The Jessica Lunsford Act

Jessica was the young Florida girl abducted and killed by a sexual molester. Shakespeare's Sister tells us about the new bill signed by King George's little brother, Jeb, to make conditions tougher on the people who would do this thing. She also shares her concerns.

Let me share mine as well. And - just for comparison sake - I should tell you that I experienced molestation as a child and I've experienced rape. Both facts certainly affected my life. To this day, I still cannot imagine how anyone sees a child or even another adult as just a sexual object there for their folly - something to be used and thrown away. Another adult, at least in theory, has some chance of fighting back more effectively than a child. But, especially with a child, I don't think many of us can quite get our heads around seeing a child of 7 or 9 or 12 and "clicking" on the idea of sex.

However, with that said, I've still got some big worries about what we're doing here. No one wants to see kids abused like this, much less killed. But the harsher we make the situation for someone who so much as looks twice at a child in what someone else would perceive as a sexual manner, doesn't it make it more likely that a predator who acts on an urge will kill that child, hoping that this will give them more of a chance to escape than if the child lives to tell?

But I'm very worried about treating sex offenders so much different than any other category of criminal: tracking them forever, even when they've served their sentence and even if they show no symptoms of repeating the behavior. In what other crime do we a) not allow people to return to their community and b) act like their time in prison doesn't count because we can sentence them to a life of monitoring and being pulled in every time some child goes missing? Is this really the right thing to do? Or is it the expedient bandage we apply to a situation to make us feel better?

I believe that aside from the fact that we make child cases like Lunsford's into a big media event, sexual predators do NOT represent the single largest danger to children. Last I read, parents are statistically much more likely to hurt and/or kill a child than any outside bogeyman. Only very rarely, once a parent has harmed or killed a child does a court put some condition on that person that they can never have contact with another child.

Beyond the issue of parents, it's not a sexual predator/stranger like the fellow in the Lunsford case who is most apt to get access to a child to harm them: it's someone close to the child like a clergy person, a family friend, or a relative other than the parents. In my case, my molestation occurred not from a stranger but two mature males, pillars of our community and two local churches, who had access to our home because they had been friends of my deceased father. I've read that this is the case for most kids.

People like the men in my case would probably never get processed through the system, would never be identified as sexual predators, and would not be monitored. Granted, reporting of childhood sexual abuse is taken a great deal more seriously today than it was when I was a small child in the late 1960s, but I believe the statistic stands.

We're too eager to assign bogeyman status to the poor, the mentally ill, and the transient, while being very resistant to see the dangers posed by those close to home.

Jeb Bush had strong words today for anyone who commits such a crime against children. But my, wasn't he eager to join in the fanfare the last few weeks for not one but two Popes who acted to conceal clergy who had committed these acts against kids?