FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- Just before Christmas the City of Fresno installed floodlights to show off the historic water tower in downtown. But now the tower has become a beacon for homeless sex offenders on parole. They say it's one of the only places they can go to stay on the right side of the law.
The electrical outlets at the base of the tower are the attraction. These parolees are required to wear electronic monitoring devices on their ankles. The devices hold a charge for about 12 hours and must be charged for an hour in the morning and an hour at night. The trouble is dozens of these men live in a homeless tent encampment beneath a freeway overpass at the edge of downtown. They do not have access to electricity.
They were using an outlet at the state parole office, but their access was cut off two weeks ago. Their move to the water tower has not been embraced by the city. The old water tower also serves as a visitor's center for downtown. Police Chief Jerry Dyers said it's not an appropriate place for sex offenders to gather. "This is not the message we want to send. When people come to the water tower which is a visitor's center, that is not the image we want to portray," said Dyer.
Dyer said he is working with the state parole office to find another plug-in location, but indicated it might take awhile. In the meantime the city manager's office may turn off the power to the outlets at the tower.
One homeless sex offender who didn't want to be identified said, "Once you cut that off where are we going to go? We're going to go somewhere else, and they're going to that off. Then we'll go somewhere else and they will cut that off."
Without a source of electricity to charge their monitors the men will be breaking the law. Once the monitors are dead the men will be un-trackable to the law enforcement agencies that are supposed to be keeping track of them.
Brian Semsen, a Baptist minister who works with the offenders said the men in the camp are trying to comply with the law, but are being treated unfairly. "These folks out here on the street are the Lepers of our day. In Jesus' time Leper's were considered unclean. There were laws requiring them to segregate. They had to shout "unclean, unclean" when they approached others so they could warn them to stay away. Now these folks, these men are the Lepers of our day." Semsen said.
The sex offenders know they are unwanted, but said if they don't find access to electricity nearby, they will have to use outlets at businesses on the Fulton Mall, a popular public shopping area.
Sex Offenders Struggle To Comply With Impossible Laws
A Reminder of what "Sexually Violent Predator" Really Means
I would like to point out that the term "Sexually Violent Predator" rarely means what folks could reasonably expect it to mean.
"Sexually Violent Predator" does not require actual "violence". In every state using the term it means having ANY kind of sex with someone under the age of 14 or 13 (depends on the State).
The mere act of having sex with someone under that age is, in the State's definition, "sexual violence". No actual violence need be employed.
Thus, it serves to drum up lots of hysterical reaction from the public. Politicians love the term because it allows them to set the public's agenda and to offer themselves up as tough-on-crime problem-solvers. Local T.V. news reporters love it because everyone wants to stay tuned to learn the details (which are never revealed). This is the dirty little secret none of you are being told. The problem is, most of you don't want to know it, either. It's more fun to create monsters and chase them around than it is to pay attention to the very real problems our children encounter in their daily lives.
Constitutionality of 'Jessica's Law' questioned
The California Supreme Court ruled 5 to 2 Thursday that a 2006 ballot initiative that permitted the state to lock up sexually violent predators indefinitely may violate constitutional guarantees of equal protection.
The California Supreme Court ruled 5 to 2 Thursday that a 2006 ballot initiative that permitted the state to lock up sexually violent predators indefinitely may violate constitutional guarantees of equal protection.
The ruling, written by Justice Carlos R. Moreno, did not strike down the measure, Proposition 83, also known as "Jessica's Law."
Instead, the court said a fact-finding hearing must be held to determine whether valid reasons exist for treating sex predators differently from others subject to civil confinement, such as mentally disordered offenders.
Proposition 83 increased penalties for repeat sex offenders, prohibited them from living near schools and parks, and changed the law to permit their indefinite confinement to mental institutions, instead of two years with the possibility of extensions.
Richard McKee, a convicted child molester, challenged his confinement on several constitutional grounds, but the court found that only his equal protection argument had merit.
The majority said the state must provide "some justification" for creating greater obstacles for sex predators to win their freedom than for severely mentally disordered offenders who commit crimes but serve their terms in mental institutions.
Sexual predators must be shown to "bear a substantially greater risk to society, and that therefore imposing on them a greater burden before they can be released from commitment is needed to protect society," Moreno wrote.
The majority said the state can provide its justifications in a hearing before a trial judge.
Justice Ming W. Chin, joined by Justice Marvin R. Baxter, dissented.
"Whether sexually violent predators present a distinct danger warranting unique remedies is for society to determine, not a trial judge," Chin wrote.
Ruining Kids in Order to Save Them
The boneheaded logic behind treating "sexting" teens as child pornographers.
Radley Balko | Reason Magazine
That the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would even need to hear oral arguments in the case of Miller, et al. v. Skumanick last week is a pretty good indication that law enforcement officials in Wyoming County, Pennsylvania have lost their collective minds.
At issue in the case: Whether the U.S. Constitution permits prosecutors to charge minors who pose for nude or risque photos with child pornography. You read that correctly. In order to protect children from predators and child pornographers, the local district attorney is threatening to prosecute minors who pose for racy photos as if they were child pornographers.
Even within the context of the already hysterical overreaction to the "sexting" phenomenon, the facts in Miller are jaw-dropping. Of the three girls bringing suit, two were photographed at a slumber party wearing training bras. The third photographed herself baring her breasts, then sent the photo to a boy she'd hoped to make jealous. The girls aren't in trouble for distributing the photos, or even for taking them. They've been introduced to the criminal justice system merely for appearing in them.
Wyoming County District Attorney George Skumanick, Jr. gave the girls a choice. The first option was to face felony child pornography charges, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The second was to attend a series of Skumanick-chosen classes, which according to the Pennsylvania ACLU included topics such as "what it means to be a girl in today's society" and "non-traditional societal and job roles." The girls would also be put on probation, subject to random drug tests, and would have to write essays explaining why appearing in photos while wearing their bras is wrong.
Skumanick would later tell a gathering of students and parents that he had the authority to prosecute girls photographed on the beach in bikinis, because the minors would be dressed "provocatively." He told the Wall Street Journal that by offering the girls the classes and probation instead of immediately hitting them with felony charges, "We thought we were being progressive."
Of the 19 minors Skumanick targeted, 16 chose the classes. The other three took Skumanick to court, where they won a restraining order. Skumanick appealed. To the credit of the people of Wyoming County, after 20 years in office Skumanick lost his bid for reelection last November. But his office continues to fight.
But this isn't just an isolated case of a renegade D.A. There have now been several cases across the country where young people who either pose for, snap, or forward provocative or nude photos of other minors are being charged or threatened with felony child pornography. In 2007, a state appeals court in Florida upheld charges of "directing or promoting a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of a child" and possession of child pornography charges against a 17-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl for forwarding explicit photos of themselves having sex from her computer to his email address. The sex wasn't illegal. But the photos were. Incredibly, Judge James Wolf wrote in the majority opinion that "Mere production of these videos or pictures may...result in psychological trauma to the teenagers involved. Further, if these pictures are ultimately released, future damage may be done to these minors' careers or personal lives."
The message to minors: These photos can ruin your lives, kids. And just to prove it, we're going to ruin your lives.
These cases are the natural culmination of two trends. The first is the continuing view among politicians that there's no punishment too severe for sex offenders. Moreover, to show how serious we are about sex offenders, we should broaden the class of people we classify under the label. And there needn't be any actual victims.
In 2006, Karen Fletcher, also of Pennsylvania, was convicted in federal court for writing fictional stories (and granted, they were disturbing stories) about sexual and violent crimes against children. Until it was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2002, the 1996 Child Online Protection Act criminalized images of adults made to look like minors, as well as digitally manufactured photos of minors who don't actually exist.
The second trend is the "for the children" excuse that no law ought to be questioned if its intent is to protect young people. The resulting paternalism is built in.
Put these together, and you get the intellectually vacant policy of prosecuting children for sexually exploiting themselves...in order to protect them from the people who might exploit them.
It isn't exactly clear from what or whom the authorities are protecting these teens. To my knowledge, there hasn't been a single case of a predator who tracked down, then raped, killed, or otherwise physically harmed a minor after viewing explicit photos of the child on the Internet or via images forwarded by cell phone. Perhaps it has happened. But given the media obsession with these stories, if it's happened with any frequency at all, we would have probably heard about it by now.
The harm here seems to be the possibility that somewhere, someone other than the intended recipient of these photos may be masturbating to them. That's an uncomfortable thought, sure. But it's difficult to see how that presents tangible harm to the minors in the photos, certainly not to the point where the minors themselves ought to be prosecuted. Anyone turned on by the photos in Skumanick's case could just as easily placate themselves with an old Sears catalogue—and with no resulting damage to the models who posed in it.
But the idea that an otherwise innocuous image can mutate into illegal child porn based on how it might be used by pedophiles is gaining currency. In 2006, Alabama photographer Jeff Pierson was indicted on federal child porn charges for a website he ran featuring aspiring teen models. None of the models were nude, nor were any depicted engaged in any sexual activity. All of the models' parents signed off on the photos. But federal prosecutors argued the models struck "illegally provocative," "lascivious," and "coy" poses that could entice pedophiles. In 2002, Republican Rep. Mark Foley of Florida (yes, that Mark Foley) introduced the Child Modeling Exploitation Prevention Act, which would have prohibited the sale of any photo of a minor. It failed, but crazy as Foley's bill sounds, it at least would have cleared up the ambiguity. As the website CNET reported in a story about Pierson, federal courts have made the definition of child porn so subjective, "judges and juries [are] faced with the difficult task of making distinctions between lawful and unlawful camera angles and facial expressions."
When applied to "sexting" cases, that also leaves prosecutors like Skumanick far too much leeway—enough, for example, for him to believe he can prosecute a girl photographed in a bikini because he finds the photo uncomfortably "provocative." But even when "sexted" photos are unquestionably explicit, there's no justification for criminal charges. Even the deterrent argument falls flat. Despite these high-profile cases, threats of prosecution, and public service announcements on MTV, surveys suggest that about 20-25 percent of young people college-aged and younger have taken or sent sent explicit photos of themselves. That number is rising, not falling.
The root disconnect, here, is that the law treats pre-pubescent sex crimes on par with crimes related to teenagers who are sexually mature. Fact is, teenagers become sexually mature years before it's socially or legally permissible to think about them that way. That they're then having sex is nothing new. Nor is the fact that teens make rash, emotional, spur-of-the-moment decisions. What's new is that they're able to document it all in ways that can quickly escape their control. What they need after the fact are responsible adults who can walk them through a poor decision, appropriately reprimand or punish them if necessary, but all while keeping things in perspective, and minimizing the long-term consequences for the teen. Dumping the kid into the criminal justice system has all the subtlety and precision of dropping an anvil on the problem from 40 stories above.
Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason magazine.
Police said Valparaiso boy, girl sent nude pictures to each other
Ed: We are smack-dab in the middle of a full-blown Hysteria! To say that we have allowed ourselves to be governed by the most narrow-minded of Puritans is, incredibly, to do injustice to the historical Puritans who, arguably, were never as puritanical as Americans now most clearly are. Where is the outrage at the incursion of government into every aspect of our, and our children's, lives? And why the hell aren't we putting up more of a fight to defend our freedom? Have we really become that docile and ignorant? If there is a role for "shaming" in our society, it should be employed as a tool against these intolerant, bullying assholes who have nothing but contempt for the liberties our country was founded upon! We MUST secure our rights once again!
Middle school students charged in 'sexting' case
By Ken Kosky - ken.kosky@nwi.com, (219) 548-4354 | Posted: Thursday, January 28, 2010 12:05 am
VALPARAISO | Two Ben Franklin Middle School students who Valparaiso police said were caught using their cell phones to exchange nude pictures of each other -- a practice called sexual texting or "sexting" -- are facing criminal charges.
A 13-year-old Valparaiso girl and a 12-year-old Valparaiso boy were referred to juvenile probation on charges of possession of child pornography and child exploitation. In adult court, the charges would carry a maximum penalty of 11 years in prison, but prosecutors expect the case to be handled in the juvenile system.
"Something needs to be done, but we think dealing with them through the juvenile court system is appropriate, so as not to saddle them with (consequences) from the adult system," Porter County Prosecutor Brian Gensel said.
In the adult system, convicted offenders face not only prison time but also having to register as a sex offender.
The case against the Valparaiso students came to light when the girl's phone went off during class Jan. 21 and the teacher confiscated it. The teacher told police the girl asked to delete something from the phone before it was turned over to the administration, but that request was denied.
The teacher said the girl began crying, saying she would get in trouble because the boy had sent her a dirty picture.
An investigation revealed the boy sent the girl an explicit photo of himself Jan. 17 and asked her to use her cellular phone to send back a similar picture of herself, which she did, police said. Police further found out the girl showed the picture of the boy to one of her friends.
Deputy Prosecutor Cheryl Polarek said young people don't understand the ramifications of texting nude pictures or posting certain material on social networking sites like Facebook. She said a nude picture could end up being shared with half the school and could get in the hands of people who seek out child pornography.
Even though it is illegal to send or possess nude pictures of someone younger than 18, a national survey found 20 percent of teens have texted or posted online nude or semi-nude pictures of themselves.
Gensel, who belongs to the National District Attorneys Association, said the association's trade publication featured a column on sexting that highlighted Montgomery County, Ohio, Prosecutor Mathias Heck Jr.'s implementation of a "diversion program" for sexting cases.
Young people who enter the diversion program undergo education on appropriate sexual boundaries and related topics, complete community service and relinquish their cell phone for a period of time. If the program is successfully completed, the charges are dismissed or never filed.
Gensel agrees with Heck that there needs to be some "tempering" of prosecution so some foolish, consenting behavior doesn't have long-term ramifications on young people's lives. Gensel favors a system in which young people receive an explanation about how serious of a matter sexual texting is, and that there will be serious consequences if they continue doing it.
Valparaiso police Sgt. Michael Grennes said this case shows the need for parents to educate their children about what they can and can't do with their cellular phones or on their computers. He also recommends parents to follow through by monitoring their children's phone and computer use. He also said parents might want to consider whether their child really needs to own a phone.
Paul Shanley Case and Repressed Memory
The Paul Shanley Case and Repressed Memory Recovery: Not Such Thin Partitions
By Jean Mercer, Ph.D.
Created Jan 17 2010 - 10:39am
A few days ago, the Boston Globe reported that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has upheld the conviction of Paul Shanley, a former priest accused of sexual abuse occurring about twenty years ago. The appeal of Shanley's conviction was based on objections to the lower court's acceptance of testimony based on recovered memories of the event, which were said to have been repressed by the victim. In upholding the conviction, the higher court said: "... the judge's finding that the lack of scientific testing did not make unreliable the theory that an individual may experience dissociative amnesia was supported in the record, not only by expert testimony but by a wide collection of clinical observations and a survey of academic literature". This was in spite of the submission of comments rejecting the idea of repressed memories by experts such as Richard McNally. However, the opinion went on to say, the Supreme Judicial Court may decide in the future to throw out a conviction where the only evidence is recovered memories.
Repugnant as is the idea of sexual abuse of children, especially by figures of authority, it is also repugnant to think that misinformation may have trumped good evidence in this and similar cases. It is always a problem to translate scientific standards of evidence into legal standards, because legal standards are based on concepts like "what a reasonable man would think" or on the preponderance of evidence, and scientific standards have traditionally been based on probabilities. Recently scientific standards, especially in medical and psychological areas, have also considered the quality or level of evidence supporting a claim. This perspective seems to be difficult for courts to handle.
The higher court's statement about "the lack of scientific testing" misses several points about the evaluation of scientific evidence. One important point is that it is not possible to prove that something (such as repressed memory recovery) does not exist or did not exist in the past. There are two ways to provide evidence about non-existence. One is to amass evidence that some situation, mutually exclusive with the point in dispute, does or did exist-- for example, if I say a person attacked me, evidence that he or she was on another continent at the time shows that what I claim could not have happened. Another approach, one that is becoming more important as people focus on quality or levels of evidence, is to show that evidence supporting the existence of a phenomenon (for instance, repressed memory recovery) is not of good quality. In the case of repressed memory recovery and other issues, critiques of research methods and reporting can invalidate the evidence claiming that something exists. Critiques of the research evidence supporting repressed memory recovery, by Richard McNally, Susan Clancy, and others, have effectively shown that such evidence is of poor quality.
When deciding whether evidence is good or poor, experts often begin by examining whether an idea is plausible. Is it possible that events could come about as claimed? How does the suggested function agree with known, well-supported information about other functions? Although there can certainly be real "breakthroughs" in which a discovery shows that what we thought we knew was wrong, the simplest conclusion about an implausible idea is that it is mistaken.
The idea of recovered repressed memories is in fact implausible. It is at odds with everything known about human memory. It contradicts the fact that vivid experiences (as sexual abuse would presumably be) create lasting memories, as well as the fact that memories change and are reconstructed over time, even those that are easily accessible and frequently recalled. It also contradicts the fact that thoughts that we experience as remembered may come from sources other than memories of actual experiences of our own.
I would suggest that the idea of recoverable repressed memories is based, not on modern understanding of memory, but on a belief about memory accepted by Sigmund Freud but dating to a period much earlier than his. This view of memory was put forth initially by the 18th-century philosopher John Locke, and was later elaborated by the British Associationist school of psychology. The basic concept at work here was described poetically by Alexander Pope in his lines:
Remembrance and reflection, how allied;/ What thin partitions sense from thought divide.
Pope and the Associationists assumed that thoughts and ideas were simply results of the impact of sense experiences on the mind. These results, like ripples of a stone thrown into a pond, could fade with time, but were completely determined by the event that caused them. If recalled, they came back into consciousness in exactly the same form in which they were originally created. People who had many thoughts and ideas were people who had had many experiences; those with few thoughts had been deprived of experience. Ideas could be connected with each other (forming a "complex") if sensations were often experienced together.
I don't mean to ascribe the idea of repression to the Associationist school, of course. That idea has different sources. My point here is that this early view held that memories were accurate reflections of experiences, and that although they might fade with time they remained accurate. The "thin partititions" had no capacity to alter memories so that they would not accurately resemble the original experience. This same belief is characteristic of ideas about recovered memory: that whenever a memory is accessed, or whenever a person experiences a thought as remembered, the experience is a direct parallel to the person's sensory experience in the past.
Our understanding of memory today stresses "thick partitions" that divide sensory experience and thoughts or memories. Processing of sensory information and later cognitive activity change thoughts and experienced memories. Memories that have not been accessed before do not suddenly emerge as accurate recordings of past experience. It is disappointing that courts have not yet come to terms with this fact.
Child Sexual Abuse: Problematic, Yes; Traumatic, Not Necessarily
By Jean Mercer, Ph.D.
Created Jan 26 2010 - 8:08am
Susan Clancy's important book "The Trauma Myth" (New York, Basic Books, 2009) is drawing the critical fire of a number of people who have not given it the careful reading it deserves. Some of these critics have claimed that Clancy argues against any deleterious effects of sexual molestation in childhood--- that she defends pedophiles, and even that she is a pedophile herself or that she blames child victims for the behavior of sexually-exploitative adults.
These statements are nonsense, and I am going to attempt to counter them by devoting today's post to a summary and comments on Clancy's argument in "The Trauma Myth".
"The Trauma Myth" emphasizes repeatedly the clear evidence that childhood experiences of sexual exploitation by adults are associated with a long list of later problems, including mood disorders, anxiety disorders, personality disorders, relationship and sexual problems, eating disorders, self-mutilation, and so on. Because one in five children is reported to have experienced sexual abuse (and probably there are more, unreported, cases), such abuse is responsible for significant numbers of mental health problems. It's important that we learn how to prevent it and to treat its results, not only for the sake of individuals but for the mental health of the whole population. To prevent child sexual abuse and treat problems that result from it, we need to have a real understanding of how these experiences cause bad outcomes. However, much work in this area is based on the assumption that trauma theory, which attributes many mental health problems to the past experience of severe pain and fear, and trauma theory may not provide a good framework for understanding the impact of sexual molestation in childhood.
Clancy is not the first to point out that children's sexual experiences with adults are not necessarily experienced as traumatic (severely painful or terrifying) at the time when they occur. But her interview research with adults who had been molested as children clearly showed a continuum of child experiences, ranging from terror and pain at one end, through puzzlement without distress in the middle, to physical and emotional gratification at the opposite end. In fact, most of her interviewees reported that in childhood, at the time of the event, they were not frightened or in pain. The abuser's actions did not involve force or even penetration of any kind, but were generally limited to rubbing, kissing,or fondling of genitals, nor did most of the abusers threaten the children in any way. Nevertheless, those adults, as well as the ones who had experienced trauma, reported symptoms related to their experiences, and now felt that the sexual event had had a deplorable effect on them.
The question Clancy raises is this: if the abused children did not at the time experience the event as traumatic, how can we explain the connection to their present symptoms? We can't do this in any simple way by means of applying trauma theory. To make trauma theory work in this context, we would have to add to it the concept of repressed memories-- to say, for example, that the adults Clancy interviewed were really terrified and hurt, that they have repressed and can't report that part of the experience, but that in its repressed form the memory still affects their mental health. Taking that approach, however, we would come up against an even more complicated issue: why is it that people who were actually hurt and terrified (according to independent evidence) don't repress what must be a hideous memory? Using the repressed memory concept, then, we find ourselves having to explain why a really terrible experience is remembered with all the emotional factors intact, but a less painful and frightening situation leads to repression of memories of emotion. Although U-shaped functions of this kind are not unknown in psychology, this one does not seem to make much sense.
Clancy concludes from this line of reasoning that trauma theory and the concept of repression are not good ways to explain the most common situations involving childhood sexual abuse and its aftermath in adulthood. Because they are not good ways, they have not done much to help us either prevent or treat the effects of child sexual abuse. We need to explore these matters much more carefully, and, Clancy says we need to make sure that our explanation involves the child's point of view, which has generally been ignored. To understand that children's group and individual characteristics affect the sex abuse situation is a far cry from "blaming" the child.
Clancy makes several points about children's understanding of the world and the ways it can make the child's view of non-painful sexual abuse rather different from an adult's. She stresses the ignorance of children about sexuality and their failure to comprehend what an adult wants or what he or she is doing. Why heavy breathing and a red face, for instance? A child has probably observed these things before, but in quite different contexts. The puzzled conclusion may simply be that this is strange and perhaps it's one of those embarrassing things that you get in trouble for talking about, so best to just keep it to yourself.
Importantly, Clancy also emphasize that there are characteristics of individual children that may make them more likely to be the victims of repeated abuse which they do not report. No, she does not say these children are "seductive"; what she does say is that they are lonely, unsupervised, and grateful for adult attention. They respond to the fascinated attentiveness of the potential abuser as a delightful experience, in sharp contrast with the indifference their caregivers may show. Without experiences of pain or fear, why should they reveal what seems to them like a romance to familiar adults who will probably cause some trouble?
Finally, Clancy says something that is for many readers the unspeakable: that given a kind, careful adult who treats them well, children may enjoy sexual experiences (we are not talking about penetration here, of course). I was reminded of a story I heard from a friend some years ago. She had left her 3-year-old boy with a 13-year-old boy babysitter, and when she came home she became aware that some sort of sex play must have been going on. All she could think of was to give the 3-year-old the old bromide, "if someone touches you and you don't like, just tell them to stop"--- to which the 3-year-old replied enthusiastically, "I liked it! When can he babysit me again?" And there you have it in a nutshell; sexual activity of the right kind is pleasurable for everybody at every age. Sexual predators know that very well, and if we want to stop their exploitation of children, we need to be honest about it too, and not to expect children to "tell on" someone who gives them pleasure.
"The Trauma Myth" is a serious effort to deal with child sexual abuse and its aftermath. I've had space here to give only the highlights of Clancy's argument, but the book contains much more of interest, including a discussion of abuse prevention programs as they now exist. I hope readers will give "The Trauma Myth" the careful attention it deserves.
Ed: One implication for her assertions is that we, as a society, may be causing actual harm to children through our own reactions to their sexual experiences. This is obviously the case.
Abusing Not Only Children, but Also Science
By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D.
Given the vested interests lurking all over the current medical landscape, it is no wonder that the scientific method is so often mauled a little in transit. Cases of data ignored or manipulated to serve an agenda are like muggings in a bad neighborhood: you hear about them all the time, but in fact relatively few are ever openly examined.
And so even readers with no personal or professional connection to the sexual abuse of children may be edified by “The Trauma Myth,” a short tale of one such particularly fraught episode.
For a graduate research project at Harvard in the mid-1990s, the psychologist Susan A. Clancy arranged to interview adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, expecting to confirm the conventional wisdom that the more traumatic the abuse had been, the more troubled an adult the child had become.
Dr. Clancy figured she knew what she would find: “Everything I knew dictated that the abuse should be a horrible experience, that the child should be traumatized at the time it was happening — overwhelmed with fear, shock, horror.”
But many carefully documented interviews revealed nothing of the sort. Commonly, the abuse had been confusing for the child but not traumatic in the usual sense of the word. Only when the child grew old enough to understand exactly what had happened — sometimes many years later — did the fear, shock and horror begin. And only at that point did the experience become traumatic and begin its well-known destructive process.
Dr. Clancy questioned her findings, reconfirmed them and was convinced. Her audience, when she made the data public, was outraged.
First, her data flew in the face of several decades of politically correct trauma theory, feminist theory and sexual politics.
Second, Dr. Clancy found that the world had little appetite for scientific subtlety: “Unfortunately, when people heard ‘not traumatic when it happens,’ they translated my words to mean, ‘It doesn’t harm victims later on.’ Even worse, some assumed I was blaming victims for their abuse.”
Dr. Clancy reports that she became a pariah in lay and academic circles. She was “crucified” in the press as a “friend of pedophiles,” colleagues boycotted her talks, advisers suggested that continuing on her trajectory would rule out an academic career.
All that fuss about one little word — “trauma” — and a change in its timing. Why should it matter one way or the other?
Dr. Clancy suggests several reasons her data aroused such passion. For one thing, a whole academic and therapeutic structure rides on the old model of sexual abuse; her findings had the potential to undermine a host of expensive treatment and prevention projects.
Meanwhile, she argues, it is her model that may really help victims. Adult survivors of childhood abuse are commonly mortified by their own behavior as children. By not fighting back or calling for help, they blame themselves for effectively colluding with their abuser. It can be intensely comforting for them to hear that their reaction, or lack thereof, was completely normal.
Dr. Clancy’s model also makes some sense of the whole sticky question of repressed memory. Most traumatic events are likely to be vividly remembered. But if instances of sexual abuse are simply among the many confusions that characterize childhood, they are perfectly forgettable: “Why should a child remember them if, at the time they happened, they were not particularly traumatic?” Only when reprocessed and fully understood do the memories leap into focus.
Even without all these practicalities, the moral of Dr. Clancy’s story is clear: science should represent truth, not wishful thinking. When good data fly in the face of beloved theory, the theory has to go.
Dr. Clancy writes with the precision and patient repetition of a good teacher on complicated terrain. Her prose could not be clearer, and her points are restated many, many times over. But at Amazon.com, an outraged customer-reviewer has already pounced.
“It is appalling,” the reviewer wrote, “that ‘experts’ like Susan Clancy can get away with having a book published with a title that is not only false, but one that tells sexual perpetrators, ‘Go ahead, sexually abuse children, they like it, and they aren’t going to be traumatized by it.’ ”
Science is sometimes no match for conviction, and often, evidently, good writing is not either.
Martha Coakley's Convictions
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
The story of the Amiraults of Massachusetts, and of the prosecution that had turned the lives of this thriving American family to dust, was well known to the world by the year 2001. It was well known, especially, to District Attorney Martha Coakley, who had by then arrived to take a final, conspicuous, role in a case so notorious as to assure that the Amiraults' name would be known around the globe.
The Amiraults were a busy, confident trio, grateful in the way of people who have found success after a life of hardship. Violet had reared her son Gerald and daughter Cheryl with help from welfare, and then set out to educate herself. The result was the triumph of her life—the Fells Acres school—whose every detail Violet scrutinized relentlessly. Not for nothing was the pre-school deemed by far the best in the area, with a long waiting list for admission.
All of it would end in 1984, with accusations of sexual assault and an ever-growing list of parents signing their children on to the case. Newspaper and television reports blared a sensational story about a female school principal, in her 60s, who had daily terrorized and sexually assaulted the pupils in her care, using sharp objects as her weapon. So too had Violet's daughter Cheryl, a 28-year old teacher at the school.
But from the beginning, prosecutors cast Gerald as chief predator—his gender qualifying him, in their view, as the best choice for the role. It was that role, the man in the family, that would determine his sentence, his treatment, and, to the end, his prosecution-inspired image as a pervert too dangerous to go free.
The accusations against the Amiraults might well rank as the most astounding ever to be credited in an American courtroom, but for the fact that roughly the same charges were brought by eager prosecutors chasing a similar headline—making cases all across the country in the 1980s. Those which the Amiraults' prosecutors brought had nevertheless, unforgettable features: so much testimony, so madly preposterous, and so solemnly put forth by the state. The testimony had been extracted from children, cajoled and led by tireless interrogators.
Gerald, it was alleged, had plunged a wide-blade butcher knife into the rectum of a 4-year-old boy, which he then had trouble removing. When a teacher in the school saw him in action with the knife, she asked him what he was doing, and then told him not to do it again, a child said. On this testimony, Gerald was convicted of a rape which had, miraculously, left no mark or other injury. Violet had tied a boy to a tree in front of the school one bright afternoon, in full view of everyone, and had assaulted him anally with a stick, and then with "a magic wand." She would be convicted of these charges. Cheryl had cut the leg off a squirrel.
Other than such testimony, the prosecutors had no shred of physical or other proof that could remotely pass as evidence of abuse. But they did have the power of their challenge to jurors: Convict the Amiraults to make sure the battle against child abuse went forward. Convict, so as not to reject the children who had bravely come forward with charges.
Gerald was sent to prison for 30 to 40 years, his mother and sister sentenced to eight to 20 years. The prosecutors celebrated what they called, at the time "a model, multidisciplinary prosecution." Gerald's wife, Patricia, and their three children—the family unfailingly devoted to him—went on with their lives. They spoke to him nightly and cherished such hope as they could find, that he would be restored to them.
Hope arrived in 1995, when Judge Robert Barton ordered a new trial for the women. Violet, now 72, and Cheryl had been imprisoned eight years. This toughest of judges, appalled as he came to know the facts of the case, ordered the women released at once. Judge Barton—known as Black Bart for the long sentences he gave criminals—did not thereafter trouble to conceal his contempt for the prosecutors. They would, he warned, do all in their power to hold on to Gerald, a prediction to prove altogether accurate.
No less outraged, Superior Court Judge Isaac Borenstein presided over a widely publicized hearings into the case resulting in findings that all the children's testimony was tainted. He said that "Every trick in the book had been used to get the children to say what the investigators wanted." The Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly—which had never in its 27 year history taken an editorial position on a case—published a scathing one directed at the prosecutors "who seemed unwilling to admit they might have sent innocent people to jail for crimes that had never occurred."
It was clear, when Martha Coakley took over as the new Middlesex County district attorney in 1999, that public opinion was running sharply against the prosecutors in the case. Violet Amirault was now gone. Ill and penniless after her release, she had been hounded to the end by prosecutors who succeeded in getting the Supreme Judicial Court to void the women's reversals of conviction. She lay waiting all the last days of her life, suitcase packed, for the expected court order to send her back to prison. Violet would die of cancer before any order came in September 1997.
That left Cheryl alone, facing rearrest. In the face of the increasing furor surrounding the case, Ms. Coakley agreed to revise and revoke her sentence to time served—but certain things had to be clear, she told the press. Cheryl's case, and that of Gerald, she explained, had nothing to do with one another—a startling proposition given the horrific abuse charges, identical in nature, of which all three of the Amiraults had been convicted.
No matter: When women were involved in such cases, the district attorney explained, it was usually because of the presence of "a primary male offender." According to Ms. Coakley's scenario, it was Gerald who had dragged his mother and sister along. Every statement she made now about Gerald reflected the same view, and the determination that he never go free. No one better exemplified the mindset and will of the prosecutors who originally had brought this case.
Before agreeing to revise Cheryl's sentence to time served, Ms. Coakley asked the Amiraults' attorney, James Sultan, to pledge—in exchange—that he would stop representing Gerald and undertake no further legal action on his behalf. She had evidently concluded that with Sultan gone—Sultan, whose mastery of the case was complete—any further effort by Gerald to win freedom would be doomed. Mr. Sultan, of course, refused.
In 2000, the Massachusetts Governor's Board of Pardons and Paroles met to consider a commutation of Gerald's sentence. After nine months of investigation, the board, reputed to be the toughest in the country, voted 5-0, with one abstention, to commute his sentence. Still more newsworthy was an added statement, signed by a majority of the board, which pointed to the lack of evidence against the Amiraults, and the "extraordinary if not bizarre allegations" on which they had been convicted.
Editorials in every major and minor paper in the state applauded the Board's findings. District Attorney Coakley was not idle either, and quickly set about organizing the parents and children in the case, bringing them to meetings with Acting Gov. Jane Swift, to persuade her to reject the board's ruling. Ms. Coakley also worked the press, setting up a special interview so that the now adult accusers could tell reporters, once more, of the tortures they had suffered at the hands of the Amiraults, and of their panic at the prospect of Gerald going free.
On Feb. 20, 2002, six months after the Board of Pardons issued its findings, the governor denied Gerald's commutation.
Gerald Amirault spent nearly two years more in prison before being granted parole in 2004. He would be released, with conditions not quite approximating that of a free man. He was declared a level three sex offender—among the consequences of his refusal, like that of his mother and sister, to "take responsibility" by confessing his crimes. He is required to wear, at all times, an electronic tracking device; to report, in a notebook, each time he leaves the house and returns; to obey a curfew confining him to his home between 11:30 p.m. and 6 a.m. He may not travel at all through certain areas (presumably those where his alleged victims live). He can, under these circumstances, find no regular employment.
The Amirault family is nonetheless grateful that they are together again.
Attorney General Martha Coakley—who had proven so dedicated a representative of the system that had brought the Amirault family to ruin, and who had fought so relentlessly to preserve their case—has recently expressed her view of this episode. Questioned about the Amiraults in the course of her current race for the U.S. Senate, she told reporters of her firm belief that the evidence against the Amiraults was "formidable" and that she was entirely convinced "those children were abused at day care center by the three defendants."
What does this say about her candidacy? (Ms. Coakley declined to be interviewed.) If the current attorney general of Massachusetts actually believes, as no serious citizen does, the preposterous charges that caused the Amiraults to be thrown into prison—the butcher knife rape with no blood, the public tree-tying episode, the mutilated squirrel and the rest—that is powerful testimony to the mind and capacities of this aspirant to a Senate seat. It is little short of wonderful to hear now of Ms. Coakley's concern for the rights of terror suspects at Guantanamo—her urgent call for the protection of the right to the presumption of innocence.
If the sound of ghostly laughter is heard in Massachusetts these days as this campaign rolls on, with Martha Coakley self-portrayed as the guardian of justice and civil liberties, there is good reason.
Ms. Rabinowitz, a member of the Journal's editorial board, is the author of "No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusations, False Witness And Other Terrors Our Times" (Free Press, 2003).
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A19
America's unjust sex laws
The Economist
An ever harsher approach is doing more harm than good, but it is being copied around the world
IT IS an oft-told story, but it does not get any less horrific on repetition. Fifteen years ago, a paedophile enticed seven-year-old Megan Kanka into his home in New Jersey by offering to show her a puppy. He then raped her, killed her and dumped her body in a nearby park. The murderer, who had recently moved into the house across the street from his victim, had twice before been convicted of sexually assaulting a child. Yet Megan’s parents had no idea of this. Had they known he was a sex offender, they would have told their daughter to stay away from him.
In their grief, the parents started a petition, demanding that families should be told if a sexual predator moves nearby. Hundreds of thousands signed it. In no time at all, lawmakers in New Jersey granted their wish. And before long, “Megan’s laws” had spread to every American state.
America’s sex-offender laws are the strictest of any rich democracy. Convicted rapists and child-molesters are given long prison sentences. When released, they are put on sex-offender registries. In most states this means that their names, photographs and addresses are published online, so that fearful parents can check whether a child-molester lives nearby. Under the Adam Walsh Act of 2006, another law named after a murdered child, all states will soon be obliged to make their sex-offender registries public. Such rules are extremely popular. Most parents will support any law that promises to keep their children safe. Other countries are following America’s example, either importing Megan’s laws or increasing penalties: after two little girls were murdered by a school caretaker, Britain has imposed multiple conditions on who can visit schools.
Which makes it all the more important to ask whether America’s approach is the right one. In fact its sex-offender laws have grown self-defeatingly harsh (see article). They have been driven by a ratchet effect. Individual American politicians have great latitude to propose new laws. Stricter curbs on paedophiles win votes. And to sound severe, such curbs must be stronger than the laws in place, which in turn were proposed by politicians who wished to appear tough themselves. Few politicians dare to vote against such laws, because if they do, the attack ads practically write themselves.
A whole Wyoming of offenders
In all, 674,000 Americans are on sex-offender registries—more than the population of Vermont, North Dakota or Wyoming. The number keeps growing partly because in several states registration is for life and partly because registries are not confined to the sort of murderer who ensnared Megan Kanka. According to Human Rights Watch, at least five states require registration for people who visit prostitutes, 29 require it for consensual sex between young teenagers and 32 require it for indecent exposure. Some prosecutors are now stretching the definition of “distributing child pornography” to include teens who text half-naked photos of themselves to their friends.
How dangerous are the people on the registries? A state review of one sample in Georgia found that two-thirds of them posed little risk. For example, Janet Allison was found guilty of being “party to the crime of child molestation” because she let her 15-year-old daughter have sex with a boyfriend. The young couple later married. But Ms Allison will spend the rest of her life publicly branded as a sex offender.
Several other countries have sex-offender registries, but these are typically held by the police and are hard to view. In America it takes only seconds to find out about a sex offender: some states have a “click to print” icon on their websites so that concerned citizens can put up posters with the offender’s mugshot on trees near his home. Small wonder most sex offenders report being harassed. A few have been murdered. Many are fired because someone at work has Googled them.
Registration is often just the start. Sometimes sex offenders are barred from living near places where children congregate. In Georgia no sex offender may live or work within 1,000 feet (300 metres) of a school, church, park, skating rink or swimming pool. In Miami an exclusion zone of 2,500 feet has helped create a camp of homeless offenders under a bridge.
Make the punishment fit the crime
There are three main arguments for reform. First, it is unfair to impose harsh penalties for small offences. Perhaps a third of American teenagers have sex before they are legally allowed to, and a staggering number have shared revealing photographs with each other. This is unwise, but hardly a reason for the law to ruin their lives. Second, America’s sex laws often punish not only the offender, but also his family. If a man who once slept with his 15-year-old girlfriend is barred for ever from taking his own children to a playground, those children suffer.
Third, harsh laws often do little to protect the innocent. The police complain that having so many petty sex offenders on registries makes it hard to keep track of the truly dangerous ones. Cash that might be spent on treating sex offenders—which sometimes works—is spent on huge indiscriminate registries. Public registers drive serious offenders underground, which makes them harder to track and more likely to reoffend. And registers give parents a false sense of security: most sex offenders are never even reported, let alone convicted.
It would not be hard to redesign America’s sex laws. Instead of lumping all sex offenders together on the same list for life, states should assess each person individually and include only real threats. Instead of posting everything on the internet, names could be held by the police, who would share them only with those, such as a school, who need to know. Laws that bar sex offenders from living in so many places should be repealed, because there is no evidence that they protect anyone: a predator can always travel. The money that a repeal saves could help pay for monitoring compulsive molesters more intrusively—through ankle bracelets and the like.
In America it may take years to unpick this. However practical and just the case for reform, it must overcome political cowardice, the tabloid media and parents’ understandable fears. Other countries, though, have no excuse for committing the same error. Sensible sex laws are better than vengeful ones.
Innocent Man Freed, But Shabby Prosecutor Still Works as Judge
Reason Magazine
Bernard Baran served 22 years on dubious child molestation charges, yet the prosecutor who convicted him isn't even inconvenienced
Radley Balko | August 17, 2009
This June, District Attorney David Capeless of Berkshire County, Massachusetts announced that he was dropping all charges against 44-year-old Bernard Baran, a man who has spent half his life behind bars on child molestation charges that the state no longer has the confidence to retry.
Baran was convicted in January 1985 of molesting six children at a pre-Kindergarten daycare facility in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was released on bond in 2006 after an appeals court determined [PDF] that his trial attorney had been incompetent and that the prosecution may have withheld key exculpatory evidence. Baran says that during his jail term he was raped and beaten more than 30 times, necessitating six different transfers to new correctional institutions. Such is the cost the prison system exacts on an openly gay man convicted of molesting children.
Baran was one of the first people in the country to be prosecuted in the daycare sex abuse panic of the 1980s, a bizarre, nationwide hysteria fed by fears of satanism, homophobia, and a wing of child psychology that used unproven interrogation techniques critics say caused children to recount sexual incidents that never took place.
While Baran's case has been covered extensively in Massachusetts, and recently in the national media, one aspect of it still hasn't really been examined. Prosecutor Daniel Ford likely engaged in serious misconduct and open bigotry in winning his conviction of Baran. Yet in 25 years, Ford has never been investigated or disciplined for his role in the case. And since 1989, Ford has sat as a judge on the Massachusetts Superior Court. Ford's career trajectory and lack of accountability is the far too familiar product of the backward incentive structure that prosecutors work under. Convictions produce rewards, while abuse rarely comes with a penalty.
The most serious allegation against Ford in this case concerns an edited video interview with the children he presented to the grand jury that indicted Baran. According to court documents, the video shows several children alleging that Baran had sexually abused them. But edited out was footage in which some of the children denied any abuse by Baran, accused other members of the daycare faculty of abuse or of witnessing abuse, and, most importantly, depicted interrogators asking the same questions over and over—even after repeated denials—until a child gave them an affirmative answer. Some children were even given rewards for their answers.
Withholding the unedited video from the grand jury was itself an act of misconduct. And Ford may also have withheld it from Baran's trial attorney. We can only say "may" because there's never been a hearing, and Baran's trial attorney was far from competent. (Judge Ford did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) In granting Baran a new trial in 2006 [PDF], Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Francis Fecteau never moved beyond the inadequacy of Baran's lawyer. Harvey Silverglate, one of Baran's appellate attorneys (and also a Reason contributor), says Fecteau's passing over the misconduct claims was entirely appropriate. "For the purposes of judicial economy, judges only focus on what's necessary to make a ruling," he says. "Judge Fecteau is a hero, here. I don't fault him at all."
When the case reached the state appeals court, the justices there not only upheld Fecteau's ruling [PDF], they looked more closely at Ford's possible misconduct. "While the record does not settle the question whether the unedited videotapes were deliberately withheld by the prosecution," the ruling read, "there are indications in the trial transcript consistent with that contention."
The appellate court further noted that it took years for Baran's appellate lawyers to get prosecutors to turn over the unedited tapes. Baran's attorneys originally filed a motion for the tapes in 2000. For three years, then District Attorney Gerard Downing, who assisted in Baran's original trial, claimed to be unable to locate the tapes. When Downing died of a sudden heart attack in December 2003, David Capeless took over as D.A. When a court ordered Capeless to find the tapes, he was able to produce them within months. The appellate court opinion cited other examples of Ford failing to turn over exculpatory evidence, too, including evidence that two of the children who accused Baran may have suffered prior sexual abuse.
The case against Baran was also awash in homophobia. According to court documents, the first parents to come forward with accusations against Baran in September 1984 had just days earlier registered a complaint with the center upon noticing Baran was "queer" by the way he walked and talked. The boy's mother, who thought gays "shouldn't be allowed out in public" much less permitted to work at daycare centers, said that she "didn't want no homo" watching her son.
When that child later tested positive for gonorrhea of the throat, Ford used the test against Baran at trial, even though A) the child never accused Baran of forcing him to perform oral sex, B) the child, in fact, specifically denied having sexual contact with Baran on the witness stand, C) Baran tested negative for gonorrhea, D) the boy had told his mother two months prior that his stepfather had orally raped him, and E) on the very day Baran was convicted, charges against the stepfather were turned over to the D.A.'s office for possible prosecution. Baran's counsel was never informed of the allegation against the stepfather. Addressing the gonorrhea issue in his closing arguments, Ford implied that Baran's "lifestyle" made it probable that he contracted gonorrhea at other times and knew how to quickly eradicate it to cover his tracks.
In his closing argment, Ford likened Baran's job at a daycare center to a "chocoholic in a candy store," and hypothesized that in the "five or ten minutes" he was able to be alone with a child without being seen by other staff or children, Baran "could have sodomized and abused those children whenever he felt the primitive urge to satisfy his sexual appetite." The appeals court that eventually overturned the conviction ruled that the incompetence of Baran's counsel "facilitated the speculative, stereotypical, and deeply insidious links between homosexuality, gonorrhea, and child molestation."
An affidavit signed by Baran's boyfriend at the time also paints Ford as a homophobe. According to the document, the D.A. spent an inordinate amount of time asking Baran's boyfriend about his own sex life, employing variations of the word faggot, and a mocking, drawn-out pronunciation of homosexual. The affidavit alleges that in the ensuing months, Baran's boyfriend was pulled over by police officers and further harassed on a daily basis, and that Ford told him, illegally, that if he spoke with Baran or Baran's defense attorney, he would be arrested. This of course is just an accusation. But it's a serious one, particularly against a sitting judge. And it has never been properly investigated.
In upholding the ruling that granted Baran a new trial, the appeals court added in a footnote that if the state wanted to retry him, Baran could file a motion for a hearing on Ford's possible misconduct. By dropping the charges, the D.A. avoided that hearing. "In my opinion, the possibility of an embarrassing hearing into misconduct by a former prosecutor and now sitting Superior Court judge was the main reason, if not the reason, they decided to drop the charges," Silverglate claims. "The appeals court opinion cut a bit too close to the bone for them."
So while Bernard Baran is free after 22 years of incarceration, at the moment there is no plan to look into the actions of the prosecutor, now a sitting judge, responsible for the conviction. In his position on the Massachusetts Superior Court for the last 20 years, Ford has presided over some of the state's most serious criminal trials. He also serves on a committee that helps determine the state's rules and guidelines of criminal procedure.
Baran has said he isn't sure he wants to endure a lawsuit, but even if he did such a suit would still be unlikely to get to Ford. Prosecutors enjoy absolute immunity from civil rights lawsuits, even in cases of misconduct that lead to false convictions. And they're rarely disciplined in other ways, either. Appeals courts rarely even mention prosecutors by name when criticizing their conduct. (Ford wasn't named in the Massachusetts appellate court's decision.) Courts and bar associations also rarely hand down professional sanctions. According to a study released earlier this year by the advocacy group The Justice Project, "Despite the prevalence of prosecutorial misconduct all over the country, states have consistently failed to investigate or sanction prosecutors who commit acts of misconduct in order to secure convictions."
The only way Ford's actions in the Baran case could now be examined would be for one of the state's legal ethics boards to open an investigation, either on its own or in response to a complaint. Silverglate says that if there's no action in the coming months, he may file a complaint himself.
Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason magazine.
Discuss this article online.
Try Reason's award-winning print edition today! Your first issue is FREE if you are not completely satisfied.
Bullets and Barrels
The New York Times
June 21, 2009
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The popular uprising unfolding in Iran right now really is remarkable. It is the rarest of rare things — more rare than snow in Saudi Arabia, more unlikely than finding a ham sandwich at the Wailing Wall, more unusual than water-skiing in the Sahara. It is a popular uprising in a Middle Eastern oil state.
Why is this so unusual? Because in most Middle East states, power grows out of the barrel of a gun and out of a barrel of oil — and that combination is very hard to overthrow.
Oil is a key reason that democracy has had such a hard time emerging in the Middle East, except in one of the few states with no oil: Lebanon. Because once kings and dictators seize power, they can entrench themselves, not only by imprisoning their foes and killing their enemies, but by buying off their people and using oil wealth to build huge internal security apparatuses.
There is only one precedent for an oil-funded autocrat in the Middle East being toppled by a people’s revolution, not by a military coup, and that was in ... Iran.
Recall that in 1979, when the Iranian people rose up against the shah of Iran in an Islamic Revolution spearheaded by Ayatollah Khomeini, the shah controlled the army, the Savak secret police and a vast network of oil-funded patronage. But at some point, enough people taking to the streets and defying his authority, and taking bullets as well, broke the shah’s spell. All the shah’s horses and all the shah’s men, couldn’t put his regime back together again.
The Islamic Revolution has learned from the shah. It has used its oil wealth — Iran is the world’s fifth-largest oil producer, exporting about 2.1 million barrels a day at around $70 a barrel — to buy off huge swaths of the population with cheap housing, government jobs and subsidized food and gasoline. It’s also used its crude to erect a vast military force — namely the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij militia — to keep itself in power.
Therefore, the big question in Iran today is: Can the green revolution led by Mir Hussein Moussavi, and backed by masses of street protestors, do to the Islamic regime what Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian people did to the shah’s regime — break its spell so all its barrels and bullets become meaningless?
Iran’s ruling mullahs were always ruthless. But they disguised it a bit with faux elections. I say faux elections because while the regime may have counted the votes accurately, it tightly controlled who could run. The choices were dark black and light black.
What happened this time is that the anger at the regime had reached such a level — because of near-20 percent unemployment and a rising youth population tired of seeing their life’s options limited by theocrats — that given a choice between a dark black regime candidate and a light black regime candidate, millions of Iranians turned out for light black: Mr. Moussavi. The Iranian people turned the regime man into their own candidate, and he seems to have been transformed by them. That is why the regime panicked and stole the election.
The playwright Tom Stoppard once observed that democracy is not the voting, “it’s the counting.” Iran’s mullahs were always ready to allow voting, as long as the counting didn’t matter, because a regime man was always going to win. But what happened this time was that in the little crack of space that the regime had to allow for even a faux election, some kind of counter-revolution was born.
Yes, its leader, Mr. Moussavi, surely is less liberal than most of his followers. But just his lighter shade of black attracted and unleashed so much pent-up frustration and hope for change among many Iranians that he became an independent candidate and, thus, his votes simply could not be counted — because they were not just a vote for him, but were a referendum against the entire regime.
But now, having voted with their ballots, Iranians who want a change will have to vote again with their bodies. A regime like Iran’s can only be brought down or changed if enough Iranians vote as they did in 1979 — in the street. That is what the regime fears most, because then it either has to shoot its own people or cede power. That is why it was no accident that the “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei, warned protestors in his Friday speech that “street challenge is not acceptable.” That’s a man who knows how he got his job.
And so the gauntlet is now thrown down. If the reformers want change, they are going to have to form a leadership, lay out their vision for Iran and keep voting in the streets — over and over and over. Only if they keep showing up with their bodies, and by so doing saying to their regime “we cannot be bought and we will not be cowed,” will their ballots be made to count.
I am rooting for them and fearing for them. Any real moderation of Iran’s leadership would have a hugely positive effect on the Middle East. But we and the reformers must have no illusions about the bullets and barrels they are up against.
A Never-Ending Sentence for the Sex Crime You Have Yet to Commit
Reason Magazine
Bill Flanigen
June 22, 2009
The Supreme Court has announced that it will hear arguments over a federal law that allows the government to confine "sexually dangerous" prisoners in mental hospitals after they've served out their sentences. According to the Department of Justice, 95 federal prisoners have been "identified as possible candidates for post-sentence detention." Back in January, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the law as unconstitutional. The 4th Circuit's justification:
The Constitution does not empower the federal government to confine a person solely because of asserted "sexual dangerousness" when the Government need not allege (let alone prove) that this "dangerousness" violates any federal law.
A commenter at Sentencing Law and Policy (linked above) points out probably the strangest element of the law in question (18 USC 4248): It allows the government to detain "sexually dangerous" persons regardless of their crime:
Section 4248 does not require that the potential committee has ever been convicted of a federal sex offense, or indeed ANY sex offense. All it requires (on this issue) is that the govt prove, by clear and convincing evidence, that the person has at some time in his or her life engaged in child molestation or sexually violent conduct (both as defined by BOP regs).
http://www.reason.com
Sexually Violent Predator Legislation Introduced by Assemblymember Pedro Nava
Ed: But what do we do about the "worst-of-the-worst" politicians?
California State Assembly member Pedro Nava announces the introduction of legislation to protect victims and our communities from sexually violent predators.
"We need to make sure that the worst of the worst offenders do not inflict more harm on our neighborhoods," said Nava. "This measure provides vital protections to victims, their families and communities from sexually violent predators."
Harriet Salarno, Chair of Crime Victims United of California, said, "Crime Victims United of California commends Assemblyman Nava for his persistence in addressing issues of concern related to juveniles and sexually violent predators. The nature of sex crimes committed by juveniles provides good insight into the individual´s potential sexual and violent tendencies as an adult. Research seems to show that many sex offenders began their sexually abusive behavior as juveniles. AB 168 would provide the appropriate agencies charged with assessment of offenders with more information about SVP candidates to assist in more accurately assessing the threat they pose to the public."
Said, Jim Provenza, Special Assistant to Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley, "AB 168 will permit sealed juvenile records of violent sex criminals to be reviewed by mental health professionals to help determine if the offender should be confined for mental health treatment at the end of his or her prison term. Without this law prosecutors will be unable to prevent the release of some sexually violent predators into our communities."
AB 168 - Sex Crime Disclosure Act
The Sex Crime Disclosure Act permits the courts access to the full history of sex crimes committed by the most violent sex offenders when prosecutors are trying to civilly commit them after their prison sentence has been completed. Records of these offenses contain sociological and psychological reports that are valuable tools for inspection and use in a Sexual Violent Predator (SVP) proceeding. By having this information available during an SVP proceeding, it will enable those who have committed the most egregious acts to be civilly committed and prevented from inflicting more harm on our communities.
AB 61 ? The Sex Crime Loophole Closure Act
Last week Assemblymember Nava announced the introduction of AB 61, The Sex Crime Loophole Closure Act, which will prohibit authorities from granting "deferred entry of judgment" to juveniles who have committed sex offenses. Deferred judgment can be used to "launder" or expunge egregious sex crimes from a juvenile´s record. This measure will stop the practice of sending juveniles straight to probation if they have committed egregious sex crimes.
Assemblymember Nava, Crime Victims United and the public safety community believe that these measures are necessary to provide more tools to keep the most violent predators off our streets.
Life Without Parole For Rape at 13 Cruel and Unusual?
A man who was convicted of rape at age 13 (he is now 33) and sentenced to life without parole is petitioning the Supreme Court to consider whether his sentence is a violation of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Sentencing Law & Policy has more. You may read his petition for a writ of certiorari here. From the New York Times:
The victim testified that her assailant was “a colored boy” who “had kinky hair and he was quite black and he was small.” She said she “did not see him full in the face” and so would not recognize him by sight. But she recalled her attacker saying something like, “If you can’t identify me, I may not have to kill you.”
At his trial, Mr. Sullivan was made to say those words several times.
“It’s been six months,” the woman said on the witness stand. “It’s hard, but it does sound similar.”
The trial lasted a day and ended in conviction. Then Judge Nicholas Geeker, of the circuit court in Escambia County, sentenced Mr. Sullivan to life without the possibility of parole.
“I’m going to send him away for as long as I can,” Judge Geeker said.
Mr. Sullivan is 33 now, and his lawyers have asked the United States Supreme Court to consider the question of whether the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment extends to sentencing someone who was barely a teenager to die in prison for a crime that did not involve a killing.
People can argue about whether the punishment in Mr. Sullivan’s case is cruel. There is no question that it is unusual.
According to court papers and a report from the Equal Justice Initiative, which now represents Mr. Sullivan, only eight people in the world are serving sentences of life without parole for crimes they committed when they were 13. All are in the United States.
And there are only two people in that group whose crimes did not involve a killing. Both are in Florida, and both are black.
Joe Sullivan is one; Ian Manuel, who is in prison for a 1990 robbery and attempted murder, is the other.
About 1,000 people under 15 are arrested on rape charges every year, according to Justice Department data. But none of them have been sentenced to life without parole since Mr. Sullivan was. Indeed, no 13-year-old has been sentenced to life without parole for any crime that did not involve a killing in more than 15 years.
Florida’s attorney general, Bill McCollum, waived his right to file a response to Mr. Sullivan’s petition to the Supreme Court, a sign suggesting that he considers the case insubstantial if not frivolous. Sandi Copes, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCollum’s office, declined to discuss the case.
Last month, the court indicated that it found the case more interesting than Florida does, requesting a response from the state. That probably means that at least one justice considered the case significant or difficult. But it is nothing like a guarantee that the court will agree to hear it.
On the other hand, the question of whether life without parole for juveniles is constitutional is the logical next step following the court’s 2005 decision in Roper v. Simmons, which struck down the death penalty for crimes committed by 16- and 17-year-olds. Writing for the majority in that case, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said that even older teenagers are different from adults. They are less mature, more impulsive, more susceptible to peer pressure and more likely to change for the better over time.
Last year, in Kennedy v. Louisiana, the court issued another ruling that helps frame Mr. Sullivan’s case. That decision said crimes against individuals that did not involve killing, including the rape of a child by an adult, may not be punished by death.
In 2007, after Mr. Sullivan had served almost two decades in prison, a Florida appeals court declined to have another look at his case. The Roper decision, the appeals court said, “established only one new constitutional right, the right for a juvenile not to be given the death penalty.”
Douglas A. Berman, an authority on sentencing law at Ohio State, said it was time for the Supreme Court and the legal system to widen its relentless focus on capital cases and to look at other severe sentences as well. Cases involving the death penalty receive careful review at multiple levels, he said. Life sentences can receive almost none.
Mr. Sullivan’s trial, for instance, lasted a day. He was represented by a lawyer who made no opening statement and whose closing argument occupies about three double-spaced pages of the trial transcript. The lawyer was later suspended, and the Florida Bar’s Web site says he is “not eligible to practice in Florida.”
There was biological evidence from the rape, but it was not presented at the trial. When Mr. Sullivan’s new lawyers recently sought to conduct DNA testing on it, they were told that the state had destroyed it in 1993.
“I absolutely believe he is innocent,” Bryan A. Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, said of Mr. Sullivan. Mr. Stevenson said he believed that one of the older youths who committed the burglary with Mr. Sullivan and who testified against him was probably the actual assailant.
But the point made by Mr. Sullivan’s brief to the Supreme Court is not that he is innocent. It is not even that he should be released after 20 years in prison. It is only that he should someday be allowed to make his case to the Florida Parole Commission.
“I don’t think it’s possible to say that a 13-year-old will never change and that life without parole is an appropriate punishment,” Mr. Stevenson said.
Aside from Mr. Sullivan’s case, it seems there is only one other appeals court decision about whether young teenagers may be locked away forever for rape. It was issued 40 years ago in Kentucky, and it involved two 14-year-olds. The court struck down the part of the sentences precluding the possibility of parole.
Juveniles “are not permitted to vote, to contract, to purchase alcoholic beverages or to marry without the consent of their parents,” the court said. “It seems inconsistent that one be denied the fruits of the tree of the law, yet subjected to all of its thorns.”
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.
'That paedo is going to get it': Drunken vigilante's threat to police moments before he knifed child porn suspect to death
Victim: Geoffrey Harries, a former policeman charged with child pornography offences, was allegedly stabbed to death by Daniel Williams
A former police officer facing child porn charges was stabbed to death by a drunken neighbour, a court heard today.
Geoffrey Harries, 49, died after Daniel Williams attacked him in the street with a heavy-duty hunting knife,a jury was told.
Williams, 30, had drunkenly boasted to police that he was going to 'get' Harries moments before carrying out the crime.
'That paedo is going to get it. I'm going to have him,' he reportedly told officers. 'If you don't do something about it then I will.'
Head of N.D. S.V.P. Program Sentenced to Seven Years
Man found dead in cold was turned away from shelters in past because he was sex offender
Ed: Of course, most people won't care, convinced as they are that sex offenders are necessarily beasts undeserving of living or, for that matter, any of the rights everyone else in the U.S. enjoys. Not only is this predictable (I did so here several months ago at the onset of winter amid reports that S.O.s were being refused entry to homeless shelters) but what is also certain is that these policies will continue into the foreseeable future without the slightest concern for their murderous consequences. It's just as certain that states like California, in the midst of its worst fiscal crisis in decades, will continue to imprison sex offenders whom they have permanently detained in Coalinga State Hospital after they have completed their long prison sentences at a cost of nearly a half million dollars each PER YEAR. One no longer expects rational public policy when the topic is sex offenders. For too long we have been under the spell of the hysterics. And able deprogrammers are nowhere on the horizon... GRAND RAPIDS -- A man found dead on the streets Monday had tried in recent weeks to gain admittance to at least one of two Heartside missions, but was denied a bed because he is a registered sex offender. Officials say its possible Thomas Pauli might be alive today except for a state law prohibiting him from establishing a residence even for one night within 1,000 feet of a school, in this case, Catholic Central High, also located in the Heartside district. "It's heartbreaking. I have a hard time even talking about it," said Marge Palmerlee, executive director at Degage Ministries. Palmerlee said she had talked to at least two people who told her Pauli had tried earlier this month to secure a bed at one or both missions. Bill Merchut of Mel Trotter and Bill Shaffer of Guiding Light agreed that Pauli may have tried to gain entrance, but that their missions risk fines and loss of license if they admit sex offenders. They do not track everyone who applies for a bed, only those who are admitted, so while they were sure Pauli had not been admitted, they couldn't be sure if he had tried. They both decried a system where there are no exceptions to the so-called Megan's Law, which sets boundaries and restrictions for those on the list. "We have to follow the law, but ethically, it feels like were responsible," said Merchut. Added Shaffer, "These men and women are clearly 'The Scarlet Letter' folks of our day. And where do they go? I have no answer." Pauli, 52, served 11 years in prison for a 1991 conviction in Grand Traverse County for second-degree criminal sexual conduct, state records show. He was released in 2003 and was required to register as a sex offender. Results of an autopsy are not yet available.
How the faceless and amoral world of cyberspace has created a deeply disturbing... generation SEX
Ed: You're NOT a prude? You are the DEFINITION of a prude! And I think the shocking behavior exhibited here was by your own daughter who felt justified in physically assaulting the lad engaging in entirely voluntary sex with her friend. I shudder to imagine what your hypocritical reaction would have been had the BOY slapped around your DAUGHTER! While you, no doubt, fail to recognize in yourself your own prudishness, let's be clear that that is the moral panic with which you are afflicted. And the motivations behind your moral outrage are deeply suspect, as they have always been for ALL prudes. Adolescents HAVE sex; now GET OVER IT! And tell your damned daughter to mind her own business. The same goes for you! ]
How the faceless and amoral world of cyberspace has created a deeply disturbing... generation SEX
By Olivia Lichtenstein
Remember that Hilaire Belloc cautionary tale - Matilda told such dreadful lies, it made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes? I used to love it as a child when telling lies was one of the naughtiest things you could do: Matilda ended up getting burned to death.
These days, however, everything has changed and it’s the truths that children tell that make one gasp and stretch one’s eyes.
A couple of years ago, my daughter Francesca, then aged 13, told me about a party she had been to one Saturday night. Insight: Olivia (left) and daughter FrancescaIn the course of the evening, she came upon one of her friends, also aged 13, performing oral sex on a boy in the garden. The boy was standing and videoing the event on his mobile phone.
My daughter, in whom the feisty gene has always found strong expression, pulled her friend off the boy, knocked the phone out of his hand and slapped him round the face.
I apologise for shocking you, but then there are a number of things shocking about this event: the casual nature in which such an intimate act is performed in public, the young age of the participants and last, but by no means least, the fact that it is being filmed.
This not only signals the boy’s disassociation from the physical experience, it also indicates his intention to replay the event and, no doubt, to share his triumph with his friends as one might brandish a trophy above one’s head for all to see.
Nor was this the only such event on this particular evening. I am no prude, but Francesca painted a picture of Bacchanalia that certainly made me gasp.
Brutal Murderer Of Sex Offender Sentenced
Ex-butcher [Ed: I'd say that he's a "current" butcher] Lea Mason, 33, formerly of Turnock Street, will serve a minimum of 17 and a half years after launching a "violent and frenzied attack" on his victim.
Mason used knives to stab, and a frying pan to bludgeon, Darren Presley – until they bent or broke – then stamped on his head, which left "huge gaping holes" and soaked the killer’s trainers in blood, a judge heard.
Mason and co-defendant Stephen Brian Kidd, 37, originally from Stoke, both pleaded guilty to murder at Preston Crown Court and were sentenced last Thursday (January 22).
Mason was a thug well-known to police in Macclesfield through a string of violent offences stretching back 15 years.
He admitted the murder after being captured by police in Blackpool.
Posts
