Picked up by the Fort Dodge Messenger, Storm Lake Pilot-Tribune, Des Moines Register, and Cedar Rapids Gazette.
Over the next few days, thousands of former sex offenders in Iowa, many of whom have served their sentence and worked diligently to make amends, will be scrambling to comply with a wide range of new restrictions on their lives. Not because they have been classified at a high risk to re-offend. Not because they pose a legitimate threat to any Iowan perusing the sex offender registry. But, as perhaps we will grow to recognize in the next few years, because we lack a government with the wisdom and courage to address sexual violence through a comprehensive approach.
With any luck, our legislators will stop labeling and demonizing the tiny fraction of perpetrators who are convicted for their crimes, and who, with the right support and guidance, can rehabilitate. Perhaps then legislators might truly protect Iowa’s children by addressing the circumstances of most acts of sexual violence – when victim and perpetrator are acquaintances, or even family members, when the perpetrator has never been caught, and when the victim is unable to report the abuse. The myths of “stranger danger” and the incurable “sexual predator,” long debunked by scholars, need to finally be removed from our laws.
Make no mistake. Confronting sexual violence in our society is a very complicated mission. And as a result, we cannot allow our legislators to continue taking shortcuts. We cannot continue to be distracted by the claim that the real problem of sexual violence is a few thousand “bad people,” while we pretend that former offenders are less likely to re-offend if they can’t find a home, a job, or a community that will treat them like a human being. As a society, we are responsible for every victim who is unable to leave an abusive relationship, every child whose ignorance about sexuality is exploited, every institution that praises those who exploit the weakness of others, and every perpetrator who is in dire need of rehabilitation. Let’s start acting like it.
Christine Z. said
I believe that if we stop demonizing and hounding ’sex offenders’ we will make it easier for victims to come forward. It is already difficult for them to tell due to family dynamics which tend to encourage denial of any scandal, but also, there is the fear of the draconian consequences they will have to share with their abuser.
If this is ever to end, we need to let go of our Puritan repressiveness that leads to a constant preoccupation with sex while pretending it’s somehow dirty.
The thing to do is to see a sex crime as just another crime.