Federal Judge James Munley recently took the near-unprecedented step
of preventing local prosecutors from bringing child-porn charges
against several teenage girls who took and sent pictures of themselves
and each other in states of undress.
The girls are just the latest example of the sexting epidemic, which
has been addressed kind of like termites in the house: You’ve heard the
creaking for years, but turned away until the bottom fell out of your
kitchen floor.
Too bad there was no Judge Munley for Keimond Brown, and the many
thousands of boys like him.
Brown was charged with the aggravated molestation of a 13-year-old
girl, and now has to register as a sex offender. Before your chorus of,
“They should have shot him,” reaches critical mass, consider that he
was 15. Indeed, in the matter of Pima county juvenile no. 74802, the
Arizona Supreme Court upheld registration for a probation violator, for
sex with a 14-year-old female. He was 16.
According to the National Center for Juvenile Justice, 19,000 people
are on registries for consensual childhood or adolescent behavior, most
of them boys. The study found that one in 220 adult males is a
registered sex offender. We also know, courtesy of a study by the
National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, that 22
percent of teen girls have sent nude or semi-nude pictures of
themselves to others.
Only now that the cloud these laws have caused threatens to envelop
and swallow whole the population the laws were drafted to
protect—white girls—are we looking to the underground
shelters. The chickens have indeed come home to roost, in
eight-megapixel resolution, brought to you by Olympus and Kodak.
America is now compelled to come to grips with some inconvenient
truths, and we are at a crossroads. We now have a sex crime whose
primary perpetrators are 11-to-18-year-old females. The production of
adolescent porn is being driven by Chelsea and Heather, not balding
white physics professors. These girls making these videos and images
are as young as 13, and completely free of adult influence, at odds
with the very premise of sex-crime jurisprudence. If we are serious
about the “rule of law,” then the ranks of my lot will swell with the
ranks of teen girls. And if you agree that Keimond is a deviant, then a
huge percentage of boys and men are sex offenders—your husbands,
nephews, brothers, custodians, police officers, construction workers
and doctors.
The upside of all this is that we have an opportunity to re-evaluate
our sex-crime laws. We must rethink how leisurely we throw around words
such as “dangerous,” “predator” and “victim.” Jessica
Lunsford—abducted and killed in Florida in 2005—was a
victim. The 16-year-olds who go to adult spring break and flash for Joe
Francis are not. We must acknowledge that there are differences in
contexts. That does not excuse a father or uncle or teacher, but if a
21-year-old John Walsh—Mr. America’s Most Wanted himself—can date his future wife at 16 (according to a Men’s
Journal article from June 2002), then why are others getting thrown
in jail for doing so?
Any of these laws that don’t target molesters of actual children,
rapists and sex traffickers should be scaled back, changed to
misdemeanors or expunged. All boys who had sexual contact with girls
that was not nonconsensual should have their convictions expunged. Put
in more community service; implement more sensible penalties, like
lifetime computer monitoring for those convicted of looking at child
porn; push felony charges for molesters who apply at day-care centers
and schools.
We haven’t much time. These laws are eating the young and our boys
in myriad ways. Don’t do it for me; do it for your sons and their
future wives, so that there will be no more Keimonds.
T. Vaughn Henry is a convicted sex offender. Now would be a good
time to reiterate the fact that the opinions expressed here are solely
the opinions of the writers, and not the Tucson Weekly.
This article appears in Jul 9-15, 2009.
Thank you for speaking out on this. It’s a courageous act and a point of view long overdue in the press and public media.
Well-said. The only thing missing here is that you may perhaps underestimate how strong the temptation is to take advantage of easy prey.
I’m talking about prosecutors here. The temptation to pursue easy convictions, especially when professional status and livelihood is often tied directly to conviction rates, is tremendous. Even prosecutors who recognize that sex crime laws have expanded well past the point of betraying their original intent still have the same professional incentives. (In fact, there can be sharp disincentives for NOT pursuing these charges, no matter how frivolous.)
It’s unlikely that legal reform will be forthcoming anytime soon. In the meantime jurors need to start saying no to these kinds of convictions. No one is talking about allowing rapists and hard-core child molesters go unpunished. Rather, jurors need to send a message that they’re not going to sentence a teenager to prison time and life-long stigma for having consensual sex with another minor. The public can disapprove of teen sex, and even censure it, but it doesn’t need to criminalizing it.
Only in an ultra-individualistic culture such as ours, or a deeply religious one would the power of the state be brought to bear to punish young people for doing what comes naturally. What to do? Well, on a related subject, perhaps instead of stigmatizing teen mothers, we should restructure our society to better accommodate a fact of life – that young males are most sexually active in their late teens, and that this fact has nothing to do with morality, and everything to do with biology.
Certainly something is awry in our culture when so many women wait to bear children until they’re almost too old to do so.
It certainly “takes a village” to raise a child, but do we even have villages anymore?
“Federal Judge James Munley recently took the near-unprecedented step of preventing local prosecutors from bringing child-porn charges against several teenage girls who took and sent pictures of themselves and each other in states of undress.”
I love this. How many young men did this same wonderful Judge prosecute and sentence to jail for receiving these same kinds of pictures or sending pictures of themselves to others? I would feel safe in betting everything I own that the this same judge will decline to interfere with prosecutors who bring charge agints the young man/men that received these pictures and if they are unlucky enough to land in his courtroom, get a very hefty sentence and life on the sex offender’s list to boot. This is just another example of female sentencing discount. Nothing more.
“We also know, courtesy of a study by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, that 22 percent of teen girls have sent nude or semi-nude pictures of themselves to others.”
And yet the only stories you hear are of YOUNG MEN going to jail and placed on the sex offenders list for RECEIVING them even if the immediately delete them, but rarely is the young woman arrested on manufacturing and distribution charges.
I think it’s clear he is just doing this because they are female teenagers; it’s simply fulfilling the requirements of politically correctness. Nothing more.