Soft on Sex Offenders

I'm a hardass about certain things - doing homework in writing class, Islamic Terrorism, returning phone calls, but I'm soft on other things, and one of those things is sex offenders.

This may sound weird, but bear with...

When I say I'm soft and hard, I mean it in a relative sense. I get much more pissed off than my average classmate when others in a writing class do not read material (or turn in material) before class. It doesn't just annoy me - it angers me. With respect to Islamic Terrorism, I don't give a flying shit about their grievances or point of view, I think they're a bunch of childlike pussies playing religious fascists for sport. And I really don't like people not returning phone calls, so much so that I'll do retributive things like not call them on their birthday. (I actually don't think I've ever done that, but basically, I'm not really friends with people who don't return calls).

When it comes to sex offenders, I don't like them, but I certainly don't share the extreme ire our society has toward them. I see them as victims in need of rehabilitation and not people who deserve to be beaten to death.

I bring this up because I spent my entire day watching Law and Order Special Victims Unit shows at work. For those of you who don't know, the Special Victims Unit is "an elite squad who deals with crimes of a sexual nature, the most heinous in our criminal justice system..." or something to that effect.

I like Law and Order. It's a really well done show. Overdone, of course, but there's a reason it's like the most produced show in the history of procedurals...but the way it portrays sex criminals as the worst of the worst and the sheer terror it tries to instill in the audience at these criminals is pretty creepy. And the media does this well - I think we all fear sex criminals more than almost any other type of criminal, the idea that they take children or women who are innocent and helpless and do all sorts of awful things that are incomprehensible to the rest of us. Of the cases I saw today, there was a murderer who stabbed a woman in her vagina repeatedly, a man who kidnapped orphaned Katrina victims, an old man who molested and killed four young boys 20+ years ago, a parent who adopted a son only to have him killed and collect insurance money, a teenage mother who abandoned her incestously created baby, and a teenage mother who had her boyfriend beat her stomach to have an abortion. Wow, that's a lot.

Law and Order uses only a sparce amount of music and beats and does so really effectively, often creating quite intense moments of sheer creepiness when you realize the calculated and awful acts of these criminals.

Another show that really disturbs me is that Catch a Predator reality TV show where they stage traps for sex predators and then catch them while the host wags his finger in disgust at the humiliated criminal. The host acts self-righteous and horrified, even though he staged the entire thing.

I'm not defending the acts of sex predators. But why does our society get so up in arms about the whole thing? Even prisoners seem complicit...in so far as sex offenders and rapists "get it" the worst in prison. We all seem to like this fact. It gives us some sort of secret warmth about the retributive nature of human beings.

Why does that comfort us? It's not as if it stops sex offenders from offending. We all know that sex offenders can't be fully deterred by being threatened prison or harsh punishment. We know that they were almost alway abused themselves as children. The pattern is more clear, I think, in this type of criminal than in any other type of criminal. So we know there is some sort of psychological explanation to the behaviour and yet we insist upon a retributive form of punishment - knowing full well it won't cure anything or deincentivize others from doing the same. It is almost as if we enjoy, in the cases of sex offenders, cruelty for cruelties sake.

We have millions of in this country who claim high moral ground for mistreatment of terrorist detainees and I'm guessing most of them would - if it were up to them - seriously consider cutting the balls off of sex offenders. Maybe I'm wrong.

But what about the crimes? What is the solution? I don't know. I just know we as a society hate sex offenders more than any other type of criminal and I don't think the statistics would bear out that sex offenses hurt society very much at all compared to other crime.