RE: Not All Dangerous
From E.A. Timm (The Stokes News):
Dear Editor,
The questions asked in “Not All dangerous”, were: ‘Where there is no harm, where is the crime?” and “Why are we trying to twist this into people‚s minds as dangerous when it’s just the opposite, it‚s harmless.” They were related to older boys having sex with girls under 16 years of age, who would after conviction, be put on the National Sex Offender Registry.
Since everyone is imperfect, everyone should be looking for the truth to solve life's questions about the problems before us...
posted by BP News Bureau | 2:34 PM
1 Comments:
I think Buddy missed the point of Tena's letter.
She was objecting to the way the government uses the sex offender list and, indirectly, so the sex offender laws in general.
Here is the problem with the current situation, and the one Buddy unfortunately seems to espouse: It is incredibly dangerous to ask the government to punish intent. On the surface, we would like for law enforcement to be able to prevent crime, but that is a path fraught with danger. Once you let that camel get its nose under the tent, you leave the citizenry open for all manner of horrific abuse at the hands of the government. The unfortunate fact is that law enforcement absolutely must be limited to apprehending and punishing criminals after the fact. It is up to the judiciary to prevent crime, or more accurately to deter crime.
We might ask ourselves, are there more sexual predators (or as we used to call them, perverts) out there? The answer is probably no. All in all, I almost would be inclined to suspect that there are fewer of them because our society has become more permissive with respect to, or more tolerant of sexuality. So why do we seem to hear about this kind of thing more often?
The answer has many facets. First and foremost, it is a function of our media. Nothing sells airtime like a good, smarmy sex story. Second, believe it or not, even though our society has become more open and permissive with regard to sex, as a whole, we have drastically tightened the reigns on sexual activity considered to be sociopathic. We throw 19 year old boys in jail for having consensual sex with 16 year old girls. We have also vastly widened what is considered to be a sexual offense, as in the example I already gave. And finally, on the up-side of a more sexually permissive society, the social stigma associated with being the victim of a bona fide sexual crime has diminished, so more of these incidents are being reported.
There was a time, not so very long ago at all, when it was recognized that 16 year olds are not children. I have friends who were married in their mid-teens. Their parents were married in their early teens. My paternal grandmother gave birth to her second child, my father, at age 14. In reply, it is invariably stated that people's lifespans are longer than they used to be. My answer to that is that cars are faster than they used to be and that is no more germane to the subject than are lifespans from two generations ago. First, because they weren't all that much shorter, and second, for that to even be a factor, girls and boys would also need to sexually mature later. Even the most causal observer can see that is not the case.
The simple fact is that parents must bear, as they have always borne in the past, the lion's share of responsibility for protecting their children from sexual predators. All the inevitable whining about how hard that is to do these days holds not an ounce of water. It is no more difficult to protect your children from perverts than it ever was, and I would offer that the ubiquity of law enforcement and instantaneous communication actually make it easier. The sad fact is that many parents are far too self-absorbed in their own pursuits to be bothered with monitoring their kids Internet usage or finding out what they're doing after school. Like the lions in the veldt, the predators who are out there will swiftly find the calf that is ignored by its inattentive mother.
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