What are some proven ways to actually cut down on sex offenses? Right now it seems like all LE and politicians want to do is go after the minority of sex offenders who get caught. But that does nothing for the 90% of victims who never come forward or for the sex offenders who only have a recidivism rate of only 10-20% (that rate may be low as that is just for people who get caught again, and the rates of getting caught are low to begin with).
Right now our system seems pretty inept. Are there proven ways to prevent sex offenders from offending the first time or to get victims to report them? It seems like alot of what we do with sex offenders is counterproductive as most sex offenders are known to the victim and if you tell a 9 year old kid that their only options are to either watch their cousin/babysitter/friend of the family get publically crucified and feel like he has ripped his family apart or do nothing about the sexual abuse that he will choose the latter.
Are there interventions potential sex offenders can get to find treatment before they offend? I don’t know if it would matter as even with something harmless like depression alot of people don’t get any treatment, they just try to deal with it on their own.
Most children who are violated are violated by their own family members. US Dept of Justice While one child predator on the prowl (whether it is on the net or in the playground) is one too many, there really are not that many of them, relative to the dangers from relatives.
I’d say we start at understanding what places a family at risk for that and once we have a greater understanding of that design interventions so that families are at less risk of being places of danger.
I don’t have that understanding myself. I suspect that some posters here have enough personal experience to offer some insights, but I am not familiar with what research has been done.
Date rape can certainly be fought through education. An alarming number of young men simply don’t know where the bounderies are. An honest discussion of this on a high school level would do wonders.
A person only seeks treatment if they want to do so. Many sex offenders have justified their acts to themselves. They don’t think of themselves as “sex offenders”, just people taken up by a set of circumstances, and they have a million reasons why what they did was not wrong.
Most of the time, a man does not wake up in the morning intending to become a sex offender. It’s usually a series of gradual steps which leads them to it. At each step, they find justification, so by the time they get to the actual crime, it doesn’t seem such a big deal.
Depression is not harmless. True depression (as opposed to just occasionally “having the blues”) can be deadly.
True, I know its not harmless as I have had it. What I meant it is not something where you go out and victimize someone else because of it like you would with pedophilia.
Well, it can be. Some people suffering from different forms of depression, such as post-partum have killed their children or other family members. (Andrea Yates, as an example.) I’m sure you’ve heard of “family anihilators”-- people who kill their families before taking their own lives. Depression can also lead to spousal/child abuse.
Fair enough. However it is far easier to admit that you have depression than to admit that you have pedophilic urges. Since so few people with depression get treatment the rates for people with pedophilia is going to be much lower.
As I understand it, it’s widely considered that the term “sex offenders” is a quite the catchall, and includes a lot of people whose crimes pale in comparison to the serial child rapist/murderers that the term often conjures up. And treatment options very widely in that group. Maybe the OP should tell us who he thinks a sex offender is.
One thing, in my opinion, that needs to really be stressed is that the victim is** not** at fault. Most offenders who are known to the victim before the offense tell the victim “if you tell…mommy will die, you’ll go to hell, you’ll be taken away…whatever.” Many children/younger teens never report molestation because they think it is their fault.
It’s kind of a catch-22. I mean, I’m inferring you think it would be easier to treat pedophiles if people felt they could talk about their pedophilic urges in a more open manner. However to do that might create a climate in which those urges become more accepted or even tolerated, which isn’t the end result we want.
There’s also the problem that many pedophiles don’t think they’re mentally ill, they view it as their sexual orientation. Ask a straight man how much psychotherapy it would take to make him prefer men over women, or vice versa for a gay man.
I guess the answer to “what works” is, “anyone’s guess, but I sure don’t know.”
Well, in a sense, they’re right. Many cultures throughout history felt it perfectly normal to have sex with children. We think it’s sick to want to have sex with children, so we assume it must be a mental illness, but our disgust is a socialized reaction.
Yes, sort of like our disgust at seeing a man beat the shit out of his wife is a socialized reaction. Everything is a socialized reaction, welcome to Sociology 101.
Cultural relativists would, I guess, just say we need to look at this with a different societal lens. Me, I’d say it’s progress that we no longer think the exploitation of those who cannot consent or defend themselves is a perfectly normal thing.
It was also, of course, perfectly normal to own slaves in many of those cultures. And et al.
Mostly pedophiles and date rapists, but mainly pedophilia which as has been brought up is usually done by an aquaintance of the victim. I’m referring to sex offenses where the vast majority of the time the victim never reports it.
I tried to dig up some cites using the 'net, but got a little concerned about where I’d end up.
Suffice it to say that slave children in many cultures, such as the Greeks and Romans were sold as sex slaves. Pre-pubescent boys were often the playthings of wealthy men. I also remember reading of one African tribe which believes that a boy does not manufacture his own semen, and must ingest that of his elders in an initiation rite to become a man. Some cultures have used masturbation as a way of getting infants to sleep. There are also some tribes in which father-daughter sex is a way of blessing the hunt.
If you want actual tribe names and the like, I’ll have to comb through some of my books.
I wish I had read the Boards earlier in the day. I usually like to get my first dose of belittlement in before breakfast.
What I was trying to get at with my previous post is that we’ve been so conditioned to be horrified and sickened by pedopilia that some assume offenders must be insane to be willing to do such things.
But it’s not a mental illness. Actual mental illnesses are things like schizophrenia. Pedophilia is classified (IIRC) as a psychosexual disorder, a whole different ball of wax. Nor does its classification necessarily mean anything, since homosexuality was, until relatively recently, classified as a* bona fide* mental illness. There are a lot of political considerations.
I think it’s important to look at sociology and anthropology for what they can tell us about human behavior, for it gives us a fuller understanding. Rather than simply condemn a behavior offhand, it make sense, I believe, to look at how that behavior was practiced in other cultures and throughout history. It’s not excusing that behavior, merely trying to understand it.
Most of the accounts I’ve read have said that while pedophilia was frowned upon, ephebophilia was common. For example “Sex in History” by Reay Tannahill states that pedophilia was illegal in ancient Greece.
You are probably thinking of Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia. It is important to note that this practice was heavily ritualized with the boy’s maternal uncles being in charge of his manliness. From the sources I have read, when child-adult sex was practiced by a culture, it is done in a highly ritualized environment and normally begins at the onset of puberty or shortly before.
As I understood, that depended on the status of the victim-- no one cared what happened to a slave, who had no legal rights or protection whatsoever. As for it being frowned upon, it again, depended on the status of the people involved, and whether or not they were fulfilling their reproductive duties. No one much cared what a man did after he had married and fathered legitimate sons. Other sexual preferences were pretty much only a problem if they interefered with him doing his duty to the family.
I have no data on this, but from what I’ve read, I’ve formulated a small theory that there is a correlation between the ritualized aspects and respect for female virginity. In cultures where virginity isn’t as much an issue, the riutal aspects seem to be less.
There is, of course, a difference between fondling and oral sex and penetrative sex. Before a certain age, a child would be physically injured by penetration, which is probably why we see more of that around the age of puberty in some cultures.
Yes, I think that is very true. Or, as in the case with the “semen-warriors” a negative few of female sexuality. In that culture, sex with a woman is regarded as draining. When a woman is devirginized, she is basically gang-banged, an act which can damage her cervix and affect her child-birthing abilities.
I think the best thing that can be done to cut down sex offenses is to educate young people about what is proper and what isn’t.
I think it would also help if people were less critical of women who claim to be the victims of date rape. While there are women who cry rape over consensual sexual encounters that they later regret, there are also women who share their experiences only to be told that they deserved it.
Looking to anthropology or sociology will simply teach us the error of how other cultures dealt with issues like this. That path leads to acceptance of pedophilia, not any sort of lasting solution.
What’s to understand? They want to have sex with children, we don’t want it to happen.
