cleverthylacine: a cute little thylacine (Default)
the cleverest little thylacine ([personal profile] cleverthylacine) wrote in [personal profile] kengr 2006-05-10 10:23 pm (UTC)

I find the "rehabilitation" argument troubling.

Raping children is not like stealing, which people do because they have no alternative or they think they can get away with it or a whole host of other reasons that are basically rational, and which harms only property.

It is also not like murder, which is usually committed by relatively sane people as a reaction to a specific set of circumstances that is unlikely to recur.

It is a symptom of a mental illness we do not know how to cure, with which victims are very often "infected" themselves. Until we know how to CURE it, I'm not comfortable letting people who have it run around loose, no matter how well-behaved they have been in a supervised setting, because if they get out of control, they will create more victims, some of whom will grow up to become offenders themselves.

I know it's the common "liberal" belief that all criminals can be rehabilitated but that really is only possible if we know what caused the criminal to become one and can reverse it. The common "liberal" solution is to censor the media, particularly erotic media even if there are no living people in it, as per Australia or Canada, and as you know I'm against that. Why? Because you can write NC17 chanfic for years, and never want to harm a child, and none of your readers will either. Yes, a paedophile might get off on it, but a paedophile is also capable of getting off on the children's underwear section of the Sears Roebuck catalogue.

People who cannot be cured and who have been proven to be dangerous shouldn't be turned loose without supervision. Sorry. They're usually not happy people either. If they were dogs, we would put them down. They're not, so we can't do that, but that doesn't mean I want them living next door to me if there are children in my house. Or even if there aren't, if the person is known for violence against women rather than or as well as children.

I feel very differently about nonviolent sex crimes, like public sex or statutory rape of a consenting and duplicitous minor (one of the reasons I feel that way is that I very nearly fell into that trap myself with a 15 year old boy who looked 22, but thankfully someone warned me in time), or soliciting prostitution. Most of those are things that I either think should not be illegal (prostitution, teenage sex) or that I think should be misdemeanors (I don't think most people want to be subjected to seeing people fuck when they go to the park, I know I don't want to watch anyone doing that unless we have a certain kind of relationship, but that's ANNOYING, not worthy of jail time). And I have a real problem with people who go out and get drunk with the intention of getting laid and then wake up the next morning and regret it and say they were raped. Not all drunk sex is rape. If she's so drunk you can't ask her and she can't answer, that's rape, but if she has beer goggles it's her own damn fault. And there should be help available for people who have to move, but then, I think genuine violent sex criminals probably ought to be living in supervised facilities anyway.

Post a comment in response:

This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting