Sex Offenders

Yesterday, in line with a national trend, the Governor of the State of Washington signed into law 18 new pieces of legislation having to do with sex offenders. Fear of a repeat of 9/11 has probably been surpassed by fear that a sexual offender might move next door.

Terrorists and sex offenders engage in behavior that deviates from a societal standard. Terrorists use violence to obtain submission. But so do soldiers. The standard to be applied to perpetrators of violence may depend on who is doing the application. The society of an occupied nation may see insurgents as soldiers and the occupying forces as terrorists. Tailgaters are terrorists and are in violation of laws about not following too closely, but tailgating seems to in fact be quite acceptable on the freeways and even celebrated in the very popular NASCAR races. By stark contrast, sex offenders receive zero tolerance.

Some sex offenders use violence or the threat of violence, but many don’t. If society has an honestly informed basis to fear that a violent sex offender will offend again, then continued incarceration would seem a more appropriate societal protection than release with publication of the registered address of the offender. Predatory offenders who seek to exploit the young and otherwise vulnerable need to be treated like violent offenders, if the likelihood of repeat offending is reasonably high. While in prison, offenders should receive counseling, both for the purpose of gathering generic research data on offenders and to attempt rehabilitation. Prisons are currently overrun with drug offenders, but if diversion and treatment programs are properly used for them, space should be available for longer incarceration of sex offenders who are highly likely to offend again.

Marginal sex offenders should be dealt with by diversion and counseling. These are the cases which ensnare people who are not really deviant but may have barely crossed a line one time and got in trouble. The man who notices his neighbor lady undressing with the blinds open and moves closer to her window for a better look, for example.

One of the few things that has been around as long as sex is sexual ignorance. Only in the last 100 years did Freud open doors of thought about the libido and Kinsey gather and publish significant statistical data. Recently, 60 Minutes ran an interesting piece about the likelihood of a male being born homosexual. Statistics have proven the likelihood increases with the number of older male siblings a male child has. Scientists think the reason may be that the mother is programmed to try to keep the sex of her children fairly equal, so as the number of male children gets too far ahead, she tries to change the male child in the womb and affects it hormonally. Apparently the mother can only do this with males, because the inherent sexual difference between mother and son facilitates her detection of the problem, and she possesses the female hormones to pass onto him.

In the 2004 Presidential Debate, when asked if he believes homosexuality is a choice, George W. Bush said he did not know, and he gave no indication he was interested in finding out the answer. I suppose if asked about the research reported on 60 Minutes he might speculate that boys with lots of older brothers may be choosing to act gay in order to seem different.

Our society, like George W. Bush, is irresponsible in not properly educating ourselves and our children about sexual matters. Ignorance of the elders has perennially been passed along to the children. Churches have presented a moral view of sex, requiring abstinence until marriage, based on doctrinal views, but without other educational background materials. Sex education has historically been obtained on the street from older peers, and now the Internet overwhelms our tech savvy children with sexually explicit materials, violent, predatory and marginal.

The more we learn about sex and about how people become sexual deviants, the better job we will be able to do through our educational system of reducing the number of sex offenders in the future.

We need a four part societal program:
1. Keep violent and predatory sex offenders in prison until we are reasonably sure they are not likely to offend again, and counsel and learn from them while they are in prison,
2. Divert and counsel marginal offenders,
3. Fund and encourage worthwhile sex research,
4. Develop and utilize effective sex education programs for both our students and their parents, as a public health requirement to be met regardless of whether the student attends public school or not.