Former Storm Lake sex crime convict leads offender rehab coalition
Still wrestling with his own demons, should Buena Vista University grad ever regain public trust?
By Dana Larsen
Storm Lake Pilot-Tribune Editor
July 6, 2009
From an inmate to an advocate, former Buena Vista University resident advisor Kyle Payne has been named executive director of the Iowa Coalition for Sex Offender Rehabilitation. Payne is one of the Iowans who in early July will be required to register on the Sex Offender registry, as legislative changes regarding offenders takes effect. He is urging Iowans not to simply ban offenders from society, but to help them reform themselves into productive citizens.
“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,” he says. “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.”
The former Storm Lake student admits that he is still working to come to grips emotionally with his own crime. In January, 2007, 22-year-old Payne was serving as RA for Buena Vista University when he attended to an intoxicated 18-year-old female student from Newell in her dorm room. He allegedly partially disrobed and touched the girl while she was unconscious, videotaping and photographing the act and downloading the files onto his computer. He was later arrested, convicted and jailed for six months.
Payne’s case received national attention, as he had been an outspoken feminist at BVU, speaking and blogging to paint himself as a protector of women, an advocate of abuse victims and an opponent of pornography. He had been nominated as senior of the year at the university and chosen as speaker at a community vigil against abuse at the county courthouse. One feminist website termed him “the biggest hypocrite in feminist history.”
Payne was released from county jail in February, subject to terms of parole and probation for up to 10 years. He moved to Sioux City in April, about the time he was contacted by the coalition and asked if he would direct the effort in Iowa. “I wasn’t really interested at the time,” Payne said. “I thought that they were too focused on civil liberties for offenders rather than on rehabilitation.”
The coalition is gradually growing in the state, and involves mostly former offenders and their family members, although Payne is trying to network the organization to work with victims’ rights groups, psychologists and attorneys for a more comprehensive effort to reform past abusers. “The dominant approach with legislation has been to restrict former offenders, in ways that don’t contribute to rehabilitation or necessarily increase public safety. In fact, by restricting offenders’ residency and work, we prevent them from having stability and in some ways may make it more likely they will reoffend,” Payne says.
The goal of his agency is to help find sustainable policies to help sex offenders re-enter society, protecting both their civil rights and the safety of the public. “As a state we have tried to remove them, tried to make them invisible, and it hasn’t worked,” he said. For one thing, society has failed to address popular culture that in some ways makes sexual aggression and predator behavior seem acceptable – in movies, music and explicit materials, he says.
While Payne finds that his own experience as a recovering sex offender has given him credibility with other offenders and their families, he is aware that his crimes will cause others to view him as a hypocrite. He said he is aware he can never count on rebuilding the trust others had once had in him as a male feminist. “I take my own rehabilitation very seriously. There is nothing I can do to take away the harm I have done, and I will deal with that for the rest of my life,” he said. “I didn’t think this situation would lead me to be an advocate, but I would be pleased if there was some way I could contribute to a safer society.”
Regardless of his position, Payne says the rights of offenders will not be foremost in his mind. “Morally, there is no place to even have a discussion unless we put the victims first,” he says. “I can draw upon my complicated history – as a survivor, a former advocate for survivors, and having hurt someone – to foster a new dialogue on sexual violence that doesn’t shy away from the complexity of this problem.”
He said that he has received financial support from the state to continue his own counseling to hope with what he claims was sexual abuse he suffered as a child. ”Leading Iowa CSOR has allowed me an opportunity to continue working against sexual violence, while also recognizing sex offenders as human beings, something I was unable to do as a victim advocate and activist against pornography.”
While working for the coalition, he continues his education part-time, seeking a masters degree in nonprofit management. He has had no contact with his victim, he says, on the advice of his attorney. “I will allow her to initiate contact if she ever wishes to, even if it is just to express the anger over what I have done to her. I would invite that – I believe it would be healthy.” He continues a blog, on which he describes himself as a “Zen Buddhist.”
The issues the coalition is working with stand to have considerable impact in Iowa – there are some 5,000 offenders on the abuse registry right now, and around 100 more poised to go on this month as the regulations change. While the Iowa CSOR has not proposed specific legislation, he says it calls for age-appropriate sex education, material and therapeutic resources for victims of sexual abuse, and treatment programs for sex offenders.
He said he hopes to see the “stranger danger” myths debunked, as statistics show that most sexual abuse comes from relatives or people well known to the victims. “We cannot allow our legislators to continue taking shortcuts,” he said. “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 cannot find a home, a job, or a community that will treat them like a human being.”
