on their own or get inadvisedly drunk at a party. These are the risks we should be warning our girls against.

Instead, we are obsessed with paedophilia. Do we really want to live in a society where a teacher can't sit a five-year-old on her knee and give him a cuddle when he's crying? Do we really want to live in a Crucible-like climate in which fingers of suspicion are pointed at wholly innocent people – and by government, this time, not even teenage girls? We were shocked by the anti-Communist hysteria which swept 1950s America, yet we failed to prevent the anti-paedophile hysteria taking root in our own country.

This climate is really bad for adults and children alike. All the international studies show that countries with high levels of social trust tend to have lower crime and happier, more engaged citizens. And the more people engage, the more they come to understand that most strangers are as benevolent as they are. Yet the proportion of Britons agreeing that "most people can be trusted" has halved since the 1950s, and young people are the most mistrustful of all.

It's not a good idea to be completely credulous, but a default position of trust tempered by common sense is all we need to rub along together well. That was how my generation saw adults when we were children. Most of them meant well; a few were sadistic and a few were lecherous. We knew who the sadists and the pervs were, and we kept clear of them. You need to learn to discern; it's a useful skill for adulthood. It's a lot better than relying on a piece of paper, which might anyway clear a paedo who has never been caught by the police.

Thank goodness ministers have at last seen sense. Not much the Government does these days is popular. It can't spend any more and most of its cuts cause pain. But here is one initiative which saves money, reduces bureaucracy and – most importantly – could make a real difference to our lives. It deserves an unqualified cheer.

m.sieghart@independent.co.uk

Moral Panics – Particularly Those Concerning Children – Always Serve Some Hidden Purpose

Judith Warner, New York Times
The Myth of Lost Innocence

At a journalism conference a couple of years ago, I met Linda Perlstein, the author of “Not Much Just Chillin’: The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers.” This meeting occurred right in the middle of the “rainbow party” craze – that is to say, the media frenzy around the alleged oral activities of oversexed (and lipsticked) tweens.

Rainbow parties hadn’t actually played any part in Perlstein’s book. But that, she told me then, hadn’t stopped TV producers – representing “Oprah,” from “The Dr. Phil Show,” from a Katie Couric special – from calling and cajoling her to come on their shows to talk about them.

“I’d say, ‘No one is doing that,’” she told me when I called her this week to refresh my memory of her story. “Even the sluttiest kids I knew, when I told them about that said, ‘Ewww. No one does that.’ This really prurient stuff was being way overblown.

“Believe me, I wanted to be on ‘Oprah.’ I had a book to sell. I’d say, ‘There’s lots of stuff to talk about. Stuff that really should be talked about, that’s more nuanced and complex.’ They were like ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’”

I found myself thinking about Perlstein’s media follies this week, when I read Tara Parker-Pope’s article “The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity” in Science Times on Tuesday. For me it not only raised the issue of myth and reality (teens are, in truth, having sex less and later than they did a decade or two ago), but also brought to mind the stories that we tell and what people are willing to hear.

Two sociologists in Philadelphia, Kathleen A. Bogle, of La Salle University, and Maria Kefalas, of St. Joseph’s University, both specialists in teen sexual behavior, told Parker-Pope that they’d had to struggle mightily to get people out of their “moral panic” mindset, and make them understand that teens are not “in a downward spiral” or “out of control.”

“They just don’t believe you. You might as well be telling them the earth is flat,” Kefalas told me when I called to follow up with her this week.

This reminded me of how the developmental psychologist Joseph Mahoney – and others – have had to fight to convince people that another much-discussed creature of our time, the Overscheduled Child, isn’t as common or as stressed-out or even as busy as we commonly think. (I myself didn’t believe him at first, and wasn’t too nice about it.) It reminded me, too, of the Boy Crisis – how hard it has been for scholars who have taken a hard look at the boy/girl achievement numbers to counter the popular wisdom that boys are falling behind. And it reminded me of the Overmedicated Child, that particular trope of child corruption, soul theft and performance pressure that has for so long fascinated me.

In each of these examples, real problems – that some girls are engaging in too-young, risky and degrading sex, that some children are being stressed excessively and stifled by nonstop structure, that some boys (poor and minority boys) are doing badly in school, that some children are getting really reckless mental health services – are grossly simplified and, via the magical thinking of dogma and ideology, are elevated to the level of myth. Real complexities and nuances – details concerning exactly which children are suffering, flailing or failing, and in what numbers, and how and why, and what we can do about it – are lost.

That’s no accident. After all, moral panics – particularly those concerning children – always serve some hidden purpose. “Modern ideas about the innocent child have long been projections of adult needs and frustrations,” Gary Cross, a professor of modern history at Penn State University, writes in his 2004 book, “The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture.” “In the final analysis, modern innocence has let adults evade the consequences of their own contradictory lives.”

All the examples of child myth-making that I’ve mentioned here have to do, at base, with the perceived corruption of childhood, the loss of some kind of “natural” innocence. When they depart from kernels of reality to rise to the level of myth, they are, I believe, largely projections that enable adults to evade things. Specifically, the overblown focus on messed-up kids affords parents the possibility of avoiding looking inward and taking responsibility for the highly complex problems of everyday life.

In the case of the allegedly lascivious Lolitas, Kefalas sees this flight from reality very clearly: “People don’t want to hear about the economic context, the social context” to young teen sexual activity and teen pregnancy, she told me. “For a 14-year-old to be having sex it’s usually a symptom of a kid who’s really broken and really hurt. Those who are having sex without contraception are a distinct set: they’re poor, from single-parent households, doing poorly in school, have low self-esteem. Teen pregnancy is so high in America compared to other places not just because of access to contraception but because we have a lot of poverty. But Americans don’t want to see themselves as a poor society. They want to make a moral argument: if only teens had better values.”

Certain kinds of children have certain kinds of vulnerabilities that make them particularly susceptible to the toxic elements of our culture. This is true of those who do or don’t fall victim to stress and anxiety, and it’s true of those who do or don’t engage in too-early, too-risky sex. Certain kinds of policies can help children. (Abstinence-only sexual education clearly does not help in combating teen pregnancy.) Certain kinds of parenting can help or hurt, too.

Having a family life that’s so atomized and disconnected that children have the physical and emotional space to upload nude pictures of themselves onto the Internet, and lack the self-esteem and self-respect to know better is obviously undesirable. Being a stressed and frantic, frazzled and depressed parent is harmful, too. (“We are a mess,” Suniya Luthar, the Columbia University psychologist, once told me, explaining why she saw overscheduling as a symptom rather than a cause of family distress. “We are the ones running around like freaking chickens without a head…. It’s the situation where the captain of the ship has lost control.”)

If we parents hadn’t created a world this high-pressured, if we hadn’t, for decades, voted in policymakers who stripped away regulations that protected us, we wouldn’t be so certain that other parents are “drugging” their kids to make them more high-performing, and we wouldn’t have to be so fearful of the influence of Big Pharma.

Luthar is right: we – the adults in this society – are “a mess.” I think it’s time to stop projecting our dysfunction onto our children.

Revisit Jessica's Law

Editorial From the Los Angeles Times

The sex-offender statute is unaffordable and doesn't improve safety. If it can't be dropped, it should be rewritten.

Of all the ill-considered ballot initiatives approved by California voters over the years, few can match Jessica's Law for sheer self-destructiveness. The measure, billed as a way to protect children from sexual predators when it appeared on the ballot in 2006 as Proposition 83, is worsening the yawning state budget gap amid zero evidence that it's protecting anyone -- in fact, according to a state panel, it may be threatening public safety.

This page warned that the initiative would be an expensive mistake, but that didn't stop 70% of voters from approving it. That may be because sexual predators are nobody's idea of a good neighbor, and voters thought that forcing sex offenders to wear GPS tracking devices for life and forbidding them to live within 2,000 feet of schools and parks would keep them at bay. What they didn't consider were cost and practicality.

Among its many failings, the measure doesn't distinguish between criminals who are at high risk of re-offending and those who aren't. That means a teenager convicted of having sex with his underage girlfriend, as just one example, is subject to GPS monitoring and residence restrictions for the rest of his life, even if he never commits another crime. It also fails to specify what agency is responsible for monitoring those thousands of former inmates, or to devote money to pay for it.

State corrections officials announced Jan. 12 that they are now monitoring all 6,622 paroled sex offenders with GPS devices, after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger set aside $106 million in last year's budget for the program. Where the state will come up with the money while facing a $42-billion shortfall over the next 18 months is an open question. What's more, the state will monitor sex offenders only for as long as they remain on parole -- after that, it's up to municipal agencies, none of which have the staff, equipment or spare funding to do the job.

The expense might be worthwhile if Jessica's Law were actually reducing sex crimes. Yet research has found no connection between where a sex offender lives and the likelihood that he'll offend again, nor is there any evidence that GPS monitoring lowers recidivism. Further, it's very hard for parolees to find homes that aren't near schools or parks, leading to a 12-fold increase in the number of homeless sex offenders since the law was passed in 2006. A lack of stable housing only increases the odds that an ex-con will return to crime -- or as the state Sex Offender Management Board put it in a report Tuesday: "Residency restrictions that preclude or eliminate appropriate offender housing can threaten public safety instead of enhancing it."

Lawmakers rarely show the courage to fix problems created by get-tough-on-crime voter initiatives, but there will never be a better time to improve Jessica's Law. The state budget and the prison system are in crisis and must be reinvented, and amending this law -- which the Legislature can do with a two-thirds vote -- would benefit them both. Ideally, the measure should be overturned, but at a minimum the Legislature should create a review process that allows low-risk offenders to escape the residency and monitoring rules. California simply can't afford to pay more to be less safe.

Esther Rantzen: Fear of paedophiles is harming children

'Now people are treating abuse as if it goes on behind every tree.'



Esther Rantzen has admitted she blames herself for raising fears of paedophiles to such a degree that adults are now scared to help crying children.

The veteran broadcaster, who founded the counselling service ChildLine, warned that young people are now being harmed by the widespread suspicion that anyone who has contact with children could be a child abuser.

Her fears were confirmed by an experiment she helped conduct in a busy shopping centre, which found that 99 per cent of adults chose to walk on by rather than going to the assistance of two children who looked lost and distressed.

Even the handful who did stop admitted they were worried that people would assume they were trying to abduct the children.

This comes amid growing concern that in the wake of high-profile cases such as the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and the Soham murders, all adults are now viewed as paedophiles unless they can prove themselves innocent.

There are now no men under 25 teaching in state-run nurseries, such is the fear of being branded a child molester, while from next year 11.3 million adults will have to have their backgrounds checked by the Independent Safeguarding Authority before they can work or volunteer with under-16s.

Even malicious allegations made against teachers or priests must now be kept on file until they retire, while council officers are questioning the motives of any lone adults who walk through a public park.

Rantzen asked of the results of the test, to be shown on TV tonight: "What does that say about our attitude to children now? Have we unwittingly put up barriers protecting ourselves, but harming them?

"It seems to me that many adults may now actually be putting children at risk, because we are so afraid someone will suspect us of having sinister motives if we help them.

"I blame myself for a lot of this. Thirty years ago most people didn't realise that abuse ever happened, so abusers just got away with it. But in 1986 we made a programme called Childwatch in which we pointed out that abuse is far more common than most people realise, but of course it's a secret crime, it happens mainly in children' homes, within the family.

"Now people are treating abuse as if it goes on behind every tree."

She added: "The tragedy is there are people who hurt children, and we must protect them against pain and abuse. But unless we hang on to our common sense the whole of child protection is going to suffer, so many of these rules and attitudes are designed to keep adults safe, to keep jobs safe, to keep organisations safe, to keep councils safe. Our priority should be to keep children safe."

In the experiment, to be shown on ITV1's Tonight programme, two child actors were left alone in a London shopping mall looking upset while hidden cameras were set up to observe how many people offered them assistance.

A total of 1,817 people walked past the children, a seven-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy, but only five did something to help.

Almost 500 people walked past the boy before one of them informed the shopping centre manager about his plight, and more than 100 ignored the girl before one of them stopped to ask if she was OK.

In addition, the five adults who did stop to help all admitted they had been worried their would be seen as suspicious.

Mark Williams Thomas, a child protection expert and former policeman, said: "It does concern me that no member of the public is even asking this child are they OK. They actually had to walk around them."

DEFINING "CHILD": Trying To Have It Both Ways

I particularly liked this statement which appeared as a comment to an online review of the movie "Doubt".

"It is always dangerous to combine “children” with “underage” as those are two different categories. One is a metaphysical reality and the other is a legal line drawn by politicians. And today, by defining teens as “children” the State has begun waging a war on teens who are now incarcerated as ’sex offenders’ for a romp in the back of the Chevy. Surely this is Big Government run amok and it doesn’t help when social conservatives push this exaggerated hysteria which is then used to prop up massive intrusions into family life.

These laws are removing parental power over their children and destroying family life. Because conservatives (and even some libertarians) promote this fear they are helping erect an edifice with immense powers over families.

While so-called liberals are defined as “anti-family” surely the Big Government intrusion into family life is even more anti-family. And need I point out that if the plot were different, but with the same characters, this review would be very different.

If the teenage boy in the film had committed a violent crime, and the family was claiming he was just a “mere child” the reviewer, I suspect would be shreiking that the teen be tried as an adult since “he knows better”. When it comes to sexual issues conservatives want teens seen as small childlren, when it comes to crime they want them seen as adult threats. Pick one side and stick to it."

My New Year's Resolution: Talk To Strangers!

Editor: When the message of "don't talk to strangers" was taken to an obsessive and paranoid level during the child abduction hysteria some twenty-five years ago (abductions which were as vanishingly rare then as they are now [no pun intended]) few considered at least one likely outcome of obsessively drumming that message into children's heads: that they would grow up to become adults who DON'T TALK TO STRANGERS. Having now acquired considerable years over which to observe human behavior, it is quite apparent that young adults today are far less friendly and engaging with people they don't know, especially those not in their own age 'demographic', than were young adults when I was one. I also strongly sense a certain self-involvement approaching narcissism amongst today's young adults beyond that of my own generation, itself often (rightly) accused of excessive self indulgence.

We need to recognize that deliberate and fundamental changes in personal behavior and governmental policies necessarily bring with them the certainty of unforeseen consequences. "Not talking to strangers" has had, as was inevitable, a corrosive effect upon society and upon trust which cannot be a good thing.

Bruce Schneier, perhaps the world's foremost computer (and societal) security "guru", wrote a piece for his own website a few years ago which is as true today as it is now. Please read it, below. Thank you, Bruce!

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Talking to Strangers

In Beyond Fear I wrote: "Many children are taught never to talk to strangers, an extreme precaution with minimal security benefit."

In talks, I'm even more direct. I think "don't talk to strangers" is just about the worst possible advice you can give a child. Most people are friendly and helpful, and if a child is in distress, asking the help of a stranger is probably the best possible thing he can do.

This advice would have helped Brennan Hawkins, the 11-year-old boy who was lost in the Utah wilderness for four days.

The parents said Brennan had seen people searching for him on horse and ATV, but avoided them because of what he had been taught.

"He stayed on the trail, he avoided strangers," Jody Hawkins said. "His biggest fear, he told me, was that someone would steal him."

They said they hadn't talked to Brennan and his four siblings about what they should do about strangers if they were lost. "This may have come to a faster conclusion had we discussed that," Toby Hawkins said.

In a world where good guys are common and bad guys are rare, assuming a random person is a good guy is a smart security strategy. We need to help children develop their natural intuition about risk, and not give them overbroad rules.

Also in Beyond Fear, I wrote:

As both individuals and a society, we can make choices about our security. We can choose more security or less security. We can choose greater impositions on our lives and freedoms, or fewer impositions. We can choose the types of risks and security solutions we're willing to tolerate and decide that others are unacceptable.

As individuals, we can decide to buy a home alarm system to make ourselves more secure, or we can save the money because we don't consider the added security to be worth it. We can decide not to travel because we fear terrorism, or we can decide to see the world because the world is wonderful. We can fear strangers because they might be attackers, or we can talk to strangers because they might become friends.

Society Builds Wall Between Men and Children

Visitors to London sometimes complain that Londoners are unfriendly, or at best reserved. To them I have an answer: get a dog. Borrow one for the duration of your stay. Last autumn, I walked George, a two-month-old cocker spaniel, for a friend while she was away. I had help from my good friend John; in fact we took it in turns. It rained every other day, so, like the little old man and woman of the mantelpiece barometer, I walked the dog on sunny days and John did duty on rainy days. This did not go unnoticed.

London is a different world when you have a dog, especially a puppy. Instead of scuttling or shuffling past, avoiding eye contact, Londoners young and old stop to talk to you and make a fuss of your little friend. Surly teenagers in hoods, studs in sunglasses melted at the sight of George, petting him and picking him up — and sounding distinctly uncool.

One of George’s admirers was a girl of about seven. A plain, awkward child, she played by herself in the park. On seeing the puppy, her face lit up and the plainness vanished. Every day — or rather every other day — she rushed up to me, falling over herself to hold him and cuddle him. Naturally we fell into conversation. An intelligent child, perhaps rather lonely, she was curious to know all about the dog, its owner — and my strangely silent friend John, who appeared on rainy days. “Why doesn’t your friend talk to me?” she asked, hurt. I was surprised at the question and, thinking that John was being churlish or impatient, resolved to tackle him about it that evening. “What, are you crazy?” he asked. “I can’t go talking to little girls in parks. I’ll get arrested.”

I remonstrated with him, but had to acknowledge that he had a point. George’s canine charms had failed to break down one of Britain’s great barriers: the barrier between adults and children. It is acceptable — just — for a woman to talk to someone else’s child in a public place, but a man who does the same thing must be a pervert. Has it come to this? How many perverts are there, for goodness sake?

London Mayor Boris Johnson asked the same question in [1] the Telegraph a couple of years ago, when a British Airways stewardess asked him to change seats because he was sitting next to some children: “We have very strict rules.” Johnson wrote:

To all those who worry about the pedophile plague, I would say that they not only have a very imperfect understanding of probability, but also that they fail to understand the terrible damage that is done by this system of presuming guilt in the entire male population just because of the tendencies of a tiny minority.

There are all sorts of reasons why the numbers of male school teachers are down 50 percent in the period 1981 to 2001, and why the ratio of female to male teachers in primary schools is now seven to one. … But it is surely a huge deterrent to any public-spirited man contemplating a career in education that society apparently regards all adult male contact with young people as being potentially a bit dodgy, a bit rum, a bit you know. …

It is insane, and the problem is the general collapse of trust. Almost every human relationship that was sensibly regulated by trust is now governed by law, with cripplingly expensive consequences.

The cost is not just financial. Starved of robust, normal contact with adults — particularly men — outside the family, children remain infantilized. Driven to school in cars, continually supervised, they live in a bubble, failing to develop common sense and judgment about which strangers and situations are benign and which are dangerous. And it is a lonely bubble, in which adults seem not to care. Tonight, a British current affairs program, recently did an experiment in a shopping mall, in which a child pretended (very convincingly) to be lost and distressed. It took a long time before any passersby — certainly male ones — stopped to help her.

A kindly adult outside the family can act as confidant, mentor, and safety valve, as Esther Rantzen, founder of [2] Childline, explained in a [3] Daily Mail article denouncing hysteria about child abuse:

Last week, I met one of Europe’s most successful architects. He told me his parents were extremely poor, and that because his mother had a serious mental illness, his father left the family home.

But they had a neighbor — a man with no children of his own — who noticed his talent when he was young and gave him art classes.

Suppose the neighbor had been a pervert? Well, it’s possible, but is it likely? Here are some statistics on perpetrators of child abuse. As this is an American website, I will take them from a U.S. report, [4] Child Maltreatment:

In FFY 2005, more than three-quarters of perpetrators of child maltreatment (79.4%) were parents, and another 6.8 percent were other relatives of the victim. Unrelated caregivers (foster parents, residential facility staff, child daycare providers, and legal guardians) accounted for less than 10.1 percent of perpetrators. Women comprised a larger percentage of all perpetrators than men, 57.8 percent compared to 42.2 percent. More than three-fourths of all perpetrators were younger than age 40.

Seemingly, the “dirty old man” in the park is the least of a child’s worries. As the statistics show, most abuse, sexual or otherwise, takes place within the family. A particular problem in the UK’s Muslim community is that of [5] forced marriages, and in Islam, a girl is deemed marriageable at just nine years of age. In an article for the [6] London [6] Times on the connection between pedophilia and terrorism, Stefano Dambruoso, Italy’s anti-terror magistrate, is quoted as saying:

The most you can attribute to them is a relationship between men and women different from that of us Westerners, in which — as in many parts of the Arab world — wives are often very young girls of 11, 12, or 13 who because of family negotiations are given in marriage to men much older than them. But that is not pedophilia; it is a question of Arab culture.

Really? One thing’s for sure: a girl of “Arab culture” would not be allowed to play in the park by herself, and so would be safe from the dishonor wrought by an encounter with my friend John and an eight-week-old puppy.

This has to stop. Adults should talk to children in public, whether to joke, teach, comfort, or if need be to admonish. Normal adults, that is. Or are we prepared to leave the field clear for perverts and psychopaths?

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Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/society-builds-wall-between-men-and-children/

URLs in this post:
[1] the Telegraph: http://www.ipce.info/newsletters/e_26/come_off.htm
[2] Childline: http://www.childline.org.uk/Pages/default.aspx?gclid=COveoMu-rJcCFUsa3godQhxfhg
[3] Daily Mail article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1033483/I-launched-Childline-protect-vulnerable--unleashed
-politically-correct-monster.html

[4] Child Maltreatment: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/pubs/cm05/index.htm
[5] forced marriages: http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2008/03/honour-killings-forced
[6] London : http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4958674.ece?Submitted=true

JOHNSON: We need a change in approach to sex offenders

By RICHARD JOHNSON
News And Tribune – Indiana

— Most people seem to believe that sex offenders have a higher re-offending rate than any other category of criminal. A figure I hear tossed around a lot says that 95 percent of sex offenders will commit another sex crime if they get the chance.

If this is true, then it is evidence that most sex offenders - almost all of them - will continue to commit sex crimes. If this is true, then it means that most sex offenders can?t help their behavior. They will never change. They are beyond help.

If sex offenders really cannot and will not change, then society is justified in wanting to lock them up and throw away the keys. After sex offenders serve their time and get out of prison, it is right that they should be required to register on a database for the rest of their lives. Again, this sounds fine to me; at least, it would if that 95 percent re-offending rate was true.

It is not true. A study done by the U.S. Bureau of Justice in 1994 says so.
There were 9,691 male sex offenders released from prison in 1994, representing two-thirds of all sex offenders released from custody that year. This was not one of those studies where they interview 100 people and then stretch their conclusions to cover 100,000 people. This was an excellent study with a huge sample, whose conclusions can be trusted.

For those of you who might be interested and can read PDF files, I can e-mail you the entire 49-page study. Just e-mail me and ask for it. For those who may not have the time or inclination to wade through the whole thing, let me highlight a few of its conclusions.

First, only 5.3 percent, or 517 men, of released sex offenders tracked in the study were arrested again for another sex crime. Only 3.5 percent, representing two-thirds of those arrested, were convicted. While I absolutely agree that 3.5 percent is still 100 percent too many, it?s a whole lot smaller than that 95 percent figure so many of us throw around.

The 9,691 men in the study included 4,295 child molesters. Of these, 3.3 percent, or 141 men, were arrested again for another sex crime involving a child; again, hardly 95 percent. Half of the child molesters were 19 years of age or younger when they committed their crime. And 60 percent of their victims were children 13 years of age or younger.

The study goes on to show that released pedophiles with more than one arrest for molesting a child were three times as likely - 7.3 percent to 2.4 percent - to be arrested again for child molesting than those with only one prior arrest. This seems to indicate that the sooner pedophiles are caught, the less likely they are to re-offend.

Finally, sex offenders (including child molesters) were less likely to be re-arrested for any kind of crime after their release than non-sex offenders ? 43 percent for sex offenders versus 68 percent for non-sex offenders.

OK, we've got some figures and statistics to look at here, but so what? How does this help us prevent sex crimes? How does this help us stop sex offenders from re-offending? How can we find a way to reduce the number of victims, especially children, who are being abused by some very sick people?

For starters, if we're going to reduce sex crimes, then we ought to have good intelligence and gather the best information possible. We need to understand the true nature and actual scope of the problem. We need to deal with facts, so we can develop a plan of action based on those facts. The figures given in this study help us get there.

As long as most people believe that 95 percent of sex offenders will re-offend; as long as too many of us think that sex offenders cannot and will not change; as long as we lump all sex offenders into one category and fail to take the exact nature of each offense into consideration; as long as we let our emotional responses to a truly heinous crime drive our public policy (especially our anger and outrage); and as long as we think that putting every sex offender into a public database will solve our problem: We will not be ready to craft an effective response to this tough and emotional issue.

Almost every day, someone asks me, "What can we do about sex offenders"? That's too short a question, and the answer is quite long- too long for one column.
For the moment, let me just say that something can be done. Change is in the air, and a change in our overall approach is needed. But before we can start discussing solutions, we've got to get the rest of the facts out on the table.
In the weeks ahead, I will do my best to bring facts to this public forum in the hope that our community can find a reasonable and effective way to deal with sex offenses, and the people who commit them.

In the meantime, please don't shoot the messenger.