"Did The Economist Do Sex Crime Victims Justice?"

The title of this post is the headline of this interesting commentary by Robin Sax at The Huffington Post, which is a response to the articles noted in this post from a recent issue of The Economist.  Here is how the commentary begins:

It's not often when an article from The Economist screams, "Robin, you need to read me." But it happened on August 6, 2009 when I read America's Unjust Sex Laws with the stringer, "An ever harsher approach is doing more harm than good, but it is being copied around the world."

When I finished this article, my first feeling was shock. Clearly whoever wrote this article was a journalist and not a therapist, social worker, prosecutor, judge, and obviously not a politician. Nor did the writer live in the trenches of child sexual assault, as I have.  Not wanting to rush to judgment, and agreeing/conceding some of the points presented, I decided to wait a few days to form any firm opinions on the article.  Now that three days have passed, my nagging concerns have not subsided and I must address some of the issues I have with this article.

First of all, child sexual assault is a disgusting issue -- we all can agree on that.  But what most people don't realize is that far more often the misuse or abuse of sex laws lies with the enormous number of cases that do not get prosecuted -- or even filed!

This occurs because the cases may not have qualified legally: there may have been lack of corroboration, lack of sufficient evidence, or dueling viewpoints ("he said/she said)."  Sometimes, too, the perpetrator was so crafty in his abuse and so skilled, he ensured that corroboration would not be possible. Other times, there was a delay in the disclosure.

If anything should be explored about the state of the law relating to sex offenders, it's the huge issue of a lack of prosecution, rather than too much of it!

Ultimately, I think this piece's criticism is misunderstanding the focus of the discussion in The Economist.  The original piece was mostly concerned with the undue expansion and misuse of sex offender registries and residency restrictions; this reaction piece is mostly concerned with the challenges of effectively prosecuting offenders who sexually abuse children.  Ironically, there is possibly important common ground here: sophisticated prosecutors in Iowa and other regions have detailed that the undue expansion and misuse of sex offender registries and residency restrictions may make it harder to effectively prosecute offenders who sexually abuse children.  Disappointingly, though, common-ground insights often get lost in broader panics over sex offenders.