Let's Talk About Sex...Offenders
SCANDALS! SCANDALS!
My various news feeds have been recently peppered with reports of Rob Lowe’s October interview on SiriusXM where he characterizes the sex scandal of 1989 as the “best thing that happened to me”. He states, the experience got him sober, a wife and now he has a charmed life with two great sons. Lowe has never denied having sex with the 16-year-old he met in a night club in Atlanta in 1988. He says he didn’t know she was underaged because she used a fake ID to get into the club and because she joined into a threesome with him and her 23-year-old friend. But all that didn’t really matter. The age of consent in Georgia at the time was 16. Heck, the age of consent in Georgia was only 10 until 1918!
Afterward, the two women took the scandalous videotape of the three having sex from Lowe’s hotel room and it was leaked to the press months afterward when the teenager’s mother decided to sue Lowe for seducing her daughter. All of this was later settled out of court and his life went on.
Okay, the whole thing was certainly a set-back for Lowe’s career at the time, and he is taking a bit of heat all over the Twittersphere right now for saying it all worked out for his good. But, in the grand scheme of things, Lowe escaped unscathed, especially when we think about the state of sexual scandals today—at least here in Oregon where having “consensual” sex with a 16-year-old at the age of 24 can get you 5-10 years in prison and the shameful label of SEX OFFENDER for the rest of your life.
So, how did we get from a 24-year-old famous actor having sex with a 16-year-old being a hiccup in a successful career to becoming the kind of mistake that will irrevocably ruin someone’s life? Ironically, we need to go back to 1989—the same year that Lowe’s scandal broke. And, we need to travel from Atlanta to rural Minnesota to understand how an unsolved kidnapping combined with a handful of high profile and horrific crimes against children would ignite a firestorm of public outrage that is burning strong today as it destroys anyone who gets in its path.
ANGUISH & HELPLESSNESS
In the riveting podcast, In the Dark, APM Reports investigative reporter Madeleine Baran tells the story of Jacob Wetterling, a 12-year-old boy who was abducted—from right in front of his friends—by a stranger with a gun. The mystery of Jacob’s disappearance was not solved for 27 years when the perpetrator finally confessed—in graphic detail—to the sexual assault and murder of the boy. The podcast chronicles law enforcement debacles and the anguish of Jacob’s parents, Patty and Jerry, as they launch a national search effort to bring Jacob home. It is a difficult, frustrating, heartbreaking, yet worthy listen for all of us.
During the 1970s and ’80s, these kinds of stories of child abductions became the common topic of national news and fueled the collective fear that around every corner there was a stranger lurking and ready to do unspeakable things to our little ones. High profile child-crimes such as the murder of Adam Walsh, whose father would go on to become the host of America’s Most Wanted, and Eton Patz, who was the first missing child to be put on the side of a milk carton, led the public to believe that these occurrences were common. This season of national anger about crimes committed against our innocent youngsters coincided with the ramping up of the War on Drugs and momentous “tough-on-crime” laws that were being passed like wildfire around the nation.
Grieving parents, like Patty Wetterling, were driven to do all they could to ensure that other parents would never suffer the fate of their families. In the podcast, Patty shares how she worked to establish the sex offender registry in Minnesota and then helped to craft a national law requiring all states to register the addresses of people convicted of sex-related crimes. Her initial vision for these registries was that the information would be used by law enforcement—much like a state trooper has access to a particular driver’s record when making a traffic stop. She never intended it to be available to the public.
Even in that horrific and emotionally charged season of her own life, while experiencing the helplessness of not knowing where her child was or what had happened to him—she had reservations about what the public at large would do with such information.
SOMEBODY SHOULD DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS!
But, just as Patty and the advocates from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children were putting the final touches on the legislation bearing her son’s name, Meghan Kanka was raped and murdered by a neighbor who had a history of sex-crime convictions. The child’s parents knew nothing about this neighbor’s past and asked the team to add one little sentence, “law enforcement may notify the community upon release of a violent offender” to the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children Act.
And this, changed everything.
Two years later, Congress passed Megan’s Law, expanding voluntary community notification to be mandatory in all 50 states. DA’s around the country were being emboldened by new and harsh mandatory minimum sentencing laws, and they now had the ability to upcharge sex crimes to requiring registration as well. Offers of plea deals to much lesser offenses came in droves with the caveat that the defendant must register. Many defendants took these deals without knowing how being labeled would impact their lives. In response to public fear elected lawmakers feverishly expanded the crimes that could get someone registered.
Unlike Patty, who even in her grief, saw the fault in pursuing widespread retribution in how sex offenders pay for their crimes, the public was drunk on these new and expansive laws. Today, urinating in public can get you on the registry. Texting a nude photo to your boyfriend can get you put on the registry. Turning 18 while being in a relationship with someone who is not yet, can get you put on the registry. It is madness.
And, the sad reality is that sex registries have done nothing to protect the children they were designed to protect. In a recent opinion piece, Kristina Knittel—a graduate of the University of Oregon Law School—cites a comprehensive study that concluded that 70% of states saw no reduction, and in some cases, reported an increase in sexual assaults after implementing registration and notification laws.
What’s more, stranger-perpetrated, child-abductions account for only 0.1 percent of missing children. The vast majority are runaways or taken by noncustodial parents. And, there is no hard evidence that sex offender registries have made these rare, stranger-perpetrated abductions any less frequent. But, wait! Wasn’t this the whole reason behind establishing them in the first place?
OH NO! WHAT HAVE WE DONE?
A couple of years ago I was on the phone with a PO who managed the sex offender caseload in his county. He told me that he had a caseload of 110 perpetrators and only one of them had committed a crime against a stranger. “The public needs to be more worried about their uncle, or cousin or their kids’ step-dad than they do about anyone on the registry,” he said.
Today, Patty Wetterling has become an advocate against publicly available registration and notification laws. She asserts that we need to be more concerned about ensuring people who commit these crimes are given a chance to heal and have a successful life, “because then there would be no more victims and that’s the goal.” She says that we have let our emotions run away with us and this kept us from realizing that goal.
Robert Lowery, of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, said it this way in a January 2019 telephone interview, “It doesn’t happen very often, but they’re (child abductions) certainly the cases that capture our attention because they strike at our worst fears.”
And, our worst fears got out of control during our national frenzy of endorsing laws that do nothing to solve the problems we were told they would. We now have an estimated 850,000 people on sex offender registries around the US. Lucky for Rob Lowe, he is not one of them.
But what happens to these folks when their worst mistake does, in fact, define them…for the rest of their life! And, what has it cost us a society to keep this 90’s era, failed system alive and churning, even when it has been proven not to work? And, what does it say about us as a culture when even minor sexual misconduct will get you tracked for the rest of your life but violently murdering someone will not?
Join us for Part 2 of this post to explore these questions and navigate a vision for a better way.
Onward!