Sex Offenders Essay Example Essay Example

Sex Offenders Essay Example Paper Sex Offenders Essay Introduction Fear is the natural human emotion, the one that gives men the opportunity to retrieve when they feel they are in danger and that keeps people from the unreasonable actions. But it’s well known that when fear becomes constant it ruins the human’s personality, and deprives him/her of the chance for happy living. Fear for the physical safety of the person himself or herself, or of her relatives and friends is one of the worst kinds of fear, as most of the contemporary people feel themselves helpless and unprotected from the person who wants to hurt them physically.For lots of people sexual offence is the worst kind of physical offence, as it is still considered to be somehow â€Å"shameful† in our society. Sexual offence is a topic most people are afraid and ashamed to talk about with their friends and family, not even mentioning the officials or the specialists able of helping them. This is maybe the reason for which sexual offenders are despised in all of the comm unities worldwide.The scientists, psychologists, social workers and medical workers express various opinions on the punishment, which should be laid on sex offenders. They offer the variety of alternatives, beginning from psychological treatment and ending with paroling and chemical castration. But the recent experience shows that all of those methods are insufficient, as they do not influence the rate of repeated crimes after the molesters are let out. The thing is that sadism, masochism and pedophilia, from which the sex offenders almost always suffer, are sexual disorders which are very hard to treat, and Zigmund Freud emphasized they was incurable. The only way to indemnify our relatives, friends and ourselves from those people, is to lock them somewhere, for not to let them see the objects of their lust.Katy Butler says in her article Beyond the Bogeyman in Psychotherapy Networker, that: â€Å"The Social Organization of Sexuality–the landmark 1994 study of American sexu al practices spearheaded by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and University of Chicago professor Edward Laumann–found that 17 percent of its adult female informants and 12 percent of its male informants said they’d been touched sexually (90 percent genitally) by at least one adult before they turned 14.† It means that at least 23.8 million adult American women and 16.7 million men were sexually abused as children. Karen Crummy in her article in Boston Herald says that the study conducted in May 2000 proved that over half of the sexual assault crimes are against children, and the majority of the wrongdoers are the members of the kid’s family or people close to the familyLets compare this number to that of the registered child molesters. For example, in Idaho there were 2,562 registered sex offenders in 2005. (Worst Molesters Unsupervised. After prison, Idaho’s violent sex, Spokesman Review, The (Spokane), 2005). Even if we presume that one molester is capable of hurting dozens of children throughout his lifetime, the difference in number still shows us that only a small part of child molesters are caught and registered.The same thing is with the sex offenders whose sexual objects are grown-ups. For example, the rape victimization rate was 3,0 per one thousand, and for man this rate was 0,4. Moreover, 68,9% of rapists were at least acquainted with their victim (Rape Figures, 2000). Thus, as you see, no one may feel himself or herself safe in our times, as the number of sex offenders is great, and so is the risk to become the offender’s victim. Unfortunately, this is the current U.S ineffective policies concerning sex offenders, which let the sex offences rate stay so high.Registering the sex offenders is one of the ways that exist nowadays for to let people protect themselves and their kids from the sex offenders. Unfortunately lots of sex offenders manage to stay out of the lists. The thing is that in most sta tes a person is not required to register unless he or she was convicted in sex offence. In the same time the jurists say that molesting, especially in case children are the victims, is one of the hardest crimes to prove. The prosecutors often fail to prove molestation due to the lack of physical evidence. The only things the court usually has to lean upon are the evidence of the victim, which are often bizarre and muddled, as the psychic of the child supersedes the memories about the traumatizing experience. One more significant factor is that the atmosphere of the court is also traumatizing for the child, and in most cases the parent is not allowed to sit near the child who’s witnessing. Thus the child molesters often manage to get off light and are let out to our streets where they can search for new victims.Tim Bynum, the author of the Center for Sex Offender Management (CSOM) wrote: â€Å"For a variety of reasons, sexual assault is a vastly underreported crime. The Natio nal Crime Victimization Surveys (Bureau of Justice Statistics) conducted in 1994, 1995, and 1998 indicate that only 32 percent (one out of three) of sexual assaults against persons 12 or older are reported to law enforcement. A three-year longitudinal study (Kilpatrick, Edmunds, and Seymour, 1992) of 4,008 adult women found that 84 percent of respondents who identified themselves as rape victims did not report the crime to authorities.†The statistics says that most sexual crimes against children are committed inside the family. The other members often choose not to let anyone know about the molestation and sexual abuse which’s happening inside the family, as they are afraid of public attention and disgrace. It often happens in such families that the child is blamed for the things that happened with him or her, like in the case that was investigated in Milwaukee in 1999. The 13-year old girl was assaulted by her step-father, but when he was let out on bail it was she who was sent out of home to live with another relative, as the molester was forbidden to see his victim. A man returned home, to where his wife, the girl’s mother together with their mutual child awaited him. † The child has been further victimized by her family, who have told her she is to blame,† Assistant District Attorney Holly Bunch said. â€Å"She’s the one who is out of the house, not the defendant. The victim’s mother has chosen him over her daughter.†The most recent news about sex offenders’ registration is that â€Å"Authorities have no idea where most of the 4,500 registered sex offenders who fled Louisiana and Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina ended up.† (Lost sex offenders land here, 2005). Only a small part of them was found, thus for now we have to watch closely, as any person who fled from Katrina could be a potential sex offender.Sex offenders are a specific group of criminals for whom the normal expectat ions and principles cannot be applied. The thing is that most of the sex offenders, especially those who prefer children, are unhealthy individuals who are unable to control their sexual urges and desires. Over the decades the psychologists tried to find out what make some people choose children as the sexual objects. The author of the article Settling the Child Molesters in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (2003) claims that â€Å"some sexual predilections — and pedophilia is one of them — are everpresent.† This viewpoint seems to be the sound one, as it’s known that in spite of all of the treatment the offenders get, the rate of the re-offence doesn’t lower. The attraction to kids is a sexual disorder, the one that is still incurable in our times, at least the serious cases of it. Child molesters are simply the deranged individuals who cannot control their sexual emotions towards children. They have the normal sexual urge, but it is the object of t his urge which is not normal. Despite of all the measures taken for to help them change this object, or to limit their access to children, the pedophiles will make everything they can for to get the contact with children.Dennis M. Doren in his book Evaluating Sex Offenders writes that at the first sight those are people who do not differ from the ordinary citizens; it is often unbelievable that they could commit crimes. But, in the same time, those people are often very intelligent and highly manipulative; they try to apply the techniques they used on their victim on the counselors and the prison staff.Prentky, Lee, Knight, and Cerce (1997) found that the rate of repeated offence during 25 years was 39% for rapists and 52% for child molesters. Thus, we can see that the offenders repeated their crimes very frequently, so that the citizens should be given an opportunity to receive information about them for to protect themselves and their loved ones from the sexual offence. For to rea ch this goal tougher legislation is needed which will make the offenders to provide their address to the local legislation establishments as soon, as they move. Also all the offenders should be photographed once in five or seven years and their photos should be updated in the databases, accessible by the public.Some social activists say that exposing the data about sex offenders to the public is violating their privacy. It is true that when the neighbors get to know that the person who lives nearby is a sex offender they may hurt him physically or emotionally, but it is obvious that the safety of the potential offenders’ and molesters’ victims is of greater importance than the supposed psychological problems of the sex offenders whose dislocation and records are exposed to the public.One of the problems that exist with the sex offenders’ databases today is that they can mostly be accessed through the Web. The thing is that there are lots of people who are unable to use the Internet, whether because they don’t have the access or because it is too complicated for them. The information about the child molesters and other sex offenders should be provided in other ways, such as by phone or in some booklets.As you see, the situation that exists in our society regarding the sex offenders is complicated. Lots of things should be done for to make them less dangerous for the citizens, like making their personal records accessible to the public and warning people of the sex offenders living nearby. Our streets should be safe to walk by, and every person regardless of the sex, are or gender should feel himself/herself protected. Sex Offenders Essay Thank you for reading this Sample!