'Sex Offender' Laws are Insane! : Kids Bearing Burden of Hysteria

R.L. Davis, seattle.indymedia.org, October 20, 2008

These kids are all going to be put on the sex offender registries, and their lives are never going to be the same. They will be ostracized and villified. They run the risk of having their future homes vandalized by angry neighbors. In many states, they will not be able to be within 2,500 feet of children, including their friends and siblings, not to mention the problems if they marry and have children. They may even be targets for murderers.

Why are we targeting the very people we are charged to protect?

Our world is going absolutely insane. We've lost all sense of scope or perspective, and we've abandoned common sense and reason, seemingly content to just stay the course and push forward, oblivious to the absolute stupidity of our actions.

No, I'm not talking about the Iraq War - I'm talking about our war against sex offenders. It's gone off the deep end - it's being taken to absurd ends - and no one seems to care. We're targeting the very innocence these laws are designed to protect.

Case in point - police in Newark, Ohio picked up a fifteen year old girl last week and held her over the weekend on felony charges of child pornography and possession of criminal tools. Her crime? She took nude pictures of herself with her cell phone and sent them to friends.

They're now debating on whether to charge the children to whom she sent the photos, as well.

Not surprising in Ohio, who went fully nuts in 2006, when they passed a bill that made it so you didn't have to be even charged with a sex crime to be put on their "civil" sex offender list.

Or there's Alex Phillips, the seventeen year-old boy who, after being dumped by his sixteen year-old girlfriend, uploaded to MySpace the nude photos she had sent him. Now he's facing charges of sexual exploitation of a child. I'm surprised she wasn't also arrested for producing child pornography.

There's also the case of "Amber" and "Jeremy," a couple of Florida teens who took photos and videos of themselves engaged in sexual acts at Amber's house and then emailed them to Jeremy's computer. They have been convicted of "producing, directing or promoting a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of a child." Because they were sent to his computer, Jeremy was also convicted of possession of child pornography.

The conviction was upheld on appeal, the majority opinion stating that the "Appellant was simply too young to make an intelligent decision about engaging in sexual conduct and memorializing it."

If they were too young to make an intelligent decision, how can they then be held legally responsible for it? It's a bizarre paradox where they are too innocent to choose sex, but mature enough to choose be sex offenders. I mean, the courts didn't even release their real names, to protect them!

The dissenting judge in the case rightly pointed out the obvious, that these laws were "designed to protect children from abuse by others, but it was used in this case to punish a child for her own mistake."

This is what I'm on about. These kids are all going to be put on the sex offender registries, and their lives are never going to be the same. They will be ostracized and villified. They run the risk of having their future homes vandalized by angry neighbors. In many states, they will not be able to be within 2,500 feet of children, including their friends and siblings, not to mention the problems if they marry and have children. They may even be targets for murderers.

The definition of sex offender has been expanded to the point of being so broad, its meaningless. When you look at your local registry, you don't know if your neighbor is a child-molesting pervert, or the eighteen year-old senior that got busted for consensual sex with his highschool sweetheart.

This does nothing to promote justice or make our children any safer, and in fact, has the opposite effect. With so much bad information out there on these lists, its near impossible to find the real threats to your children.

And in many cases, it is the State who is the real threat - branding our kids with their very own scarlet letters, sending innocent children out into the world with a metaphorical pervert tattoo on their foreheads.

In the case of Amber and Jeremy, the court said that "if these pictures are ultimately released, future damage may be done to these minors' careers or personal lives."