While Child Predators Walk, Marijuana Consumers Nailed
DENTON — For those of you who retain faith in our justice system, it may shock you to learn that my hometown of Denton, Texas is home to dozens of predators convicted of sex crimes against children 13 and younger, all the way down to age four, who never served a single day in jail. Some of these rapists have been convicted of multiple offenses against multiple children. This same dynamic is occurring across our nation.
Sit with that a moment. The system that sentences prostitutes, vandalists, and marijuana consumers to jail might release a convicted child rapist right back into your neighborhood — as if personal property and morality were more important than public safety, and pilferers and potheads were more threatening than perverted predators.
This disparity is not for lack of resources. The United States leads the world in incarceration rates. Thanks to Draconian penalties for consensual crimes (implemented in the name of "protecting the children"), we lock up more of our population than Iraq, China, Iran, and North Korea. Yet many of our judges go easy on child rapists.
Complacency in the face of evil is inexcusable. Children are being abducted, raped, videotaped for the perverse pleasure of predators, tortured, and murdered. Last year in Florida, a beautiful little girl named Jessica Lunsford was attacked by a previously convicted molester who was set free by the courts to enter her bedroom, abduct her, sexually assault her repeatedly, and bury her alive in her neighbor’s yard.
While Florida law enforcement officials failed to properly monitor and control the convicted predators in their communities, they had plenty of resources to set up reverse marijuana stings, dispatching officers to try and sell small bags of the outlawed herb to strangers on the street. It appears that inciting petty misdemeanors takes priority over preventing violent felonies. Jessica’s father Mark Lunsford, who has spent the past year traveling the country, tirelessly fighting for changes in the law, asked, "Where are our priorities as a nation? Where are our values? Sometimes it seems like we don’t value anything, least of all the children."
As if public safety weren’t enough reason to prioritize violent crimes against children, there is also the question of justice. Our judicial system is partially based on a precept that punishment should fit the crime, so the victim’s perspective must be taken into account. Many sexual abuse survivors will contend with depression, anxiety, nightmares, insomnia, identity confusion, substance abuse, social and sexual alienation, self-mutilation, and suicidal tendencies. Child abuse is a crime against humanity, and it deserves more than a slap on the wrist.
Predators are like domestic terrorists in our own backyards, targeting the most vulnerable members of our society. The fact that our system is failing to protect children should make us sick at heart, angry in spirit, and most importantly, active. A national judicial scandal of this magnitude should cause massive political reverberations as people elect to replace the legislators, district attorneys and judges who lack the insight or the concern to prioritize public safety.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the national media to cover this issue. Pundits repeatedly reported that a Vermont judge sentenced an admitted child rapist (his victim was six years old, with assaults occurring over a four-year period) to a pathetic 60 days in jail. However, these reporters spun the story as an isolated incident involving a single renegade official who needed to be removed, and they failed to cover the broader issue.
None dare call it corruption, but information regarding probated sentences for child rapists is easily accessible online at sex offender registries. So at the very least, media moguls were negligent. But did they hope people would simply raise a highly-publicized outcry against one judge, engage in primal scream therapy, and then move on to the next flavor of the month, without confronting the system itself?
I was determined to find out, so I contacted representatives at CNN, FOX, and MSNBC. They didn’t even want to talk about it, and neglected to return my calls or my emails. I contacted the Denton Record-Chronicle, to no avail. Finally, while waiting for police to arrive at my home so I could report a toy bullet suspiciously left in the back of my car on Martin Luther King Day, I phoned our local child advocacy center about the possibility of joining forces. I was told they couldn’t get involved in political issues that might upset the system of cooperation between law enforcement officials, district attorneys, and therapists. The one group that remained unmentioned was the children themselves.
The truth is painful, but we have to face the fact that our society is failing our kids. From the time they are babes, we teach them to obey adults, to respect their elders, to stay quiet, to not resist, to acquiesce. Many of our school districts are less secure than our shopping malls, lacking sufficient resources to prevent students from being harmed by predators, terrorists, mentally unstable students, or even teachers who rape children (a common theme in the press these days).
Yet those same districts will often expend resources to teach our kids (many of whom have already been sexually abused) the ultimate lesson in submission and acquiescence, forcing them to drop their pants and urinate on command, sometimes in front of adult strangers who may or may not be pedophiles themselves (this is what happens when being "drug-free" takes precedence over freedom from violence). Additionally, our children are forced to grow up in a sexually schizophrenic society, where media reduces the human body to a hyper-sexual crass commodity, and religious institutions reinforce repressive Puritanism. We fail to provide them with accurate information about their bodies and their rights.
Having rendered children psychologically helpless to defend themselves, we release convicted child predators into their neighborhoods. Predators live within drug-free school zones across our nation, unmolested by police. When our kids get raped and grow up to develop drug dependencies (as many do, trying to self-medicate psychological and psychiatric symptoms) or become prostitutes (again, trying to self-medicate), we’ll throw those crime victims in jail for their involvement with drugs and prostitution, while child rapists walk the street to create more victims (and therefore more consensual crimes, like drug abuse and prostitution).
Adding insult to injury, the United States Government denies drug-using rape victims financial aid for college (thanks to an anti-drug clause contained in the Higher Education Act of 1998), while convicted rapists continue to attend universities on the backs of their rape victims. Our federal legislators don’t want tax dollars purchasing illegal drugs, but they evidently have no problem with buying the knives, duct tape, pharmaceutical drugs, and video cameras that child predators will use on their next victims.
As a survivor of sexual abuse and child pornography who offered testimony to a Texas committee hearing on child advocacy, my blood is boiling. As the father of two beautiful children I delivered with my own trembling hands, I am afraid for them. Most importantly, I’m determined to do anything in my legal power to change this.
You can join me and other survivors, parents, and advocacy groups, who are creating a new organization called Building BLOCK - Better Lives for Our Communities and Kids (www.Building-Block.org), which will expose the authorities who perpetuate the perpetration, offering an interactive U.S. map to provide county-specific case profiles of officials who refuse to prioritize public safety over private morality. Membership is completely free, and we need your help.
Incompetent and corrupt officials take note. The people have grown weary of the ineptitude and apathy that allow fundamental liberties to deteriorate while violence devastates our communities. If you do not prioritize public, we’ll ensure you are de-prioritized at the ballet box.
And to those public servants who fight hard to protect children and strengthen our communities, I want to personally offer my thanks, as you are truly unsung heroes.
If you have kids, hug them tight when you tuck them in tonight. They deserve your protection. And if you aren’t enraged yet, you must be dead or asleep. Here’s to waking up and breaking the silence.
Christopher Largen is the founder of Building BLOCK - Better Lives for Our Communities and Kids www.Building-Block.org, author of Junk (www.ENCPress.com) and Prescription Pot
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