In an email that I received at work today requesting donations for an area organization that helps sexually abused children, there were two statistics that I found very, very disturbing. The first said that one out of every four girls and one out of every six boys will be abused during their childhoods, and the other said that a chronic sex offender averages 200 victims in his (or her) lifetime.
I had noticed lately that there was at least one new story a night on the local news about a sex offender being caught, tried, convicted, sentenced, etc. I can’t help but wonder whether sexual abuse has always been so widespread. Some have pointed out that the city that is about a twenty minute drive from where I live is a potential haven for sex offenders since it is not home to any schools (thereby not as limiting as to where perverts can take up residence). The problem with this is that most of these sex offenders are being caught in the surrounding towns.
The thing that I just don’t understand is why someone would want to have sex with someone younger than sexual maturity. While I think that it is still morally wrong to sleep with a sixteen-year-old, it is easier to understand why an adult would be attracted to someone of that age than to small children (who are the usual victims in the news stories). Maybe it has something to do with our culture’s obsession with youth. Whatever it is, something has to give. Somehow, this has to stop.
Dear Idea, I recently wrote a piece speaking to the problem you bring up. The answer to the problem with child sex offenders is to cure them. I gave an example, copied from the footnote in a book about Jungian psychology, in which the psychologist CURED a child preditor. Homosexuality has been cured as well, though when I say this much screaming occurs.
Grimmy
Comment by grimgold — October 10, 2007 @ 9:00 am
Thanks for reading and commenting! I appreciate it. One of the best books that I’ve read about criminality was called “Without Conscience.” It was about people who are psychopathic. While I will agree with you that non-psychopathic child molesters could be cured, I really don’t think that a psychopath can be cured. Hence the fact that I support the death penalty.
Comment by idealistferret — October 10, 2007 @ 1:09 pm
Approached from an athiestic point of view, you are correct. Psychopaths and sociopaths can’t be cured supposedly. I take issue with that and say psuchologists don’t go deeply, don’t engage in depth psychology because of their belief that cure is impossible.
However, the point is that cure IS possible for all kinds of mental ills and this is being ignored.
Incarceration is a simple way of solving the problem because it separates the offender from the public. But I’d like to see much more work done to cure people of mental ills, especially the child molester BEFORE he has the chance to respond to his urges.
He needs, in his teen years, to realize that something isn’t right and get help.
The same goes for homosexuals. They don’t have to be that way, but most don’t realize they have a choice. Because they ‘were born that way’ they think they are stuck with their life style. So no research is openly done to cure them, even though cures have occcasionally occured.
I am against the death penalty because it is an easy way out for monsters and I don’t want to give an out to them. I want them to live out their lives living with the crime.
Comment by grimgold — October 10, 2007 @ 11:56 pm