Now, why does it come as no surprise that in the wake of the Finkelstein Report The West media conglomerate – what do they call themselves? ‘Seven-West Media‘? – opt for secession from independent nation-wide media scrutiny in favour of going it alone?

It remains difficult to see what difference it will make, aside from making them all look completely stupid, while Western Australia remains a member of the Commonwealth and subject to the same laws and principles as the rest of us.

So let’s have none of this “independent of the company and governments” bullshit, or employing “finest legal minds” in cahoots with retired state attorneys, they’re all here in bed together anyway!

Telling criticism of old Rupe’s inner circle was that “they showered together”. This lot don’t only shower together, they sat on potties together in the same Day Care. Sorry, that’s stretching things a tad, some of them grew up south side of the river, and the others on the north side. That’s where the differences end, since once offered a place at UWA they meld and become undifferentiated.

Following graduation, herding their way onto The Terrace gets them entry into the crenelated sancti sanctori of Western Australian upper echelons, so they like to imagine in their quaintly parochial ways of thinking. From that point they not only shower together, they sleep together, and more relevant sleep with one another having gone through the same turgid adolescence and Guild piss-ups together.

One might be tempted to ask, why all this invective? The simple answer is, merely to bring home the obvious. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? as Plato once wrote – who is there to keep an eye on these people, isolated as they are way over here among the sand dunes?

The core issue of media professionalism and accountability needing to be addressed here is typically diverted, misdirected, hidden among the usual smoke and mirrors. Instead of imposing professional standards of behaviour on their minions they take the easy way out by obliging their targeted victims to lodge a formal complaint ex post facto, and sit there waiting patiently for their grievances to be heard by these “finest legal minds”, while the perpetrators sail merrily on regardless.

But that’s the way the entire judicial system works here anyway, the reason our prisons are full to overflowing – anyone beyond The Pale is automatically a criminal – all it needs is an accusation to be made and a “reasonable prospect of a conviction” backed up with statewide media coverage and millions of taxpayer’s dollars spent on prosecuting the case while the unsuspecting target languishes for years on Legal Aid.

Surely one must question the notion that the highest professional standards only allow for complaints to be heard after the fact. Professional standards would not anticipate complaints to be raised at all.

Professional standards would see West Australian journalists and their adolescent paparazzi making an appointment for an interview with those they want to write publically about, for whatever reason, giving them the ordinary right to decline, and to go about living their lives unmolested.

Professional standards do not see journalists and paparazzi hiding giggling behind bushes trying to catch all these dreadful “paedos” in action, or inside buildings taking photos of their unsuspecting target through curtained windows, then without their prior knowledge suddenly publish the most egregious gossip, hearsay and suggestion about them, especially in pursuit of their own nefarious agenda trying to pressure the very governments they now fear will intervene and bring them to task, of whom they insist they should be allowed to remain independent.

Professional standards do not write such crap to start with.

No worries, eh? Now we have an independent complaints procedure, independent even of national oversight, and again no surprise populated from the same tired old parochial inner circles of St Georges Terrace and its affiliates.

All the more reason for Sniffer Dog to be keeping an alert eye on them.

Sorry guys, something must have slipped up somewhere. We are UWA graduates ourselves, studying in the same faculties for the same degrees, sitting in on the same tutorials and seminars, writing on the same assignment topics, watching with wry bemusement at the way the locals gaggle to maintain their closed ranks and packed judicial, political and media appointments.

Fancy offering us Eastern Staters, us ‘orrible t’Other Siders, a place among the hallowed cloisters. Big mistake. These days there are more and more of us, crowding in now not only from the vast inland and eastern seaboard but from the Americas, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa as UWA takes its place among the world’s universities, no longer recognisable as the old narrowly parochial University of the Western Sand Dunes.

We can all see you now, observe you closely, for who and what you are. You can no longer hide lurking there among the crenelated towers. At the end of the day our increasingly open access to your puerile and unwarranted mischief will be your unravelling, nothing else.

Gil Hardwick BA.Hons BLitt.Hons SFSPE
Consulting Anthropologist

Population and the Environment

Our teeming attack on the natural world threatens to turn the wilderness into a fetish item.
AAP/The Wilderness Society

Elephants in the room, part one

For all our schemes and mantras about making this or that part of our lives environmentally “sustainable”, humanity’s assault on the planet not only continues but expands.

The conservation movement dates back centuries and our technological prowess grows day by day, but even so the wilderness is shrinking, species dying out, and on and on we spread, build, and plunder. It’s easy to see our schemes and mantras as ultimately little more than fiddling while Rome burns.

What are the deep problems that we don’t talk about in terms of our relationship with nature? What, so to speak, are the elephants in the room? This is part one of a series written by Professor Cliff Hooker, looking at some of these elephants.

Get out of our way: bushland is bulldozed on Perth’s fringes to make way for more houses. AAP/WWF Australia

When we’re talking about the relationship between humans and the environment, the most obvious elephant in the room is human population growth. This is rarely discussed in the Western media nowadays, especially compared to the 1970s, but it is central to what we’re doing to to the planet. We reached an estimated 7 billion people last October, and the OECD estimates that will climb to more than 9 billion by mid-century.

Yet, the only cases where population still gets coverage are those where the sheer numbers of people are the immediate problem: think China and India, or Pakistan where 40% of people are below 15 years of age and will themselves explode into further procreation over the next decade. But also think of the Sydney (Australia) Basin and the coming Sunshine Coast-Gold Coast conurbation.

In all these cases the environment – and human society as well in many regards – would be so much better off if human numbers were cut by a factor of two to five (in other words, reduced to between 50% and 20% of their present size).

Five benefits of a fall in population

First, it would vastly decrease the greatest environmental pressure we exert: habitat loss due to agriculture, recreation, industrial exploitation (dams, mining, etc), urban sprawl, and waste.

Second, it would make it easier to shape development to be compatible with natural ecological requirements. We could preserve creeks nearer to pristine condition and restore wetlands. It would also make it easier to safely extract the things we do want from ecologies (for example, to catch many kinds of fish for eating, instead of just steadily dwindling stocks of the most common fish).

Third, for developing countries, it would decrease some of the major barriers to economic development, including the costs of providing – ahead of rising taxable incomes – education, infrastructure and public institutions.

Fourth, it would offer increased opportunity for all to live surrounded by natural landscape and wildlife, and within more manageable urban structures. These are a much-underestimated support for sane living, especially when it comes to child development.

Homeless and dependent: as the forests of Kashmir are razed for development, monkeys have ended up begging on the roads. AAP/EPA/Jaipal Singh

Fifth, it reduces all the effects of non-uniform scaling up in numbers; that is, as population numbers rise relationships change. For instance, twice as many people does not mean twice as many streets but the same traffic densities; instead, even with twice as many streets, the arterial roads will be nearly twice as crowded. There are at least four categories of effects of this sort.

How relationships change as population rises

Congestion: Higher population means many more people trying to use the same streets, cafes and elevators. This can slow down and even temporarily halt normal socio-economic processes. For example, a busy 50-storey office building faces disproportionately longer elevator use times than do three-storey buildings. (What’s more, instead of building a 50-storey tower of 40m x 40m base area sitting on a 200m x 200m open space square, we could build a three-storey building along the edges of that footprint, providing the same floor space, many access points, often stairs, and an enjoyable central sheltered courtyard.)

Friction: More people means it takes many more procedures to get something done. For instance, it reduces efficiency to have to fill in a form and have one’s tool bag officially inspected just to enter a building to service the coffee machine; this happens mostly at large, busy buildings where people don’t know one another directly.

Overheads: The numbers of managers needed to organise an activity rises faster than the number of people needing to be organised. For instance, a team of three mostly does not need a leader while a team of 3,000 will need hundreds of local team leaders (of, say, 10) plus middle managers to coordinate them and executive managers to ensure overall coordination. Managerial “distance” can also increase friction and vice versa.

Thresholding volatility: Where normal system performance is pushed to near its limits, inadvertent small changes can result in it crossing a threshold to a new way of functioning. In many cases this new way will be a degraded way of functioning from which the system cannot easily recover. For instance, an expressway near capacity is in a highly vulnerable state where an isolated braking incident can lead to a traffic jam, sometimes with mounting accidents at its rear end; either way the highway has degraded to non-functioning.

“A degraded way of functioning.’ Sao Paulo, Brazil AAP/EPA/Sebastio Moreira

There are also downsides to population declines. For example, declining numbers also mean fewer workers, smaller markets and revenues, less intense and varied stimulation, fewer forms of back-up for failures, and so on. And these effects will become increasingly important as human numbers fall.

Similarly, there is the consideration of how many people we need to have sufficient “weight” in regional affairs to serve our legitimate interests, including a credible defence capacity. But this number would fall if our neighbours had smaller populations. (On both counts, recall the brief “Big Australia” debate of 2010/11.)

But within reasonable limits, and depending on a society’s circumstances (ecological, international, etc), there are rewards to be enjoyed for becoming smaller, especially for organised developing nations, and for Western urban domains, as mentioned above. Only the Chinese, through their one-child policy, are doing anything direct and serious about it. Ironically, they are self-righteously criticised for it by people like us who are so well-off we too often have trouble rousing ourselves publicly to do anything but complain about losing privileges.

More of us wanting more and more: a Beijing crowd waits for the doors to a new iPhone to open. AAP/EPA/Diego Azubel

Why doesn’t the West discuss population?

The West does not discuss population numbers partly because the market is thought to favour growth. Business finds growing numbers attractive because it mean more consumers for their products, and more labour to compete for jobs and to support an aging population. Remember the recent calls for increased immigration, lest there be a fall in the number of people seeking work and supporting the aged?

However, there are a couple of flaws in this argument. First: this perspective calls for an endlessly increasing population and this would ultimately undermine all basic rationales for it (except making money and increasing money-based power). Second: it is far from clear that this is even the best economic strategy for business. Consider smaller numbers enjoying increasing technological and human services, for example in support of “smart” green technologies. Why would this strategy not generate as much or more wealth per capita, and a great deal more satisfaction along the way?

Another reason the West does not discuss population numbers is because our gross numbers are relatively low. But this is an illusory perspective. An individual human’s impact on the environment is vastly magnified by wealth, technology and lifestyle. Thus Western nations have many times the per capita environmental impact of developing ones.

For instance, Westerners eat higher on the food chain, which greatly increases our demand for plants. Roughly, for every step up the food chain, one kilogram of food requires five to ten kilograms of supporting food on the lower step; so a human (or a tiger) who extracts one kilogram of body weight from cattle or deer needs to eat five to ten kilograms of deer, and those deer in turn need to eat 25-100 kilograms of plants. Straight away, the Hindu vegetarian who eats plants makes five to ten times less demand on agriculture and hence the environment than does his Western meat-eating equivalent.

Moreover, our industries that generated most of the past rise in greenhouse gases now expand to meet wealth-enabled demands (housing, appliances, cars, and so forth), and also manufacture higher on the production chain, meaning they take up more land and often pollute more (compare the environmental demands of making a car and a cart).

Finally, wealth makes it easy to adopt unnecessarily wasteful habits, from excessive, non-biodegradable packaging, to large and poorly insulated houses, to concentrated peak electricity use at breakfast and dinner times.

“Demographic transition”: China began its one child policy for urban couples in 1978. AAP/EPA/Wu Hong

Instead of explicit population policies we Westerners largely rely on a “demographic transition” to take care of numbers. That is, we rely on a process in which, as economies get wealthier and require longer, more expensive education while providing increased social security, people choose to reduce their family size. It’s a great idea that works well (while politicians leave it alone).

Nevertheless, there are two important problems with relying on it for everyone. First, this is a slowish transition, typically taking two to three generations or 60+ years to effect. Second, we Westerners largely did it before life expectancies took off, which raises total population “at the other end”.

Now, under the very improvements in public sanitation, medicine, safety, and social security that make small families riskable, the demographic transition is slowed down by increasing life expectancy, especially in developing nations. Can it take effect soon enough to prevent a ruinous human-plague problem for many developing nations, and the planet? How could we speed it up? What else could we throw into help other than the usual extreme nasties (war, plague, famine, forced sterilisation) and the merely hard one-child policy?

The aim of this series

My aim here is not to catalogue the obvious surface problems of our relationship with the natural world around us; they are relatively well known. The aim instead is to dig a little deeper into the underlying dynamics of human societies. There we find processes and problems now too often left undiscussed by our hastening lives and increasingly superficial media.

Only some of the elephant herd is presented. Certainly not all the herd, especially because some of them hide behind the others and are only revealed through persistent prying.

And for those animals presented, the whole elephant is never visible, just the parts I happen to handle; their bodies sometimes vanish into the unexplored gloom. And they intermingle in often complex ways. My aim is to show just enough of each elephant to reveal its presence and so stimulate you to continue exploring it. Please remember this: if your favourite piece of anatomy is missing or a limb seems misshapen, then add it in or correct it yourself! Likewise, for many of the elephants there are no experts, certainly not me; please take my presentations, even if they seem opinionated, as simply goads to explore the issues for yourself.

The herd may look a little bleak. You wont find here any spiritual messages. I have instead focussed on “neutral” underlying elephants, ones that will appear in some form in any human society because they derive from basic underlying processes, though I look at my own Western society most. This will generate elephants enough to think about while we learn to value love and hope in the human spirit.

Comments welcome below.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Finkelstein inquiry report cause for ‘cautious optimism’

Former Federal court judge Roy Finkelstein (centre) has delivered his media inquiry report.
AAP/Dean Lewins

It was a pleasant surprise that the independent Australian media inquiry, examining print, online and the role of the self-regulatory body, the Australian Press Council, was, for the most part, a satisfying document.

It was hard to know what this Inquiry might deliver, given the political events leading up to its announcement. Its timing was in the wake of the phone hacking scandal that closed Britain’s News of the World. Closer to home Greens’ Leader Bob Brown was sparring with News Limited journalists collectively labelling them the “hate media”; while, Prime Minister Julia Gillard waged her own battle with Murdoch’s Australian accusing it of publishing a false report about her “in breach of all known standards of journalism”. Her message was “don’t write crap”.

Five months on, the Inquiry, led by former justice of the Federal Court Ray Finkelstein QC, with the assistance of academic Dr Matthew Ricketson, has opted in favour of spending taxpayers’ money to replace the Australian Press Council (APC) to improve media accountability.

It is a brave and definitive stance. It is preferable to beefing up the existing Press Council, which has been dogged with its “toothless tiger” tag for too much of its 36 years. The recommendation to create the cross-media super regulator, the News Media Council, is a reason for cautious optimism.

I say “cautious” because even during the short five months it took the Inquiry to travel the major cities, hear submissions and produce its impressive 468 pages, there have been shifts in the Australian media landscape.

Billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart, who joined WA protestors to chant against the Federal Government’s mining tax, last month lifted her five per cent shareholding in Fairfax Media to 14 per cent. Already with a 10 per cent share in television network Ten, the move raised questions of whether these media share acquisitions were a strategy to get her voice better heard above the din.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy now has to act on the recommendations of the Finkelstein media inquiry. AAP/Alan Porrit

Back in 1981 Justice Ralph Norris warned of the potential for harm to society when too few own too much. The retired Supreme Court judge had reviewed Victoria’s print media and identified that concentration of ownership was “high” — and that was before News Limited acquired the Herald and Weekly Times. Loss of diversity in the expression of opinion was one concern, he stated. The second, was “the power of a very few men to influence the outlook and opinions of large numbers of people, and consequently the decisions made in society.”

If that sounds familiar, it might be because today, speaking on radio and writing in the Monthly magazine, Federal treasurer Wayne Swan accused a number of Australia’s wealthiest citizens — Rinehart, Clive Palmer and Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest — of overstepping their reach and using their wealth and influence to alter public policy to serve their self-interests.

Yet, concentration of media ownership was not the focus of this latest media review. This is despite the jaw-dropping fact Australia has the highest concentration of print ownership of any democracy, with the duopoly of Fairfax Media and News Limited (Murdoch) accounting for 90 per cent of its daily newspapers.

It is true that the latest Inquiry did acknowledge concentrated ownership shrinks the number of independent voices available to readers. And, it did find that this is particularly problematic in regional Australia where many towns have fewer media choices than the city; and where local outlets were likely to be under-resourced and understaffed. But, while the Inquiry understood that this could be damaging to the democratic function of our society, disappointingly it passed the buck to Government to investigate with “some urgency”.

The Inquiry’s recommendations are a departure from the desirable model of self-regulation that works well in many democracies. Nonetheless, the new super-regulator will be taxpayer-funded, and at arms length from government. This is better than a compulsory media-levy option because it will not disadvantage start-ups or small outlets. The proposal to have an independent panel appointing a broad mix from within the industry and community is also a positive move.

Unlike the APC, no longer will media proprietors have the option of withdrawing their participation, or much-needed funds. This makes it a fairer system for consumers, and a more even playing field for media organisations. The perhaps unfair exception is that fly-by-night bloggers, often responsible for much vitriol, and the ‘lonely pamphleteer’ will not be held to account if their audiences are small.

The report is the product of hard work, and should be compulsory reading for any student of journalism. Filled with case studies, overseas comparisons and media history, it is far from the stodgy document you might expect to be handed to Government. If the proposals are enacted, let’s hope these new measures can curtail the ‘crap’.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Judith Levine

Reposted from: http://monthlyreview.org/2012/02/01/first-they-came-for-the-sex-offenders

Judith Levine is the author of four books, including Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex, which won the LA Times Book Prize. She also writes a biweekly column called “Poli Psy,” about emotions in politics, for the Vermont alternative newspaper Seven Days. She lives in Brooklyn and northeastern Vermont.

Roger N. Lancaster, Sex Panic and the Punitive State (University of California Press, 2011), 328 pages, $24.95, paperback.

In California Governor Jerry Brown signs a law prohibiting registered sex offenders from offering their homes as polling places. The bill’s sponsor, Republican Assemblyman (and former LAPD officer) Stephen Knight, says the legislation is necessary to protect high-school volunteers and children accompanying their parents on Election Day.

In Vermont a $13.8 million network of twenty-eight communications towers and eight “public safety answering points” is under construction to aid first responders in case of a terrorist attack. Homeland Security, which is funding the project, has granted Vermont—population: 620,000; state crime ranking: forty-nine—more than $90 million since 2001.

In New York a maverick group of psychologists and urban designers are agitating to bring back the old monkey bars and asphalt surfaces of playgrounds, which were abolished because of perceived risks of accidents and lasting psychological trauma. Sixty pages of federal playground regulations now advise, among other precautions, against children wearing drawstring sweatshirts and “mittens connected by strings through the arms.” Write the psychologists: “Paradoxically, our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”

How are these items—collected at random during one week in 2011—related?

The answers can be found in Roger N. Lancaster’s Sex Panic and the Punitive State, a riveting history and virtuosic analysis of the way America’s thirty-year panic about child sexual abuse has fueled an ever-increasing appetite to “protect, punish, and preempt” crime and has served as the model for the creation of “something resembling a police state” in the United States.

Lancaster, a professor of anthropology and cultural studies at George Mason University, says that in the process the criminal justice ethos has been transformed. Today, “the protection of innocence trumps the presumption of innocence,” the victim’s “rights” to comfort and “closure” elbow out the constitutional rights of the accused or convicted, and a lust for punishment has supplanted a faith in rehabilitation.

Our civil and private institutions have become arms of the police and the vice squad. Public schools have students arrested for what used to be considered childish pranks. Public-housing authorities conduct unwarranted searches and evict entire families for the legal infractions of one member. Employee background checks, drug testing of food stamp recipients, voter ID requirements—such practices enact what Lancaster calls the “preemptive paranoid approach” to governance. Even art institutions, once redoubts of calm in a phobic world, now routinely warn audiences that an exhibition may be “inappropriate” for children.

Communities that tolerated a measure of deviance in the spirit of democracy and individual freedom now bond in the solidarity of paranoia and vengeance. The nation girds itself against alien invaders on its borders and at its airports.

And over it all, superimposed on the Stars and Stripes since 9/11, floats the image of America—not just its children—as vulnerable, victimized, and innocent.

“Social Death”

The American carceral state imprisons an unprecedented number of its citizens: with 5 percent of the world’s people, the United States now has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, leading all other nations in both percentage and raw numbers. On the other side of the bars, one in four-to-five American workers is engaged in private security or other “guard labor.” This “penal Keynsianism,” comments Lancaster, “solves two economic problems: it creates jobs while guarding the unemployed.”

Sex offenders constitute a relatively small proportion of people under the thumb of the criminal justice system. But the harshness of their punishment and the disregard of their rights lie outside the Pale even in an extraordinarily harsh system. And in a nation famous for second chances, sex offenders are uniquely bereft of the opportunity to discharge their debt to society, repent of their transgressions, and start anew.

Inmates convicted of offenses such as consensual sex with a minor (statutory rape) or possession of child pornography (which can be pictures of teenagers under eighteen) may serve terms longer than those who have assaulted or even killed a child. At the end of their sentences, sex offenders may be locked up in psychiatric civil commitment, based on psychologists’ inconsistent and unscientific predictions of future offense, with no certain date of release.

There are currently more than 705,000 people on sex offender registries in the United States, with more added weekly. These registrants include everyone from sadistic rapists to people who have urinated twice on a tree; the information on the registries makes it hard to distinguish one from the other. Almost ritually, every session both Republican and Democratic legislators enact tougher sentences and more diabolical restrictions on the residency, work, and freedom of movement of former offenders. For obvious political reasons, repeal is never on the agenda.

Violation of these stringent terms is practically inevitable, and a large number, perhaps the majority, of sex offenders who end up back in prison do so for minor infractions like failing to report the purchase of a car. Whereas parole and probation once aimed to smooth the transition from inmate to civilian, these policies do the opposite: they commonly result in homelessness and joblessness, political disenfranchisement, exclusion from higher education and military service, and even from houses of worship.

Former sex offenders and their families live under constant harassment and threat of vigilante violence; some have been murdered. Lancaster notes that during Hurricane Katrina, when certain New Orleanians were helped to evacuate and even the poorest were at least warehoused, only sex offenders were left to fend for themselves. “The classification of sex offenders as unfit for rescue” along with the special laws driving them from the community “reenact the logic of ‘social death,’” he says. Social death is the term Orlando Patterson used to describe slavery.

Civil libertarians have challenged these policies as double jeopardy, preventive detention, and a violation of the centuries-old principle of habeas corpus. But the courts have consistently upheld them as administrative, not punitive, measures—therefore constitutional. The federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, appears to consider no punishment of a sex offender excessively cruel or unusual.

A decade’s worth of research has found that such restrictions enhance public safely not a whit. But, as Lancaster shows, “preventive governance” is not a rational response to actual crime, which has been declining for decades. In fact, contrary to police claims and public perception—stoked by such shows as Law & Order SVU and To Catch a Predator—sex offenders have extraordinarily low rates of recidivism for sexual offenses. Advocates of the registries attribute the low rates, and drops in crime generally, to increased incarceration and post-prison surveillance. Opponents claim that the restrictions are so stressful that registrants are more likely to offend again. Recent research challenges both camps: a careful analysis of several data sets by Amanda Y. Agan at the University of Chicago finds that sex offender registration neither increases nor decreases the likelihood of reoffense. The article is subtitled “Fear Without Function?”1

But data have no effect. Indeed, the model of sex offender registries has only spread to other areas of the law. Several states have proposed or set up public registries of people convicted of DWI and domestic violence, and, in Florida, of all released prisoners—all to minimize “risk.”

In an era where parents are afraid to let their children play outside—or fortify them with helmets and cell phones whenever they do—“risk assessment” is a growing discipline, which looks like science. It is in fact symbolic: the actuarial encoding of hyperbolic public apprehension, ever on the uptrend. Phil Taylor, a former Texas-certified sex offender therapist, told me that “sex offender ‘management’ is done like business management”: the state calculates its potential profits (including political ones) and losses and structures its policing bureaucracies accordingly. Never mind that what shows up in the debit column are the civil and human rights of people once called U.S. citizens.

The White Molester

Among this country’s unprecedented legions of inmates and parolees, people of color are vastly disproportionate. For example, the percentage of young African-American men in prison is higher than it was in the Jim Crow South, when prisoners were leased out as slave labor.

Yet sex offenders are white—not only on the prison rolls but also in the public imagination. Why is this so and how did it come to be? It is a puzzle that critics of the penal state have not solved—and rarely approach. The facts are simply too hard to square with the usually correct view that the carceral state is the latest iteration of a systemic repression of black and brown people.

So this is probably the most valuable and original contribution of Sex Panic: Lancaster’s treatment of the “racing” and “queering” of the sex offender and its effect on what now masquerades as civic solidarity.

Since the start of U.S. history, the myth of the black (and Native American) rapist of white women has justified slavery, lynching, and the hyper-policing of communities of color; Lancaster glosses this well-known portion of the brutal story. But it is the emotions and ideologies, and resultant laws and practices, from the mid-twentieth century to the present that he maps with particular subtlety, moving from lynch laws—used against black men accused of raping white women—to “sexual psychopath” laws, which “de-raced” (or, rather, “re-raced,” as white) the molester.

From the Depression to the McCarthy Era, the image of the child-molester had morphed from an unemployed man plagued by feelings of impaired masculinity to a homosexual, naturally hungry for young flesh, his deviance portrayed as both congenital and contagious. The child molester of the 1950s has been supplanted by the “pedophile,” a word that is now used indiscriminately for people who sexually desire prepubescent children and those (like the entire advertising industry, you might say, and by extension, the rest of us) who find teenagers sexy. Although the child molester is no longer explicitly described as homosexual, homosexuality makes a suspect person even more suspect. In fact, the Static-99, widely used to assess risk of sex-crime reoffense, lists “any male victims” as a risk factor. Still, as homosexuality is normalized, today’s “pedophile” is thrust, by gay rights and straight sexual freedom groups alike, even further to the margins of queerness. Lancaster calls it the “offloading of queerness.”

What happened to the bestial black male whose image shadowed white America’s nightmares? The 1960s law-and-order mania resurrected him for a time, and he appeared again in the 1980s, embodied with particular viciousness in the five black teenagers convicted—falsely, it turned out—of raping the Central Park jogger in 1989. Interestingly the term predator—coined in that decade to describe a species of remorseless black teenage criminals—migrated to the discourse of sexual terror, as the figure of the inscrutable, naturally evil black rapist shifted sideways to make room for the incurably sick, assumedly white, child-desiring queer.

Of course racism is not vanquished; whiteness is doing its work. “Shall we say, then, that in a society committed both to a war on crime (with its mass incarceration of black men) and to ridding itself of racism (through formal adherence to a regime of civil rights) the feared figure of the white pedophile is necessary?” Lancaster writes. “Perhaps part of the psychic work he performs is to absolve the guilty conscience of racism at a time when so many other fears are focused on the black gangbanger and brown border menace.”

The child molester is real; he does harm, Lancaster concedes. But so monstrous is he in America’s imagination that he must be understood as symbolic—and, by now, central to the nation’s understanding of its moral self. As the crime scene moves from the inner city to the suburb, from the “pathological” female-headed black family of the 1965 Moynihan Report to the white, heterosexual, middle-class family and from the purview of the welfare office and the juvenile detention center to the privatized surveillance of the PTA and the neighborhood watch, “overt references to the racial origins of [national] norms can be progressively erased,” Lancaster writes.

“Whiteness and straightness may not even be the right words anymore for the type of rectitude that is staged in moral panic.” To secure a place in the idealized American moral community—even in the radically dehumanized precincts of the supermax prison—all you need to do is bash a pervert.

Politics and Perversion

This moral panic has been going on for nearly a century, interrupted by one brief decade. It is protean: in the last three decades alone, it has metamorphosed from outsized estimates of incest to belief in covens of Satanic abusers to the government’s claim of a massive global traffic in child porn—which can be neither substantiated nor refuted, since the public and the press are prohibited from viewing the images.

And, while false accusations of garden-variety child abuse continue unabated, the popular suspicion of adult malevolence toward children has spilled beyond sex. A young mother whose breast milk is insufficient is charged for the death of her starved baby. A father whose children are consumed in a fire is executed for their arson-murder.

Meanwhile, as Lancaster shows, the stain of “sex crime” is spreading into every discourse of danger. In some states, drunk drivers have been renamed “abusive” drivers. On the arm of a prisoner in Abu Ghraib, the world “RAPEIST” [sic] was scrawled in magic marker. The federal government’s tentacles of surveillance—Homeland Security and Immigrations & Customs Enforcement, or ICE—reach equally toward “terrorists,” illegal “aliens,” and men who masturbate to images of 15-year-old boys. “Victims of Human Trafficking”—largely defined as coerced prostitution, though forced domestic and industrial labor are far more common—are welcomed at the borders while economic refugees and political torture survivors are turned away.

It is not only the repressive right that got us to this juncture. The left and feminism have done their part, too. Lancaster points out that the left’s “fixation on injury” is balanced in more expansive times by a politics of liberation. But these are not expansive times. Even social service and economic justice advocates who understand the systemic causes of people’s troubles are nonetheless hunkered down defending the statutory protection of favored constituencies defined by harm. Mainstream feminists, obsessed with sexual victimhood, have formed tight alliances with moral conservatives and the paternalistic and racist forces of law and order (anti-porn, anti-prostitution feminists can be thanked for those distortions in the granting of refugee status).

Given the feeling of scarcity all around, perhaps it is not surprising that progressives have not critiqued the industry of support for crime victims—“a distorted little welfare state in the middle of savage capitalism”—while social services are slashed for everyone else.

Why should progressives have sympathy for these devils? Some sex offenders have committed heinous crimes. But so have the people on death row on whose behalf The Nation editorializes and the Quakers vigil. Even the guilty deserve justice.

Roger Lancaster was moved to write Sex Panic when his friend, a gay teacher, was entangled in a false accusation of sexual abuse. One item of evidence: he invited Lancaster, who is also gay, along on a school trip. I sometimes think the panic will end only when every American knows someone whose life has been destroyed by it.

Perhaps this book will hasten that day. With reasoned urgency and stirring intelligence Sex Panic makes palpable the injury this hysteria is inflicting, not only on people accused of sex crimes, but on democracy and freedom themselves.

Note

1. Amanda Y. Agan, “Sex Offender Registries: Fear without Function?” Journal of Law and Economics 54:1 (2011): 207–39.

• By Sebastian Anthony on February 21, 2012 at 8:37 am

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/119131-why-doesnt-the-mpaa-buy-the-pirate-bay

If you believe even a fraction of the hyperbolic crap pumped out by the MPAA, RIAA, and other copyright lobbies, you would think that piracy (née file sharing) has resulted in artists and publishers being shortchanged by billions of dollars.

In Capitol v. Thomas, the most prominent case when it comes to file sharing, Jammie Thomas-Rasset was sued by some major record labels for sharing 24 songs on Kazaa. She was found liable in the first trial and a retrial, with the jury claiming that she owed no less than $1.9 million in statutory damages, some $80,000 per song. The damages were reduced to “just” $54,000 ($2,250 per song) by a judge, which the record labels are currently appealing.

Suffice it to say, irrespective of whether a shared song is worth $2k or $80k, you are talking about truly impossible amounts of money. At the time of publishing, there are 4,000 people seeding Adele’s 21 album on The Pirate Bay (TPB). At $2,250 per seed, we’re talking about $9 million in damages; at $80,000, which is what the RIAA is pursuing, that figure is no less than $320 million. Since its release last year, 21 has probably been downloaded tens of millions of times, the downloaders theoretically racking up hundreds of billions of dollars in damages. If you expand your search to the top 10 albums on TPB, you’re looking at trillions of dollars of damages.

If you factor in Isohunt, Torrentz, Demonoid, and other torrent indexes, pirates owe the record labels something on the order of a quadrillion dollars. Finally, if we then include movies, games, and applications — all of which are much higher value than music — then… well, I hope you’re starting to see the lunacy of it all. In case you’re wondering, the total, worldwide revenue from single and album sales in 2008 was $28 billion — less than the apparent value of a single Adele album.

The situation is made all the more insane by the fact that most file sharing sites are small-time operations run by a handful of people. Some of these sites generate substantial income, like Megaupload, but for the most part we are talking about revenues of thousands of dollars per year, not millions, not billions, not trillions. In short, if the media industry really believes that file sharing sites are depriving them of money, why don’t they just buy them out?

A site like Torrentz or Isohunt, which make all of their money through display ads, is probably worth somewhere in the region of $10 to $100 million — pocket change for a company like Vivendi or News Corp. Some sites, like TPB, will be hard to purchase for ideological reasons — the service we provide is priceless! — but I suspect every file sharing site has a price. After all, if piracy is costing the industry billions or trillions of dollars, surely you can spare a few hundred million to buy out TPB?

After buying out these torrent sites, the RIAA and MPAA would have two options: They could either shut down the sites, or they could attempt to legalize/sterilize them, ala Napster or Suprnova. Either way, trillions of dollars of damages would disappear over night.
Another chilling possibility is that Big Media could buy these file sharing sites under the guise of a seemingly innocuous holding company. Isohunt might have serious moral concerns about selling out to the RIAA, but what if RIAA acted through a random private equity company instead? I’m not sure about the legalities of this, but Big Media would presumably then have direct access to both the seeders, but more importantly the users who upload movies, TV shows, and games to these sites. All of a sudden and unbeknownst to us, the RIAA and MPAA would become very good at targeting the right people.

Masquerade

The ultimate irony, of course, is that piracy isn’t worth quadrillions of dollars every year. You know that, I know that, and the industry knows that. The damage of piracy is probably so minute that it’s not even worth buying out the file sharing sites. Why then do the RIAA and MPAA spend millions every year on litigation and perpetuating the apparently persistent threat of piracy?

The real purpose behind the War on Piracy is to create a FUD smokescreen that allows Big Media to lock its content down with ever more restrictive DRM, and to pass laws like SOPA and PIPA. For just a few million dollars, Big Media bought enough congresspeople to pass laws that would allow file sharing sites to be shut down at the press of a button. SOPA was shot down at the last minute by a huge internet-wide push, but you can be guaranteed that it’ll be back.

It’s important to remember that Big Media has been the driving force behind increasingly draconian copyright laws for decades. The amount of money that a publisher can make from a piece of content is directly proportional to the control it wields; seriously, the concept of a music CD or video game that can be freely copied and distributed is the stuff of nightmare for publishers. Big Media’s capitalistic slavishness is unlikely to end, and so until enough liberty-destroying laws and DRM can be implemented, the FUD-filled War on Piracy will continue.

Long term cannabis use has been known to harm the brain but new research shows some of this damage was there to begin with.
Wiros

Cannabis remains the most commonly consumed illicit drug in the world, with more than a third of Australians reporting that they have used it at some point in their lives.

This is despite growing evidence that smoking pot during adolescence is associated with a number of significant harms, including educational underachievement and the later development of mental health disorders.

While few studies have examined whether long-term cannabis use also has detrimental effects on the brain, we have previously found that regular, heavy cannabis use is associated with significant reductions in the hippocampus and amygdala, two key brain regions that are involved in learning and emotion.

We also observed a relationship between brain volume and cannabis use, with greater levels of cannabis exposure associated with smaller hippocampi.

M. Martin Vicente

Although these changes are often attributed to the neurotoxic effects of long-term cannabis use on key brain regions, some abnormalities may predate use and represent markers of vulnerability. Until now, no studies have examined whether structural brain abnormalities are present in adolescents before they begin experimenting with cannabis.

This month, we published new research in the journal Biological Psychiatry that assessed whether adolescents who began smoking cannabis before age 17 demonstrated pre-existing differences in key brain regions. Participants were recruited from primary schools in Melbourne, as part of a larger study examining emotional development.

The participants underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at age 12 and were assessed for cannabis use four years later, at the age of 16. At the follow-up assessment, 28 participants (16 of whom were female) had commenced using cannabis and 93 (43 females) had not.

We found that only regions of the frontal part of the brain – the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) – predicted cannabis use by age 16, even after controlling for alcohol and tobacco use. Volumes of other brain regions, including the hippocampus and amygdala, did not predict later cannabis use.

Green: the orbitofrontal cortex. Paul Wicks

The OFC plays a primary role in inhibitory control and reward-based decision making. And previous studies of adolescent cannabis users have demonstrated subtle deficits in problem solving, attention, memory and executive functions, as well as abnormalities in this brain region.

In adult cannabis users, decreased activation of the OFC has been associated with faulty decision-making, suggesting that a reduced ability to weigh up the pros and cons of one’s actions might render certain individuals more prone to drug use.

But while our findings suggest that brain regions that underlie inhibitory and decision-making processes influence risk for early cannabis use, it’s unlikely that OFC volume reductions exclusively lead to cannabis use.

Multiple studies suggest that OFC abnormalities occur in other addictive disorders and are not substance-specific. In fact, smaller OFC volumes are likely to be related to other substance use problems later in life, of which adolescent cannabis use might be considered an early marker.

Presna

Indeed, our findings are consistent with other research which demonstrates that the most robust predictors of early substance use are those that relate to poor behavioural and emotional control.

Our results also suggest that previously observed structural changes in the amygdala and hippocampus in long-term heavy users are a consequence of chronic cannabis exposure rather than a pre-existing vulnerability. This reinforces the notion that prolonged use of cannabis is neurotoxic to specific brain regions.

In terms of next steps, further prospective studies are required to determine the degree and mechanisms of long-term cannabis-related harm, as well as the time course and extent of brain recovery following abstinence.

In the meantime, we need greater investment in prevention programs that target childhood risk factors, such as social disadvantage, family breakdown and early school failure, which contribute to the development of harmful substance use during adolescence.

And we need to work to strengthen factors that protect young people from developing substance-related harm such as enhancing family attachment, and social and emotional competence.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Here we go again, Perth ‘girls’ trying to find their ‘decent man’, someone who’ll look after them, pay their bills, pay their fares, whatever (so long as the ‘decent man’ doesn’t go anywhere near any of ‘THEIR’ resulting children, or not as the case may be), anything to save a few dollars, anybody for a quickie, or to keep it ‘safe’ a blow job.

Here at Sniffer Dog we keep asking why is it that Perth men persistently go to Bangkok for their holidays, or go find a Philippina, or a Chinese or a Balinese wife, anything but a Perth wife.

We know too about the only fairly recently disenfranchised Northbridge brothels, and unending suburban resistance to their reopening on a new patch, and the randy chicks left loose because of it.

We also know a few of the Sikh men who come here from the Punjab, and Mumbai and Dubai, and proud of their ancient warrior tradition and ideas of manhood and confused about having to work here merely as taxi drivers fall so easily into the trap.

Except of course here we have a Christian tradition, don’t we, and a Feminist Lobby, and a government in Canberra crying constantly poor about the violence toward women and *THEIR* children, leaving the bloke, the sperm donor, the sinner, the perpetrator, constantly having to defend themself as ‘The Rapist’.

Except, here we are civilised, aren’t we?

Here we know the rules. We’ve read the bible. We understand proper civility toward a woman shown by every decent man.

We also know that no woman can possibly sin, nor their children nor offspring, so long as that evil of all evils, the post-pubescent male, the breadwinner, the sperm-donor, the official perpetrator of every crime in the statutes, is kept nicely at bay and behaving himself.

We also know that Perth is the only city in Australia where a person can lose their wallet, accidentally drop it on the street, and find not a snowdrop’s chance in hell of ever getting it back.

Sorry, successive governments, but here at Sniffer Dog we choose to remain a law unto ourselves, and raise *OUR* children, illegally it would seem, against the odds, whatever, and take the risk of seeing them succeed in life, graduate from University, find well-paid jobs, hold their head up as honourable men apart from going offshore to find a wife and partner, and take in as many kids as we think fit on the same basis, than EVER leave them victim to the quickies and cock-suckers and hand-jobs, the blamers and haters around this place.

One might argue that it’s all the fault of George, and William, and Victoria and Edward and George and Edward again, and Elizabeth, and Whitehall, all that lot, shipping out so many convoys of blokes to the far Antipodes, and only as an afterthought a few bride ships, into an arid landscape, but we won’t.

I mean, it’s measure of value isn’t it?

Or maybe not. I’m happy to sit back and watch for the next thirty years or so, before I drop off the perch as my own turn comes around, and see the rapidly increasing numbers of mixed-race children like my own repopulate the place, all white fathers and Asian mothers, while these ‘accidents’ that Perth women have, that we see happening still, that our governments still choose to fund, form a growing underclass of illiterate, unemployable, substance dependent victims of domestic violence.

We can find ourselves distracted of course by the idea that Perth women are happy to work and earn money to pay their fare, pay their way, and not open their mouth instead, or their legs, thinking blokes are so dumb they’ll only ever fall for the same trick over and over again, but, nah, don’t go there . . . . .

All that’s all too hard.

Go figure.

Gil Hardwick BA.Hons BLitt.Hons SFSPE
Consulting Anthropologist

We have decided in the public interest to post this here as well, with the accompanying photos inserted, from http://reason.com/archives/2011/06/14/perverted-justice

Perverted Justice
Sex offender laws represent the triumph of outrage over reason.
Jacob Sullum from the July 2011 issue

“If we had been aware of his record,” says Maureen Kanka, “my daughter would be alive today.” She is referring, in a statement on the website of an anti-crime group she founded, to Jesse Timmendequas, a neighbor in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, who raped and murdered her 7-year-old daughter, Megan, in 1994. Three months later, the state legislature enacted Megan’s Law, which created a publicly accessible registry of sex offenders.

“Without the registry,” says Shirley Turner, “he would still be alive today.” She is referring, in a 2006 interview with Human Rights Watch, to her 24-year-old son, William Elliot. He was murdered that year by a pedophile-hunting Canadian gunman who found his name and address in Maine’s online database of sex offenders. Elliot’s crime: When he was 19, he had sex with his girlfriend, who was three weeks shy of 16, the age of consent in Maine.

The panic that followed Megan Kanka’s murder produced an alarm system that often fails to distinguish between dangerous predators like Timmendequas, who had a record of assaulting little girls, and nonviolent lawbreakers like Elliot, who posed no discernible threat to the general public. They are all mixed together in the online registries of sex offenders that every state is required to maintain as a condition of receiving federal law enforcement funding—a mandate imposed by another Megan’s Law, enacted by Congress in 1996.

Registration only rarely leads to murder, but it routinely ruins relationships, triggers ostracism and harassment, and impedes education and employment. These burdens are compounded by state and local laws that ban sex offenders from living near schools, parks, day care centers, and other locations where children congregate. Such restrictions, which often apply even if an offender’s crime had nothing to do with children, can be so extensive that entire cities are effectively off limits. In Miami local residence restrictions have given rise to a colony of more than 70 sex offenders who live under the Julia Tuttle Causeway, a bridge that crosses Biscayne Bay.

Some sex offenders, including nonviolent ones, will not live to see the underside of a bridge because they receive sentences that keep them behind bars until they die. Two decades of ever-more-punitive legislation have produced sentencing rules so bizarre and byzantine that the punishment for possessing images of sexually abused children can be more severe than the punishment for sexually abusing them. And even prisoners who complete their sentences may not go free, since the federal government and about half of the states have laws authorizing the indefinite civil commitment of sex offenders who would otherwise be released.

American policies regarding sex offenders mark them as a special category of criminals for whom no stigma is too crippling, no regulations are too restrictive, and no penalty is too severe. This attitude, driven by fear and outrage, is fundamentally irrational, and so are its results, which make little sense in terms of justice or public safety. Like the lustful predators of their nightmares, Americans pondering the right way to deal with sex offenders seem captive to their passions.

I Am on the Registry for Having Premarital Sex

The public branding of sex offenders through online registries is a reaction to horrible, highly publicized crimes, such as Megan Kanka’s murder, in which strangers abduct, rape, and kill children. But this sort of crime is exceedingly rare. Data from the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey indicate that more than 90 percent of sexually abused minors are assaulted by relatives or acquaintances—people they trust. (According to the same survey, strangers commit just one in four sexual assaults on adults. They commit only 14 percent of sexual assaults reported to police.) Furthermore, according to a 1997 Justice Department study, nearly nine out of 10 people arrested for sex offenses have no prior convictions for this category of crime, so they would not show up in sex offender registries.

Meanwhile, the people on sex offender lists may pose little or no threat. A 2007 report by Human Rights Watch found that “at least 28 states require registration as a sex offender for someone convicted of having consensual sex with another teenager, if the offender was either age 17 or two years older than the other party.” Eleven states set no minimum age difference. “It’s one thing if you are a 40-year-old having sex with a 13-year-old,” says the report’s co-author and editor, Jamie Fellner, senior adviser to the U.S. Program of Human Rights Watch. “It’s another thing if you’re a 17-year-old boy having sex with your 16-year-old or 15-year-old girlfriend. Registration as a sex offender is just completely inappropriate there, does nothing to promote public safety, but ruins lives.”

A man who was convicted of statutory rape when he was 16 for having consensual sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend told Human Rights Watch: “We were in love. And now we are married. So it’s like I am on the registry for having premarital sex. Does having premarital sex make me a danger to society? My wife doesn’t think so.”

The Human Rights Watch report also found that at least five states required registration for offenses related to adult prostitution, at least 13 required registration for public urination, and at least 32 required registration for exposing one’s genitals in public. And from the information given in a registry, which typically is limited to a vague legal description of the offense, it is often hard to tell what someone did to end up there. “Without any further information, it is difficult to provide reasonable steps that people can take to help keep themselves safe,” says Maia Christopher, executive director of the Association for Treatment of Sexual Abusers. “Just knowing that there is someone living next door to you who’s committed a sexual offense doesn’t necessarily give you enough information to know what you’re supposed to do about it.” In fact, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Connecticut’s sex offender registry in 2003, it did so partly because the state expressly disavowed any claims about the “current dangerousness” of the people in its electronic pillory, which meant they did not have a due process right to a hearing on that question.

Consider the case of Tony Washington, a promising college football player whose professional career was derailed by a conversation-stopping offense he committed almost a decade ago: At the age of 16, he had consensual sex with his 15-year-old sister. A 2010 profile of Washington in ESPN magazine explained the context of this forbidden liaison: a troubled, dispiriting childhood in the rougher sections of New Orleans, where Washington was constantly threatened by violence and had few sources of emotional support. Although he overcame a deprived background to become a star player at Abilene Christian University in Texas, his taboo-breaking transgression has deterred professional teams from drafting him and will mark him until the day he dies.

If you search for Washington’s name in the Texas sex offender registry or the U.S. Justice Department’s nationwide database, you will see photographs, a physical description, his date of birth, and his home address. His offense is listed as “prohibited sexual conduct,” which most people, given the context, will assume refers to some sort of predatory crime. Few people will bother to look up the Texas statute explaining that consensual sex with several different kinds of relatives, including adopted siblings and first cousins, qualifies for this label, triggering the same lifelong registration requirement that applies to rapists and child molesters. (On its face, the law even covers sex between first cousins who were legally married in one of the 25 states that allow such unions.) Whatever you may think of Washington’s crime, it hardly marks him as a public menace whom women and children should fear, let alone as someone who will be a danger to others even when he is old and infirm.

Washington’s case illustrates another way in which the legal treatment of sex offenders is unusual. Although the records of juvenile offenses typically are sealed, sex registration is public, and it applies even to people who, like Washington, committed their offenses as teenagers or children. According to The Dallas Morning News, the sex offender registry in Texas, where Washington lives, includes about 4,000 people who were minors when they committed their crimes, a quarter of whom were under 14. Human Rights Watch interviewed the father of a 10-year-old boy accused of touching his 5-year-old cousin’s genitals. “My son doesn’t really understand what sex is,” he told the group, “so it’s hard to help him understand why he has to register as a sex offender.” This policy of tarring minors as sex offenders undermines a central aim of the juvenile justice system by burdening people with the mistakes of their youth for the rest of their lives.

No Area in Town Is Available to Live In

Like registration, residence restrictions are ostensibly aimed at protecting potential victims from known sex offenders, in this case by creating a geographical buffer. But the logic of these rules, which have been adopted by more than 20 states and hundreds of municipalities, is hard to understand. “I don’t know of any research that suggests the residency restrictions are effective,” says Christopher. “People don’t necessarily offend where they live.”

In 2005 Iowa banned people convicted of sex offenses involving minors from living within 2,000 feet of a school or day care center. Almost immediately, the ban prompted complaints from police and prosecutors, who worried that the residence restrictions were so burdensome that they discouraged sex offenders from pleading guilty and from registering after conviction, making them impossible to track. In a 2006 statement, the Iowa County Attorneys Association said the law “does not provide the protection that was originally intended” and called for its repeal, citing “the cost of enforcing the requirement and the unintended effects on families of offenders.” After the law took effect, the number of sex offenders whose whereabouts were unknown more than doubled. The prosecutors reported that “the residency restriction is causing offenders to become homeless, to change residences without notifying authorities of their new locations, to register false addresses or to simply disappear.”

Jerry Behn, the Republican state senator who introduced the law, conceded that he might have gotten carried away. “If you draw a map, pretty soon you can make it so no area in town is available to live in,” Behn told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2006. “It would have been better if we had put it at 1,000 feet.” In 2009 the legislature replaced the 2,000-foot rule with a law prohibiting anyone convicted of “a sex offense against a minor” from working at a school or day care center, visiting an elementary school or day care center without permission, or loitering within 300 feet of a facility intended primarily for use by children.

Iowa’s unhappy experience with residence restrictions did not deter Georgia legislators from enacting an even more onerous set of rules in 2006. Their law, which extended existing residence restrictions, banned all registered sex offenders (not just those who had committed crimes against children) from living, working, or loitering within 1,000 feet of schools, churches, child care facilities, or other places where minors congregate, including parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, skating rinks, and school bus stops. Even a sex offender who did not currently live within one of these exclusion zones could be forced to move in the future, depending on how his neighbors decided to use their property. For the law’s sponsors, its indiscriminate breadth was a feature, not a bug. Georgia House Majority Leader Jerry Keen (R-St. Simons) said he hoped sex offenders “will want to move to another state.”

Under the 2006 law, all 490 registered sex offenders in DeKalb County, most of them men who as teenagers had consensual sex with younger girls, were required to move because their residences were within 1,000 feet of a covered location. The law applied even to sex offenders dying in nursing homes. One Georgia woman, labeled a sex offender because she performed fellatio on a 15-year-old boy when she was 17, had to move in 2005 because she was too close to a day care center. When the legislature added school bus stops to the list of prohibited locations in 2006, her new home became illegal as well.

In 2007 the Georgia Supreme Court struck down the residence restrictions, citing the perpetual insecurity they created. The court was responding to a lawsuit by Anthony Mann, who in 2002 was sentenced to four months in jail and five years of probation for flashing two minors during a business trip to North Carolina. In 2003 Mann married and bought a house in Hampton, Georgia. At the time, it was a legal location. But then a day care center opened nearby, rendering his residence illegal. “Under the terms of that statute,” the state Supreme Court noted, “there is no place in Georgia where a registered sex offender can live without being continually at risk of being ejected.” Concluding that the law “precludes appellant from having any reasonable investment-backed expectation in any property purchased as his private residence,” the court unanimously ruled that it violated the Fifth Amendment’s ban on uncompensated takings of private property.

The Georgia law also prevented Mann from working at a barbecue restaurant in Lovejoy that he co-owned, since it was within 1,000 feet of a day care center that opened after the restaurant was established. But because Mann did not present enough evidence of economic harm, the Georgia Supreme Court did not overturn the law’s work restrictions.

A 90 Percent Likelihood of Recidivism

Constitutional issues aside, closing off employment opportunities for sex offenders, who are already handicapped by criminal records and public registration, does not seem like an effective way of encouraging them to put their lives in order. Neither does forcing ex-convicts to cluster in the boondocks, far from jobs, family, churches, and treatment programs.

“Once someone is zoned out that far, a lot of the resources that help reduce the risk to reoffend are taken away,” says Maia Christopher. “People who are coming out of prison, who have whatever deficits and risk factors they have, are put into situations that really high-functioning people would find very challenging. I don’t think anybody finds it particularly easy to be living under a bridge. When you have someone who’s already got a lot of issues, part of what we’re doing is increasing that challenge. Once you make the restrictions so broad, you tend to take away a lot of the resources that we know help keep people safe, such as community stability, employment, family services, spiritual support—the relationships that help people stay crime-free.”

Human Rights Watch’s Jamie Fellner likewise argues that the rules aimed at discouraging sex offenders from committing new crimes can produce the opposite effect. “One of the most powerful things that keep people from breaking the law is a sense of what they will lose if they do,” she says. “If you’re treating someone like a cur, a dog that is being kicked out of the village, how are you strengthening that person’s desire or ability to follow the law?”

Politicians who push ever-harsher laws routinely argue that sex offenders are almost certain to commit new offenses anyway. “The rate of recidivism for these crimes is astronomical because these people are compulsive,” said Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-Wash.) in 1994, making the case for the federal Megan’s Law. In 2005 Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), later notorious for sending sexually suggestive email messages to teenage pages, claimed: “There is a 90 percent likelihood of recidivism for sexual crimes against children. Ninety percent. That is the standard. That is their record. That is the likelihood. Ninety percent.” His source may have been California Assemblyman Bill Hoge (R-Pasadena), who in 1996 told The New York Times that child molesters, upon being released from prison, “will immediately commit this crime again at least 90 percent of the time.”

There is no basis for these numbers. “Though often thought of as the most persistent and dangerous criminals, sex offenders are among the least likely criminals to recidivate,” write Florida Institute of Technology psychologist Timothy Fortney and three co-authors in a 2007 article published by the journal Sexual Offender Treatment. A 2003 Justice Department study of 9,700 sex offenders found that 5 percent were arrested for new sex crimes within three years of being released from prison. (By comparison, 23 percent of burglars were arrested for new burglaries, and 22 percent of people who had served time for nonsexual assault were arrested for new assaults.) Studies that cover longer periods find higher recidivism rates for sex offenders, but still nothing like those claimed by panic-promoting politicians. Two meta-analyses of studies involving a total of 29,000 sex offenders, published by the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in 1998 and 2005, found a recidivism rate of 14 percent after four to six years. A study of 4,700 sex offenders, published by Public Safety Canada in 2004, found that 24 percent were charged with a new sex crime over a period of 15 years.

Since the National Crime Victimization Survey indicates that most sex crimes go unreported, these numbers do not tell the whole story. But Karl Hanson, a senior research officer at Public Safety Canada who co-authored many of the recidivism studies, believes the unreported sex crimes largely fall into two broad categories: those deemed too minor to bother calling the police (such as a drunken groping at a party) and those involving relatives or trusted members of the victim’s social network—neither of which fit the pattern that legislators have in mind when they argue that registration, public notification, and residence restrictions can help protect children and women from attacks by strangers.

The research on recidivism helped change the mind of at least one prominent advocate of sex offender registries. In 1989 Patty Wetterling’s 11-year-old son, Jacob, was kidnapped by a masked gunman while riding his bike home from a convenience store in St. Joseph, Minnesota. He has not been seen since. The crime inspired the 1994 Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act, the federal law that created the state registries that Megan’s Law made publicly accessible two years later. “The high recidivism rates I assumed to be true do not exist,” Patty Wetterling told Human Rights Watch in 2007. “It has made me rethink the value of broad-based community notification laws, which operate on the assumption that most sex offenders are high-risk dangers to the community they are released into.”

Looking vs. Touching

People convicted of molesting children have demonstrated a dangerous proclivity, even if they are less likely to repeat the crime than is popularly believed. But what about people who are convicted of possessing child pornography? Although conventional wisdom assumes child-porn consumers are undiscovered or future molesters, that assumption is also wrong.

This year Michael Seto, a psychologist who advises the Integrated Forensic Program of the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group, published a study of this question, co-authored by Karl Hanson and Kelly M. Babchishin of Public Safety Canada, in the journal Sexual Abuse. Seto, Hanson, and Babchishin performed meta-analyses of 24 studies that looked at the criminal histories of “online offenders” (mainly consumers of child pornography) and eight studies that calculated their recidivism rates. They found that one in eight had an official record of committing a contact offense. In the six studies that included self-report data (drawn from treatment sessions and polygraph examinations), one in two child pornography offenders admitted to having sexual contact with children.

Looking forward, Seto says, “C.P. offenders are relatively unlikely to commit contact offenses in the studies that have followed them.” Over all, the recidivism studies indicate that only 2 percent of child pornography offenders committed a sexual offense involving physical contact during the follow-up period, which ranged from 18 months to six years. In short, says Hanson, “there does exist a distinct group of offenders who are Internet-only and do not present a significant risk for hands-on sex offending.”

Why would anyone look at this horrible stuff if he was not inclined to imitate it? Troy Stabenow, an assistant federal public defender in Missouri who is a prominent critic of child pornography sentencing policies, put it this way in a 2009 interview with ABA Journal: “People who watch movies like Saw and Friday the 13th are being titillated by the act of torture and murder. That doesn’t mean that they’re going to go out and commit torture and murder.”

Dean Boland, an Ohio defense attorney specializing in child pornography cases, says a substantial share of defendants were themselves victims of sexual abuse as children and look at these images as a way of working through the trauma. He recalls one client, a 65-year-old former pastor who received a sentence of more than 17 years, saying, “When I’m looking at these images, I’m not envisioning myself as the adult. I’m envisioning myself as the kid.”

Yet the legal treatment of people caught with child pornography is so harsh that they can end up serving longer sentences than people who actually abuse children. Under federal law, receiving child pornography, which could mean downloading a single image, triggers a mandatory minimum sentence of five years—the same as the penalty for distributing it. Merely looking at a picture can qualify someone for the same charge, assuming he does so deliberately and is aware that Web browsers automatically make copies of visited sites. In practice, since the Internet is almost always the source of child pornography, this means that viewing and possession can be treated the same as trafficking. The maximum penalty for receiving or distributing child porn is 20 years, and federal sentencing guidelines recommend stiff enhancements based on factors that are extremely common in these cases, such as using a computer, possessing more than 600 images (with each video clip counted as 75 images), and exchanging photos for something of value, including other photos.

In a devastating 2008 critique of these sentencing policies, available on his office’s website, Stabenow shows that Congress ratcheted the penalties for looking at child pornography upward through a series of ill-considered, undebated dictates driven by little more than public outrage and disgust. The upshot: Between 1997 and 2007, the number of people sent to federal prison for possessing, receiving, or distributing (but not producing) child pornography quintupled, from 238 to 1,170, while the average sentence more than quadrupled, from 21 to 91 months. Among the baffling results of these policies: A defendant with no prior criminal record and no history of abusing children would qualify for a sentence of 15 to 20 years based on a small collection of child pornography and one photo swap, while a 50-year-old man who encountered a 13-year-old girl online and lured her into a sexual relationship would get no more than four years. The comparison, Stabenow writes, “demonstrates the absurdity of the system.”

The absurdity has not gone unnoticed by the judiciary. In a 2010 survey by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, 70 percent of federal judges said the recommended penalties for possessing or receiving child pornography are unreasonable. Although the Supreme Court has ruled that the guidelines are only advisory and not mandatory, judges still must justify deviations in written explanations that are subject to review by appeals courts. Many have not been shy in expressing their opinions about the fairness and wisdom of the penalties they are asked to impose.

In a 2008 child pornography case, Robert Pratt, a U.S. district judge in Des Moines, gave the defendant a sentence of seven years instead of the recommended 18. The guidelines “do not appear to be based on any sort of empirical data,” Pratt said, “and the Court has been unable to locate any particular rationale for them beyond the general revulsion that is associated with child exploitation-related offenses.”

The following year, Lynn Adelman, a U.S. district judge in Milwaukee, cited Stabenow’s critique of the sentencing guidelines when he gave a middle-aged funeral director who was caught swapping child pornography a six-year sentence instead of the 18 years sought by prosecutors. “The flaws identified by Stabenow were certainly evident in this case,” Adelman wrote in his sentencing memorandum. “I could not conclude that under the circumstances of this case, given all of the flaws in the guideline discussed above, that the range deserved deference.”

Jack Weinstein, a U.S. district judge in Brooklyn, has been fighting for years, sometimes through rulings of questionable legality, to spare a married father of five not only the 11-to-14-year sentence recommended by the guidelines but the five-year statutory minimum for receiving child pornography. “Imprisonment of at least five years for this defendant is cruel,” Weinstein wrote in a 2008 opinion.

State penalties for possessing child pornography can be even harsher. In Arizona, one count of possessing child pornography carries a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence, each image qualifies as a separate count, and the sentences must be served consecutively. That’s how Morton Berger, a former high school teacher with no criminal record, ended up with a 200-year sentence in 2003.

In 2006 the Arizona Supreme Court upheld Berger’s sentence, rejecting his argument that it violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Writing in dissent, Vice Chief Justice Rebecca Berch noted that “Arizona’s sentence for this crime is by far the longest in the nation and is more severe than sentences imposed in Arizona for arguably more serious and violent crimes.” For example, “the minimum sentence for possession of an image of child pornography is longer than the presumptive sentence for rape or aggravated assault. A presumptive sentence for possession of two images of child pornography…is harsher than the sentences for second degree murder or sexual assault of a child under twelve.…For molesting a child, one might receive the same sentence that Berger has received for possessing one picture.”

It is hard to make any sense out of such a sentencing scheme. Ostensibly, the law punishes people for possessing child pornography because their demand for this material encourages its production, which necessarily involves the abuse of children. That is the main rationale cited in Osborne v. Ohio, the 1990 Supreme Court decision that said mere possession of child pornography can be banned without violating the First Amendment. But the minimal, indirect role that any one consumer of child pornography plays in creating a market for the stuff can hardly justify sending him to prison for years or decades, and this argument has little relevance now that people who look at child pornography typically get it online for free. “They are not protecting a single child,” says Dean Boland, the defense attorney. “They are throwing people in prison for having dirty thoughts and looking at dirty pictures.” The harsh treatment of people who like to look at child pornography seems to rest on the mistaken premise that they are equivalent to child molesters. In essence, they are being punished for the crimes they are expected to commit.

Preventive Detention

The same could be said of sex offenders who are confined indefinitely to mental institutions after they have completed their prison sentences. In the 1997 case Kansas v. Hendricks, the Supreme Court upheld this policy of post-sentence detention, ruling that a state law authorizing civil commitment of “sexually violent predators” was not punitive and therefore did not violate the Constitution’s Double Jeopardy Clause or its ban on ex post facto laws. The Court also concluded that the criteria for commitment satisfied the requirements of substantive due process.

Under the Kansas law, an offender can be committed if a jury decides he is likely to engage in “predatory acts of sexual violence” due to a “mental abnormality” or “personality disorder.” The law defines “mental abnormality” as “a congenital or acquired condition affecting the emotional or volitional capacity which predisposes the person to commit sexually violent offenses in a degree constituting such person a menace to the health and safety of others.” Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said these criteria “serve to limit involuntary civil confinement to those who suffer from a volitional impairment rendering them dangerous beyond their control.” Thomas added that the “lack of volitional control, coupled with a prediction of future dangerousness, adequately distinguishes [sexually violent predators] from other dangerous persons who are perhaps more properly dealt with exclusively through criminal proceedings.”

The thing is, the child molester who brought this case, Leroy Hendricks, did go through criminal proceedings, a fundamental premise of which was that he was able to control his behavior and could have chosen to act differently. Based on that premise, he was convicted of “taking indecent liberties” with two 13-year-old boys and served a 10-year sentence, whereupon the state declared that Hendricks could not go free because he was unable to control his behavior.

That was not the only apparent contradiction in the case. The Court ruled that indefinite commitment was not tantamount to a life sentence because the prisoner-cum-patient is “permitted immediate release upon a showing that the individual is no longer dangerous or mentally impaired.” At the same time, the Court said the state is not constitutionally required to provide treatment that might help eliminate the danger. Indeed, the state legislature suggested that sex offenders covered by the law cannot be successfully treated. The preamble to the statute called them “a small but extremely dangerous group of sexually violent predators…who do not have a mental disease or defect that renders them appropriate for involuntary treatment” under the state’s general civil commitment statute. These offenders, the law said, “generally have anti social personality features which are unamenable to existing mental illness treatment modalities.”

Predictably, offenders confined under sexually violent predator laws after completing their prison sentences are almost never declared well enough to release. In 2007 the Washington State Institute for Public Policy counted discharges by the 20 states that had implemented such laws at the time. Of the 4,534 offenders who had been committed since the first such law was passed in 1990, 188 (about 4 percent) had been released based on a “program staff recommendation.” According to 2011 legislative testimony by Rob Siedlecki, acting secretary of the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, only two out of 247 prisoner/patients (less than 1 percent) have successfully completed that state’s Sexual Offender Treatment Program since it was created in 1994. Taxpayers are paying a pretty penny for these dismal results. The Washington state study found that committing a sex offender cost an average of $97,000 annually, compared to $26,000 for a year of prison, a gap that a 2007 investigation by The New York Times attributed to “higher costs for programs, treatment and supervised freedoms.”

Contrary to the beliefs of legislators, there is not much evidence that psychiatrists or psychologists can predict which individuals will commit sex crimes. While sex offenders can be sorted into high-risk and low-risk groups based on their criminal histories, says Karl Hanson, the Public Safety Canada researcher, “the best that we can do for identifying high-risk offenders is identifying groups that have approximately 50 percent observed recidivism rates.”

What’s theoretically possible, of course, is not necessarily what government agencies actually achieve. A 2006 report from the Washington State Institute for Public Policy concluded that the methods used by the state to classify registered sex offenders by risk had “little or no accuracy in predicting sex offender recidivism.” By contrast, a 2004 study by Lynn University psychologist Jill Levenson, reported in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, found that sex offenders recommended for commitment in Florida “scored significantly higher on actuarial risk assessment instruments” and were more likely to have “other risk factors that have been empirically correlated with sexual recidivism” than sex offenders who were recommended for release.

Even when evaluators do the best they can, per Hanson’s estimate, the most they can say is that half the offenders who meet certain criteria will commit new offenses if they are released, which means half will not. Such probabilistic assessments, even for crimes that have already occurred, are not usually considered sufficient grounds for depriving people of their liberty. “This is prison,” says Jamie Fellner. “We shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Basically, this is a form of preventive detention.”

When you strip away the quasi-medical language, what states are really saying when they indefinitely commit odious individuals like Leroy Hendricks to mental hospitals is this: “Whoops. We should have given this guy a longer sentence.” But it is no mere formalistic quibble to point out that a defendant’s sentence should be imposed at the time of his conviction as determined by a judge within the parameters set by statute. These are basic requirements of due process and the rule of law, and we make exceptions to them at our peril. Clarence Thomas may be confident that preventive detention won’t be extended to “other dangerous persons,” but I am not. It seems to me that all it would take is a new law attached to a new scientific-sounding label invented by legislators or grabbed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. How many convicted criminals could qualify for a diagnosis of, say, anti-social personality disorder?

In a 2004 Criminal Law Bulletin article, William Mitchell College of Law professor Eric Janus argued that “sexual predator laws provide a model for undercutting…constitutional protections.” The process, Janus said, starts with a universally despised group of people who, like suspected terrorists, attract no public sympathy. He warned that “we are at risk of becoming a ‘preventive state,’ in which the paradigm of governmental social control has shifted from solving and punishing crimes that have been committed to identifying ‘dangerous’ people and depriving them of their liberty before they can do harm.” To most Americans, I fear, this prospect is not nearly as scary as the possibility that a sex offender lives down the street.

Senior Editor Jacob Sullum (jsullum@reason.com) is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Sleeping on it, I know this is difficult to resist, and should be said. If the public is to be given access to photos and whereabouts of convicted offenders, the whole of the case brought against them also needs to be disclosed, including the evidence against them. That does not constitute a de facto retrial, it merely allows the truth to come out finally. It is not the same thing as that considered only relevant to allow a jury to arrive at an opinion, and on that basis convict the person.

The reason the current hysteria beaten up over the sex offender register is misdirected, is because it confuses small fact with large fantasy.

It is relevant to this argument that 20% of those registered are in Western Australia, while this state carries only about 10% of the Australian population. The place is vastly overrepresented, showing that WA plainly addresses core public policy issues that need to be discussed in properly convened forums by simply arresting dissenting opinion and placing the person on the register, where (it is hoped apparently) they can be silenced into acquiescence.

Without even starting to think about the overburden of alcohol and drug abuse in this society, the fly remains nonetheless in the ointment.

With respect to the range of “sex offending”, it is irrational, deluded, hysterical behaviour to pose someone who has raped and murdered a child against someone who merely had a small child in their lap showing them how to use a computer, purportedly touched the front of their trousers, and in the event triggered hysterical overreaction leading to the waste of $millions of public money.

It is quite as irrational to argue that someone charged with possessing “child pornography” poses any sort of risk to children, or is exploiting the child concerned. We have been critical of police for lying about this in the past, when we know that the vast bulk of images of naked children on the Internet are archival, historical. It is far more relevant and important to understand the historic conditions giving rise not only to the images themselves but to the opportunities to take them.

In particular, it needs to be understood that breakdown of civil infrastructure in the wake of war, or in places like Western Australia where it simply does not exist due to remoteness and isolation, always creates special risk to children. It needs little in the way of grey matter to understand that.

That argument, moreover, is very much intended to refocus discussion on the fact that such images, of the same order of “pornographic” representation, are also found in books and films already passed by the Censorship Board, with at worst 18+ rating, for the possession of which no charges are laid because the images are legal. The question has only emerged with respect to like images accessed via the Internet, yet not prosecuted under the Criminal Code but the Censorship Act.

The issue that does seriously need to be addressed is firstly concerned with defining what are appropriate contacts between adults and children? What is to be done in the most common situation in which children of sole mothers go looking for adult male company? Is it sufficient recompense for a child missing a father-figure in their life to merely join a club or church, and hang around with their sporting coach, or their pastor?

Consistent with our current research at UWA and in many universities, the further question arises less on what is a child, but what is an adult? A child is only a child for a very short period in their life, and will very quickly turn into an adult. But what is that? Are we to suppose that the standard production line adult is most closely to resemble some cinema super-hero, or the Police Union President so strongly disparaging “parasites”, or a champion athlete perhaps. Certainly looks as if Catholic priests are out of the running.

The second issue that needs to be addressed is concerned with bringing literary, film and other media censorship protocols into line. The question of literary censorship in particular has a long and well-grounded history, and is well-established in case law. All the arguments have been put and answered, over nearly two centuries now.

What can be said here is that fashion shots of boys modelling Hilfiger underwear do not and cannot conceivably be classified as pornographic. The same can be said for Woolworths and Target catalogues. Images of naked children are widely distributed, including boys with an erection, in literature and film depending on the censorship classification. One might argue, as does the Censorship Enforcement Act, that such children do not need to be engaged in sexual activity for the image to be offensive to a reasonable adult. It remains, however, that while that Act considers their possession a crime it is only very selectively enforceable, leading to widespread corruption and blackmail.

I would argue further that teaching children to use computers, or even bathing and dressing them, and tending to their various scratches and infections, is not behaviour anyone can reasonably consider paedophilic. Yet once caught up in this corrupt and insidious system that’s how people are being labelled. The public needs to be far better educated on what the diagnosis of paedophilia entails, and further the difference between paedophilia, hebephilia, ephebephilia, and the various androphilias and teliophilias. They all have different presentations, different effects, and quite different management strategies.

Certainly that option is far more economical and effective than the current massive impost on the public purse to little effect, assuming governments are ever likely to face the facts of life.

Don’t hold your breath waiting.

Gil Hardwick BA BLitt SFSPE
Consulting Anthropologist