"So... How Do We Do that?"

Say What?

Often, I get up in news discussions and say something to the effect of... "Most sex offenders do not reoffend, most sexual crimes are committed by first-time offenders, not registrants. Our money would be better spent on preventing these crimes before they can happen."

And someone says to me... "Right, that sounds great. But how do we do that?" So, I think it is high time to discuss some practical ways that people (yes, you) can prevent child sexual abuse, as well as systemic policies that can be put in place. In the midst of writing out the prevention section for the website, I think this deserves a blog post as well.

Remember That Symposium?

Remember that rather dry symposium I covered last month? Well, one of the presentations was by Jill Levenson, discussing among other things, the fact that most sex offenders have trauma in their backgrounds. So what, sex offenders had a rough childhood. Exactly. But here is the thing: If we know that most of them come from some sort of trauma in their childhood, we know early on who is at-risk to becoming a sex offender. If we can help take care of them and give them the message that they are loved, believed in, etc... then we can intervene before they hurt people. And it is not just sex offenders: Dr. Levenson's presentation had similar findings for crime in general, not just sex crime.

Interventions For At-Risk Youth

There does need to be formal interventions for children with traumatic childhoods, and without the label. Someone with a rough background does not need to hear that they are at-risk, I mean, really. But we do need programs to reach these children, and mentors as well. After-school programs, mentoring, and the YMCA have done a lot of good in these areas. Ministries aimed at youth have also done very well. So, there is a need for formal programs here.

But let me share a brief tale of when I was a camp counselor. My first week, I had a very diverse group of middle school kids, and one of the kids had me hearing things like "emotionally disturbed" and "anti-depression medication" and "lost his mom when he was eight." You get the idea, I am sure. Well, one day, some girls came up to me and told me that this kid was pushing them off the swing. So I go up to them all, and I tell them they need to get along or they will be in trouble. It was so effective that five minutes later, the camp director came up to me and told me that the kid would be sweeping the mess hall because he had kept doing it.

So, he and I are sitting there, waiting for the director to come and lecture him before he does his sweeping, and I ask if I could talk to him. He said no, he wanted to be left alone, so I respected that and kept silent. The director comes, and he sweeps, and we are walking back to all the other kids... and I asked him again if I could say something. I said to him, "I know you've had a rough life so far. I know you lost your mom, and I'm sorry about that. But please don't make the same mistake I did of taking it out on everyone else." I did not have any more problems with him the rest of camp.

This is just one story of many where I talked with youth going through a rough time. You do not need to be part of a program to make a difference. All you need to do is say a kind word, show that you care and understand, and tell them you believe in them. Kids need to hear that, even without trauma in their background.

Proper Sexual Education

One issue that needs resolving is that we teach children many, many things to help them succeed in the real world: Get a job, go to college, choose a career... but we do little to prepare children for sex and relationships. I was never taught consent growing up, the concept just was not taught. That is an issue, because children who are exploring with their sexuality can hurt younger children if they are missing the information they need to ensure they are safe and respecting others' boundaries.

We need comprehensive sexual education that goes beyond the physical and physical health aspects of sex: We need to teach consent, mental health, relationship health, respect, and everything in between. If we are going to prepare children for the real world, we must prepare them for how to handle sex and dating, and the potential legal consequences for not handling those areas well. We cannot just assume that they are moral enough to understand, because all the good intentions in the world can still cause harm without guidance.

Destigmatizing Mental Health

We need to talk about mental health and how we are feeling, and if we are parents, we need to demonstrate that to our children: Ask them how they are feeling, not just how they are doing. We need to talk about mental health, and we need to show children what self-care is. We need to stop stigmatizing mental health in our everyday speech: Calling something psychotic or retarded, referring to people as crazy, loony, or nutzoid... We need to stop using mental health as an excuse to bully people, and we need to stop pushing the issue under the rug or avoiding it altogether. For ideas in how you can start destigmatizing mental health in your sphere of influence, visit this website.

Using Proper Terminology

You had to know this was coming. Improper terminology can spread myths about sexual abuse that lead the public to erroneously believing that individuals or situations that pose zero risk to children... do pose a risk. Sometimes, we refer to child sexual abuse as "child sex offending" and those who perpetrate it as "sex offenders." I argue that both terms are incorrect: When someone has been caught, they are unlikely to commit a new sexual crime, particularly if a child is involved, so referring to it as an ongoing event (offending) is mistaken, as is referring to someone as being a constant perpetrator (offender), because those who perpetrate child sexual abuse are rarely adjudicated offenders: They are those with no criminal record, trusted in the community. We cannot define people by their behavior, attraction, mental illness, etc. It runs the high risk of putting our focus on the wrong population.

Referring to those who have abused as pedophiles is inaccurate, then, because you are using a label that refers to someone with a sexual attraction to children and implying that attraction is the cause for their abuse of a child. It minimizes child sexual abuse and pushes pedophiles further from help by conflating their attraction with acting on it, when the two are separate. Referring to child sexual abuse as pedophilia is even worse because it directly conflates feeling with action. Pedophilia needs to only be understood as a sexual attraction to children.

Defund The Sex Offender Punishment Scheme

As most who sexually abuse children are first-time offenders and sexual recidivism among sex offenders is extremely low, we need to stop spending so much money on policies that attempt to address an issue that does not exist. Instead, our efforts on sex offenders would be better spent on rehabilitating and furthering their reentry into the community: Extend help, not fear and suspicion. This would not only help curb what little sexual recidivism there is, but would curb the proportionately higher rate of general recidivism. Incarceration should be reserved for particularly heinous cases where there is no remorse and multiple prior sexual offenses: Incarcerate those who pose a risk to the public, and rehabilitate those who do not pose that risk.

In other words, no more registry. No more public notifications. No more hype and drama when sex offenders are released. Spend that money on research and prevention, not useless tactics that put children at increased risk.

To Catch Sexual Solicitors

Say What?

Many have heard the term "sexual predators", and there has been a decent amount of publicity around stings where someone, sometimes law enforcement, pose as children to try to lure people into potential illegal activity. The most famous is the show "To Catch A Predator". I take serious issue with using the word "predator" so lightly. Yes, lightly.

People who go online for solace from whatever is going on in their lives may or may not be looking specificaly for children for sex. There are a variety of motivating factors for their internet use and behavior. It is also worth noting that most of the people caught were not previously registered on a sex offender registry.

Accuracy

First and foremost, I would like to start with a little bit about accuracy. One of the links on the side of this blog is to an article discussing the protection of children from online sexual exploitation and solicitation. In it, they discuss a survey that many advocacy groups have since cited to say that online sexual exploitation and solicitation affects one in five children. Except that the survey itself found that adults only accounted for 3% of the online solicitation discussed in the survey. In other words, online solicitation does not affect one in five children, but 3%. Already we see that online solicitation of children is overblown.

I have discussed in other posts how the term "predator" is not only overused, but misused. There is no consensus on what it means to be a sexual predator, and most sex offenders, who have automatically earned the label of sexual predator just for violating a particular statute, do not reoffend sexually. Of those, only a small fraction have antisocial personality disorder (that means that only a small fraction of sex offenders who reoffend are psychopaths).

Why does this matter, you ask? Well, if we as a society are treating every single sex offender, regardless of their actual risk level, as if they will inevitably reoffend, what do you suppose that does to the sex offenders in question? Have you ever heard of self-fulfilling prophecy? By ostracizing sex offenders, we increase recidivism. Common sense says that. The Center for Sex Offender Management says that. Expert therapists say that. Yet the American people, and people around the world, are stubbornly clinging to the idea that sex offenders are dangerous, end of story. This is a myth.

Using the term "sexual predator" to refer to every single person who meets the qualifications for the label "sex offender" overreaches the intent of sex offender laws. The idea behind the sex offender registry was to create a list for law enforcement to use when a sex crime with no further leads happened. It was originally meant as an investigative tool (if you want a full history, you can find one here). Now, it is a label that we use to ruin someone's life, regardless of the circumstances in which a crime was committed, regardless of their likelihood to reoffend.

Sympathy? Or Prevention?

Should you feel sympathy for these people? Probably, but that is not my point here. My point is that when you take anyone who has behaved a certain way, and treat all of them the same and ignore the reasons why they behaved that way, you have no way to weed out the people who will learn their lesson the easy way, those who will learn their lesson the hard way (or anything in between easy and hard), and those who will inevitably reoffend. Without being able to make those distinctions, we recreate the tragedy of the original sexual offense and allow it to continue. Not only does the behavior affect the victim and the perpetrator, it affects everyone around the perpetrator as well. That is why Women Against Registry exists.

And without those distinctions, we cannot sentence people in accordance with the severity of the circumstances in which the crime was committed. The people who could have just gotten help and re-entered the community now are haunted the rest of their lives. And the facts tell us that these people are not some small minority of sex offenders, they are 85% or more. Nationwide, over 600,000 people who can never move on and are treated the same as the remaining 200,000 or so. There are risk assessments that can accurately make these determinations. But we do not use them, under the myth that those who have offended sexually once will do so again.

Stings And Cuffs, Not Help And Empathy

One of the biggest problems with stings is that they aim to slap cuffs on whomever takes the bait, without regard to the consequences. As I detailed in my recent post about sex offenders, not all sex offenders are mandated to treatment as part of their sentence, even though treatment can cut recidivism by half. Studies show that not only do sex offenders not reoffend, treatment is extremely effective.

Why does this matter, you ask? Because the people who are not motivated by sex, but were just lonely and looking for the first person who paid attention to them, are now slapped with a label they do not deserve. Because the people who are seeking out children are a small minority, and they are now lost in the crowd of people who are not seeking out children.

Most of these people would do fine with probation and treatment. Most of these people need the adult equivalent of a 10-minute time-out and a chat about why they hit little Sally on the playground, and be asked what can be done to help them not do it again. A little planning session to figure out why Sally was hit, and how to avoid it in the future. The adult equivalent is therapy, not months or years in jail or prison. They need better coping mechanisms, better decision-making, a better support system of people to go to when they are feeling negative about life. What they need is hardly what they get by slapping cuffs on them.

So, what happens when you take someone who would ordinarily be amenable to treatment, wants to rebuild their life in a positive way, but give him a stiff fine and jail time, without being given resources to help him rebuild? That very question is the issue with the term "sexual predator" being used lightly. By putting all of these systems to punish in place, and not enough to figure out why the offense occurred and guide people to the help they need, we increase sex crimes.

Terminology, Again And Again And Again

The word "predator" implies an instinctive drive to prey upon something. It refers to an animal or human that seeks to get something by finding that prey and getting what they want. Mercy is not implied. Conscience is not implied. Mitigating factors are not implied, just the predator-prey relationship and the innate drive.

It is not a word that can be applied to most sexual offenders. We know this through the facts we have at our disposal that show that most do not reoffend. We know this through the expert therapists who have said... sexual offending is not about sex. It is about terrible coping mechanisms to deal with the pressures and trials of life. We have the experts, we have the research, we have the knowledge. But we as a nation, as a world, are refusing to believe the facts.

Therefore, I recommend sexual solicitors, or sexual solicitors of children. If we must make the same old mistake of defining people by the negative behaviors they did, then we could at least define them accurately rather than playing on people's fears, on myths, and on blind hype. If we are to use the weighty, loaded terms, let us use them on the recidivists, the true psychopaths, the minority that deserve such labels. Not on anyone we pretend we cannot understand because they are "not human".

Why Terminology Matters

Terminology Guidelines

Last week, a global inter-agency group released a fairly long document, titled "Terminology Guidelines for the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse" (you can find the direct PDF link here). Why does this matter? It matters because there are a wide variety of words that we use to describe a wide variety of topics with regard to the sexual abuse of children, and the sexual exploitation of children. As their document is 114 pages long, this will serve to highlight some of what they say, why they say it, and recommend specific terms based on their recommendations.

A Matter Of Terminology

Some argue that the terminology that we use does not matter. Sexual abuse is sexual abuse, a perpetrator is a perpetrator, and a victim is a victim. However, some terminology can not only minimize what is done to the victim of abuse, and make it seem less harmful than it actually is, it can also perpetuate myths that enable sexual abuse to happen rather than preventing it. In short, the words we use when discussing child sexual abuse and associated crimes matters because we have to be simultaneously respectful both to the victims of such crimes, and to the facts surrounding such crimes. Without giving due respect, we can do more harm than good by the words that we use.

In their introduction, they say, "Greater conceptual clarity on terminology is thus needed to ensure stronger and more consistent advocacy, policy and laws in all languages across all regions of the world. To engender more clarity in the conceptualisation, definition, and translation of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of children, a multi-stakeholder dialogue involving the voices of a multitude of actors at all levels is needed."

In other words, words matter.

Minor

This term begins on page 8. Minor is generally a term used to describe someone who is under the age of majority, or the age someone becomes an adult. The most common usage is in legal, law enforcement, and similar situations. They recommend using the word "child" in most contexts, and define "child" to mean anyone under the age of 18. Their conclusion? Use "minor" in legal issues, and "child" everywhere else.

Child Prostitute And Child Sex Worker

This term begins on page 31. These terms should be avoided, due to the implication that children in such situations are there by choice, are consenting to their work, and are paid for it. Children who are trafficked or exploited for sexual purposes are not paid, cannot consent, and are not there by choice, they are forced into those situations. Therefore, "child sexual exploitation victims" or "sexual exploitation victims" should be used. These terms are closely related to the next term.

Child Pornography

This term begins on page 35. This, perhaps, is one of the most important terms addressed in the guidelines. Both legally and linguistically, the use of the term "pornography" to refer to images and videos of real children that depict the sexual abuse of children of varying levels is completely misleading. In traditional pornography, there may be some exploitative elements, but the actors are adults who are consenting to act and model for pornographic purposes, and are paid to do so. However, images and videos that depict real children in sexual situations, whether those images involve children on children or adults on children, means that a real child is being sexually abused on film. It involves a real victim, and that real victim can be extremely affected by the knowledge that images of their sexual abuse are on the internet for anyone to see.

In short, such images and videos of real children are sexually exploitative and cannot accurately be described as pornography. Therefore, both the guidelines (p. 35-38) and other researchers have recommended that either "child sexual exploitation material" or "child sexual abuse material" (CSEM/CSAM) should be used to describe such imagery, and the terms "child pornography", "child porn", "kiddy porn", "pedo-porn", or other terms involving the word "pornography" are to be avoided altogether.

Important Note: The imagery I have just described is a completely separate issue from cartoon, computer-generated, or otherwise fictional representations of children involved in sexual situations, and will be addressed separately at some point in the future.

Grooming

This term begins on page 51.Grooming is the process of building trust in a child, the child's community, and breaking down the boundaries that might otherwise hinder someone to be sexual with the child. Grooming can be online or in person, and a significant portion of grooming does take place on social media, though it should be noted that 95% of new sex crimes are committed by first-time offenders, so while it seems to make sense to restrict social media use to sex offenders, the reality is that an adult approaching a minor on social media is, in general, a red flag. According to the guidelines, it is a term that has a generally agreed upon meaning and can be used safely.

About grooming, it should be noted that some grooming is slower is about gaining the victim's trust, but some is also more abrupt and coercive, so as to gain immediate leverage and can take less time than the traditional idea of grooming. It should also be noted that not all grooming behavior is intentional, not all behaviors that appear to be grooming are in fact grooming, and not all behavior that is in fact grooming will appear to be grooming. Some grooming, such as showing pornography or CSEM/CSAM to children, is illegal and is of itself a sex crime, but most grooming does not involve illegal behavior.

Important Note: While there are warning signs to sexually abusive acts, those warning signs do not automatically mean that sexual abuse is the end goal. The presence of warning signs and grooming behavior should warrant further conversation with the person exhibiting the warning signs and grooming behavior, and if necessary, separation from the child involved. The focus in such conversations should be around getting the person in question help and letting them know they have a safe space to be honest, and the conversation should steer clear from accusing the person involved of sexual behavior with children.

Child Sex Tourism

This term begins on page 56. Child sex tourism has traditionally referred to travelling for the specific purpose of sexually exploiting and abusing children, but the term has been increasingly debated. Considerations are the word "tourism", which is a legitimate industry, and "child sex", which amounts to child sexual abuse. In short, the term should be avoided because it has a high potential to normalize the practice of travelling to sexually exploit children.

Pedophiles

This term begins on page 86. They recommend the use of the term "preferential offenders" to describe those who sexually abuse or exploit children because they prefer children sexually, and recommend avoiding the term "pedophiles". They further recommend using the term "situational offenders" to describe those who sexually abuse children without a sexual preference for children.

In short, pedophilia and pedophilic disorder refer to "the clinical diagnosis of a mental health condition". Their note about the condition is:
"According to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), paedophilic disorder is a part of a larger group of paraphilic disorders, characterised as a “persistent and intense atypical sexual arousal patterns that are accompanied by clinically significant distress or impairment”. The change in terminology from “paedophilia” or “paedophile” to “paedophilic disorder” in DSM-5 was intended to reflect the growing acceptance among mental health professionals that not all individuals who present with symptoms of paedophilic disorder are perpetrators of child sexual abuse or exploitation."

They further note that, "The terms "paedophile" and "paedophilia" continue to be overused and misunderstood, often seen as a label for a person convicted of child sexual exploitation or sexual abuse rather than as a term for a clinical condition."

I sincerely hope that their recommendations are familiar to you, as I have said much the same thing for quite some time. I have a number of different posts on the subject (here, here, here, and more recently here). Therefore, the fact that a global inter-agency cooperation dedicated to determining the proper terminology is saying the same thing really should catch your attention. It is time for the misuse of the words "pedophile" and "pedophilia" to end.

Wrap-Up

While I did not cover every single term, that does not mean that the other terms mentioned throughout the rest of the guidelines are unimportant. Frankly, trying to whittle down the amount they say about the terms I did include to a few paragraphs was a challenge, as was deciding which terms to include here. While I certainly encourage people to read through all of the guidelines, I recognize that not everyone has the patience to go through a 114-page document describing every single term related to child sexual abuse and child sexual exploitation. I hope you found this breakdown illuminating.