Media Vilifies Sex Offenders
Boston Globe fuels Criminal Crusade

May 1996 saw unprecedented strides in the general movement toward repression of pig-defined sex offenders, notifying their neighbors, and making that information available publicly, has been the rule in New Jersey for a year and is now federal. In Massachusetts, the crusade to demonize this group has been overwhelming. Both his "liberal" opponent in the senatorial race, Senator Kerry, and the "liberal" Boston Globe accused hard-core right wing Governor Weld of being soft on pig-defined sex offenders.

This essay criticizes a series of three articles in the Boston Globe to illustrate a correct analysis of rape, including rape of children, and refocus the debate on criminal injustice.

Raped and Raped Again

All of this legislating and posturing will not stop the abuse of children, its purported goal. Children are highly sexualized in this society because power difference is eroticized. When children are powerless, they are sexy. This sexualization of children is obvious in pornography and general media representation. The scare-tactics in the Globe reinforce incorrect analyses of rape, including rape of children, catering to their pseudo-feminist constituency. This use of gender to beef up the police state is a trademark of pseudo-feminism. Pseudo-feminists make gender the principal contradiction and ignore the ramifications the legislation they advocate has for oppressed national minorities.

The first sensationalist story in Boston Globe campaign against sex offenders appeared on May 1. It told the tale of a man who had recently served a brief term for a sex offense who was accused of another, the rape of a 14-year-old girl. Never mind that he was not yet convicted, the Globe had already decided that he was guilty because he had a prior conviction. The bourgeoisie likes to pretend that the problem of child sexual abuse is one of deranged individuals destined for derangement their whole lives. 

The neighbors of this man believed he was guilty because of the past convictions alone. They were also quick to absolve themselves of any cultural unity with him. One man said: "I had no idea he had a problem like that. I don't know what a man who did something like that is doing out."

There is a great hypocrisy in a society in which child sexual exploitation is constantly portrayed in both pornography and mainstream media but people feel so uncomfortable talking about it that they use euphemisms like, "a problem like that." If the problem were just naiveté, and the man really did not know that in practice Amerika sanctions child pornography and unquestioned parental control, that would not be hypocritical. But that is just an impossibility for anyone awake and alive walking down the streets of billboards. Those who uphold the system that protects speech for the powerful (including pornography) but decry the products of that speech cannot avoid hypocrisy. 

The man, a community leader, continued with his erroneous understanding saying: "We are very upset about the situation. I just want the tenants to know we're doing everything we can to make this a safe place to live."(1) News flash: the vast majority of children who are sexually abused are aboused by their parents or other family members. The vast majority of them, especially those who are white, are never caught. If the man really wanted to make the place safe, he would have no choice but to work for the abolition of the patriarchal family and create real social responsibility for the care of children. Instead, he invents monsters to target and avoids 99% of child sexual oppression.

This push for more imprisonment actually destroys oppressed families, and MIM is not advocating abolishing the support networks among the oppressed that the imperialists are busy ripping apart. Long term, however, children won't be free until they grow up communally rather than in isolated families without social accountability.

The Boston Globe used this story to support its conclusion that we need registration of pig-=identified sex offenders in Massachusetts. The director of the American Friends Service Committee Criminal Justice program, Jill Brotman, has pointed out that telling sensationalist stories of child molesters is a deceptive technique used to vilify all pig-=identified sex offenders: "all these bills are sold as child molesters but the population affected is very heterogenous."(2) That group includes men who have been convicted of soliciting prostitutes, raping their wives, or statutory rape just across the magic age line.

None of these are really the "threat to society" that the Globe says they are: these are conformist actions, in accord with patriarchal society. Additionally, not all of these groups post the same threat to wimmin and children, even assuming they are guilty as charged - a huge assumption in a criminal injustice system where money for a lawyer is the biggest factor in whether you'll be found "guilty." The issues are very distinct gender issues threatening different groups, though you would never know it from reading the Boston Globe. 

The second pro-registration piece in the Globe came the next day, this time accusing Weld of letting sex offenders out of prison eventually.(3) The Globe whined that Weld's scathing indictments of those incarcerated for these crimes did not jive with the fact that a minority of them do get parole.

Weld has no grasp of the real situation, and so his statements don't mean much anyway. For example, he says: "There's quite a lot of evidence that the recidivism rate is so high for sex offenders, particularly child molesters, that you're almost better off concentrating on bars as the form of treatment."(3) According to the AFSC's Jill Brotman, however, the recidivism rate for those who participate in programs is just 15%, a very low rate relative to many other crimes.(2) We're not endorsing the programs here, only using generally accepted statistics to show that Weld is lying through his teeth, ignorant of the real goings-on in the prisons, making things up to suit his agenda.

Truth is, Weld (and the government) does not really care about decreasing recidivism. Crime is a big industry for Massachusetts and for Amerika. So Weld just resorts to criticizing programs on moralistic grounds: "Philosophically, I don't think treatment programs are terribly effective for sex offenders, particularly for sex offenses involving children. That's not where I'd put the bulk of my money if i had a limited amount of resources."(3) RAIL activists know this well: Weld would rather spend millions of dollars on transferring prisoners to Texas and building super-maximum prisons than on preventing crime, however defined.

The programs are not without their problems. They still focus on individual offenders rather than social reformation. It is wrong to expect people who are socialized into a rape culture to reform their own selves while society continues to eroticize power. MIM would go to those people who actually committed the crimes, urge them to engage in criticism-self-criticism to understand why gender is fucked up and their behavior is reflecting that, and organize them into un-fucking up gender.

Programs also have more tangible problems. Taking advantage of the programs dooms an individual to a life of registration and notification, thus a never-ending sentence. They must, to take the programs, sign a paper declaring that they are sex offenders and have a lifelong illness.(2)

There are very real penalties for failing to sign on when programs are available. One mother of a prisoner doing time for a sex offense he did not commit explained that her son cannot get parole because every time his case comes up he refuses to sign the paper declaring that he has this supposed disease.(4)

The bill in Massachusetts is ex post facto, meaning that it applies to people convicted before it was passed. That means that the school officials would be notified that children in their schools have a parent who was convicted of a sex crime or otherwise signed one of these papers to get parole 20 years ago.(2) The patriarchal bourgeoisie marks these people for life, never allowing any amount of reformation to release them from repression.

The third article by the Globe was more of the same: using the bogey-man of the child rapist to justify big-brother political ends.(5) A Democratic state representative out to get more support from patriarchs "was outraged" and complained: "I don't know of a more vicious crime than the rape of a child."(5)

Jill Brotman pointed out, and MIM and RAIL have long maintained, that this is a skewed understanding. She asks: "Is a pedophile more of a monster than someone who drops a bomb on Iraqi women and children?"(2) The political definition of crime prevents an objective ranking of monsters except by material analysis, which makes Amerikan imperialism the biggest rapist, child molester, murderer, and what have you.(6)

As the society portrays children in an increasingly sexualized and violent way, their abuse will continue to be endemic. But following the reactionary tide toward the bogey-man stranger child-molester, and away from the far more dangerous family, would be a great disservice to children. Instead, when reactionaries harp about child molesters we must get the debate about prisons back on track and insist on looking at the larger issues of incarceration. Prison is not the way to deal with the huge number of people following hte preachings of pornography and advertising, with the overall approval of society.(7)

Notes:
1. Boston Globe, May 1, 1996, p.19.
2. Jill Brotman, director of the Criminal Justice Program at the American Friends Service Committee, May 22, 1996.
3. Boston  Globe, May 2, 1996, p.1.
4. Anonymous mother of a prisoner, speaking at the coalition of Prisoner Families on May 22, 1996.
5. Boston Globe, May 3, 1996.
6. See the RAIL Prison Pamphlet, available for a dollar from RAIL, PO Box 3576 Ann Arbor MI 48106.
7. See "The Oppression of Children Under Patriarchy" in MIM Theory 9, "Psychology an dImperialism," available from MI for $4.95.