casual cruelty to children

Children suffer when a parent goes to prison but who would expect that the suffering can be worse when that parent is released from prison? After the parent has been away from home for years, the anticipated reunion is often prohibited, even when the child was not a victim of the parent's crime.

A man who was convicted of possession of child pornography, released to a halfway house to serve out the remaining few months of his sentence, is not allowed to see his children. He is not allowed to talk to them on the phone or to write to them.

He must be dangerous to them, one might think.

If he were a danger to his own children, why was he allowed to live at home between entering his plea and his sentencing? Why were the kids allowed to visit him at prison?

His halfway house is 30 minutes from his home. The kids know he is out of prison and they know they are not allowed to see him. Their mother can spend time with him but he can be sent back to prison if he sees or talks to the kids.

How does this make sense? How can this cruelty be anything but evil? It protects no one and throws children into an emotional tailspin they most emphatically do not deserve.

Another family, another cruelty:

The dad is out of prison but not allowed to see his son. Before he can see his son, his probation officer and his therapist require him to disclose the details of his crime to the son. This was a hands-on crime, so the thirteen-year-old son will hear every detail of the crime. It gets worse. The disclosure will also include details about sex between the parents, whose sexual activities were not part of the crime in any way.

What middle-school child needs to hear details of any sexual encounters, let alone his dad's? Note, too, that the therapist requiring the disclosure is not the boy's therapist. If the boy is seeing a therapist, that therapist was not asked if this disclosure was wise. One wonders if the continual discussion of details of the sex crime is gratifying in some way to the probation officer or the therapist.

The casual disregard for the children of sex offenders is astounding. 

high shock value; low information value

Fourteen men arrested for exploiting children via the Internet. 
Twenty-seven thousand subscribers of the website operated by those arrested.
Two hundred fifty-one victims as young as 3 years old. 
Forty terabytes of pornographic images.

According to a Reuters article on Townhall.com, a Department of Homeland Security investigation uncovered a 27,000-member, subscriber-only website (or websites; it is not clear) that made child pornography available. 

According to a USA Today article,

Those members and users, according to documents, "coerced hundreds of minor boys to record themselves engaging in sexually explicit conduct.'' Unknown to the child victims, the videos were allegedly transmitted to Johnson's sites, allowing members to view and download the videos.

This sounds horrifying. Some of it may be but let's sort out the words calculated to shock and frighten us.

On the USA Today video, the ICE spokesman says the amount of storage needed for the porn on the web servers was 

...forty terabytes, five times the size of all the information stored by the Library of Congress.

That's an impressive number, to be sure. Not many of us have an external drive that holds even a single terabyte, so forty terabytes must be, like, VAST. On the same video, a line from a court document is highlighted:

...websites contained approximately 2000 sexually explicit videos of young boys...

It is safe to say that a boy masturbating in front of a webcam (with parents and/or siblings down the hall) is not likely to produce a full two-hour movie so those 2000 videos cannot account for all forty terabytes. The website must have offered images other than those of the boys, perhaps even--dare to imagine--legal pornography. 

In addition, the comparison to the size of the Library of Congress ignores the fact that no one knows how many terabytes (or petabytes) of storage the LOC would require if all its documents--and movies!--were digitized. The comparison was used for effect, not for accuracy.

The victims were all boys ages 13-15, with the exception of eight girls and two boys around three years old. Members and operators of the website enticed the boys to perform on camera and the images then ended up on the website. Sometimes the operators/members posed as young girls asking the boys to show or do something for the camera.

Hard to tell if the subscribers were all seeking child porn or how many of them were involved in soliciting the illegal images or how long any of them were subscribers. Was it a month-by-month subscription so that the same subscriber could be counted multiple times? (Rest assured that the feds have already collected as much data about the subscribers as possible from the website. I imagine they could answer my question if they were so inclined.)

Given the information we have, the victims were enticed, not forced, so we have teen-aged boys, foolishly performing before a webcam. The two little ones? Those images are not described, but if someone did something to or with those little guys, they should be held responsible. On the other hand, if the images are not described, perhaps the images don't have the shock value needed for the story.

If over 200 boys will perform for a webcam when a stranger entices them, how many boys are doing the same for their real-life friends? In this case, the boys are called victims and ICE can claim to have saved them from the bad guys. 

In other cases, teens who upload naughty videos are called child pornographers.

A careful reading of the story should raise questions as well as eyebrows. 

you thought the registry was just for sex offenders?

The sex offender registry includes more than sex offenders. A Pennsylvania woman is surprised to find that she is required to register.

Four years ago, [she] was convicted of interference with custody of children. That crime falls under the newest version of Megan's Law, and [she] must register as a real sex offender.

The news site offers what little comfort it can.

Although [she] feels singled out, there are hundreds in our area who never committed a sex crime yet they, too, are now registered as sex offenders.

Ah, well then. Hundreds of others on the registry even though they didn't commit sex offenses.

Once there is a registry, legislators will be unable to resist enlarging its scope. Legislators make laws and it is much easier to pass a law that no one dares to argue against.

Abolish the registry.

the mystery of the missing sex offenders

A fear-mongering news report from Omaha's KETV talks about sex offenders who go missing.

According to Nebraska’s sex offender registry, there are more than 900 convicted offenders living in Douglas County alone. 

Chris White, a deputy U.S. marshal with the Metro Area Fugitive Task Force, said about 90 of those convicted offenders are hiding. 

“There are more people absconding every day. That number compiles [sic] unless we get after it,” White said.

A multi-agency task force tracks down the missing sex offenders.

“I assume that they're reoffending, that they're dropping off the radar because they don't want law enforcement to know what they're doing,” White said.

Is that the only reason a sex offender might choose not to register? If the deputy U.S. marshal were paying attention, he might notice that there are one, two, three, and more reasons.

Ninety out of nine hundred sex offenders are presumed reoffending, according to White. But are they? Of all the sex offenders who have dropped off the radar, how many have been rearrested for sex crimes?

Because the recidivism rate for registered sex offenders is about 5%, we can estimate that about 45 of the 900 commit another sex offense. But wait: Failure to register is considered a sex offense even though there IS no sex offense committed--so of the 45, how many of them go back to prison for failure to register? The reporter doesn't even touch on that question.

If deputy marshal White had his way, all ninety of the missing would be back in prison, even without them having committed another sex offense.

The sex offender registry is touted as a way to protect our communities. The Nebraska registry says:

Nebraska State Statute 29-4002 declares that sex offenders present a high risk to commit repeat offenses and that efforts of law enforcement agencies to protect their communities, conduct investigations, and quickly apprehend sex offenders are impaired by the lack of available information about individuals who have pleaded guilty to or have been found guilty of sex offenses and who live in their jurisdiction. Because of that, the legislature determined that state policy should assist efforts of local law enforcement agencies to protect their communities by requiring sex offenders to register with local law enforcement agencies as provided by the Sex Offender Registration Act. 

Five percent is a high risk for repeat offenses? That seems a bit hysterical when other recidivism rates are 70.2% for robbers, 74% for burglars, and nearly 79% for car thieves. Nebraskans should be concerned that their state statutes are based on information not even close to accurate.

The Nebraska registry explains how it is to be used:

This information is to be used to provide public notice and information about a registrant so a community can develop constructive plans to prepare themselves and their family. Sex Offenders have "always" been in our communities. The notification process will remove their ability to act secretly.

The community would do better to prepare themselves and their families for the sex offenders who have yet to be apprehended because most sex offenses are first-time offenses. The next sex offense in your town will in all likelihood be committed by someone not on the registry.

The sex offender registries protecst no one, though it is possible it protects jobs for members of the task force busy tracking down 90 people--ninety people for whom the task force has no reason to believe have committed another sex crime. 

Imagining someone is out there committing crimes is not the same as reasonable suspicion. Statistics say it isn't reasonable at all.

UPDATE:
Another perspective on the same KETV news report: 

The research shows that former offenders in Nebraska have a year-to-year reoffense rate of less than 1 percent. It shows that Nebraska's public shaming website drives people from their homes. The City of Omaha has a residency restriction ordinance that illegally created a new classification of "predator" -- some harmless people with misdemeanors fall under the classification. Why not assume someone's been evicted because of the ordinance? That's just as likely or more likely than the reoffending. 

Nebraskans Unafraid has documented cases where a former offender has reported the correct address to a local sheriff, but the address still ends up listed incorrectly on the registry because of a clerical error. An offender might go to prison because of a clerical error. It is as easy to assume someone in a short-staffed law enforcement office is messing things up as it is to assume that a former offender is reoffending.

"ruining the life of the offenders in the name of justice is not working"

A woman who grew up in a family that suffered incest talks about healing. She talks about the abuse her father experienced as a child and the effect that abuse had on him as a parent himself. She says the current approach--yanking the offender from the home and isolating him with incarceration and then with the sex offender registry--does little to help the family heal.

We have it all wrong. Shunning the offenders is not working. Locking them up is not working. Settling in court for massive sums of money is not working. Ruining the life of the offenders in the name of justice is not working. Leaving victims to pick up the pieces of their life alone is not working. The sexual abuse of our boys and girls is still going on, generation after generation.

Kim Cottrell watched her sister suffer through incest and considers herself an incest survivor because everyone in the family felt the effects of it. Years later, when her father had a stroke, she brought him to her home to care for him, something we do not expect to happen in families like this.

She has her own ideas about how to help families heal.

I wonder if we could agree, the first goal is to stop the molestation and abuse of children. I used to think it was as simple as finding evidence, separating kids from their parents or abuser, and locking them up. Case closed. But when I was a speech pathologist in a large trauma hospital where I worked with babies and young children who’d been hit or shaken by adults, enough to cause brain damage, I saw a different side of the story. In many situations, removing the child from the parents caused further trauma. That’s when I realized it’s not so simple.

Not so simple. Families who have been separated from the offender do not magically turn into happy families when the offender is gone. The offender was always more than what he did to harm the family. He may have been the breadwinner, the funny guy at breakfast, the one who taught the kids how to ride a bike, the one who took the kids fishing. When the offender is removed from the family, the man who plays Scrabble and teaches shoe-tying goes with him.

The current system--law enforcement, child protective services, the courts--behaves as if the child will be relieved that the offender is gone. Instead, in many cases, the child victim would be more relieved if the offending behavior stopped and the no-longer-offending family member were still in the home.

Second, and I don’t expect agreement but I believe this is crucial, we need to stop pursuing vengeance. We must lay down the judgment and shame game. 

Our capacity for forgiveness should be given more room.

For there to be any systemic, generational healing, we need to bring secrets out in the open. We need to stop banishing people, offenders or victims. We need to slow down enough to let the healing process take place. We need to support the healing process and let it be a normal part of life. There is clearly no evidence blaming, shaming, and shunning have anything to do with finding our way out of this crisis and the crisis our children are facing today.

She is clear about responsibility but she is also clear about forgiveness and shame.

...the fact I’m caring for my father does not excuse his behavior. Nor is it my place to absolve him of responsibility for those he has hurt. What is true is that, together, he and I worked on our relationship and I no longer need his penance. Knowing he wakes up every single morning with the shame of destroying his family has taken away any taste I had for restitution.

Caring for him when he still feels such shame about his life, that's mercy.

the "super" in Super Bowl isn't where the hyperbole is

Derek Logue at OnceFallen thoroughly fisks an article about sex trafficking at the Super Bowl.

One of the newest prevailing myths is that the Super Bowl is now a yearly magnet for roughly 100,000 "sex traffickers," or what we used to like to refer to as "prostitution." You see, we no longer refer to prostitutes as prostitutes, but "sex trafficking victims." Now granted, a small number of Americans are forced into doing really bad things, like forced prostitution. Many more do so for reasons such as supporting a habit or because it is fast and easy money. That 100,000 number is ridiculous, by the way, since the biggest Super Bowl in history had about 105,000 or so official attendees. That would be about one prostitute for damn near every Super Bowl attendee. But I digress.

The FBI partnered with over 50 law enforcement agencies to fight sex trafficking at the Super Bowl, even fighting it in states through which the traffickers might have traveled to reach their destination. A hundred thousand sex traffickers, descending on a football game that isn't particularly known as an event where guys go to get laid.

The FBI plus 50 (FIFTY!) law enforcement agencies were able to rescue 16 teenagers. Sixteen teenagers out of 100,000 sex traffickers.

Before you fire the confetti cannons, read the whole thing.

surrounded by goodness

A fat, lacy, glittery Valentine to~

...the therapist who said, "It's good that you are surrounding your husband with love and support."

...family and friends who send letters and cards to inmates.

...co-workers who understand why we might need a long lunch on tough days.

...friends who wave the lonely mom over to sit with them at school events.

...prison corrections officers whose eyes soften a little when they see children greet an incarcerated family member.

...those who slip an arm around our shoulders when our anxiety is noticeable.

...our kids' school friends who know the story and don't spread it around.

...those who ask what prison is like.

...bloggers and journalists who acknowledge the unfair sentences and the cruel sex offender registry.

...teachers who recognize that our family is dealing with something difficult.

...those who listen and listen again.

...school friends' parents who treat our kids like all the others.

...those who can see that the sex offender registry encourages an unreasoning fear of all sex offenders.

...women who hold each other up in their similar struggles.

...men who support women sex offenders; they must feel more lonely than we women do.

...friends who ask how to get permission for a prison visit.

...those who don't say anything but pray hard for us.

So many wonderful people out there supporting sex offenders and our families. May your examples teach others.