Offending Children, Registering Sex: Policing Sexuality

• In Event: Abolitionist Methodologies

Abstract

This paper explores how abolitionist methodologies enable and demand critical analyses and organizing in response to the criminalization of young people, including the sexual activities perpetrated by minors. This form of criminalization naturalizes the link between age and consent, creating complex and precarious landscapes for youth to navigate sexuality. Schools—teachers, social workers, counselors—as mandated reporters, are on the front lines of engaging the state to police child sexuality and to determine harm. The move to criminalize child sexual activity flattens the possibilities of child/youth sexual agency and disproportionately affects the most marginal young people. Yet producing meaningful opportunities for public safety and dismantling sex offender registries and community notification laws—failed public policy initiatives, as this paper will illustrate, requires moving beyond “child saving.” It is not enough to focus simply on the problem of juveniles on the registry.

The paper outlines and demonstrates how abolition scholarship informs a different and critical set of questions and methodological/political commitments to the project. First, the paper reviews the context for the growth in registries and community notification laws and summarizes available research that illustrates how registries fail to address child sexual violence. Second, the project explores why certain youth are significantly represented on the registry and outlines how uneven criminalization shapes boundaries between childhood and adulthood. Third, it briefly explores the impact--both individual and collective--of being on the registry and critiques reform movements that focus solely on exempting juveniles.

A 2009 research brief from the U.S. Department of Justice identifies that young people are disproportionately charged with and convicted of sexual offenses: “Juveniles account for more than one third (35.6 percent) of those known to police to have committed sex offenses against minors” and “juvenile sex offenders comprise more than one-quarter (25.8 percent) of all sex offenders” (Finkelhor, Ormrod, and Chaffin 2009,1, 3). Notably, this research indicates that preteens, those between the age of 12 ad 14, are increasingly charged and convicted of sexually based crimes (Finkelhor et al, 2009, 2). The very systems set up to protect children from sexual violence, sex offender registries, also work to disproportionately regulate and punish children.

While across the United States, youth, particularly those nonwhite and poor, can be tried in adult court for crimes committed at age fifteen, being charged with sexual offenses appears to place even younger youth outside any protective logic associated with childhood. While diminished culpability is associated with some forms of contemporary white childhood, even those nine or ten years old are understood as culpable and in need of state punishment and possibly lifetime surveillance when their behaviors are interpreted as sexual (and potentially harmful). Unpacking the role of schools in policing and criminalization child/sexuality is central to reclaiming public safety.

References

Finkelhor, David, Richard Ormrod, and Mark Chaffin. 2009. Juveniles Who Commit Sex Offenses Against Minors. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/227763.pdf.

Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission. 2014. Improving Illinois’ Response to Sexual Offenses Committed by Youth: Recommendations for Law, Policy, and Practice. Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission. http://ijjc.illinois.gov/sites/ijjc.illinois.gov/files/assets/IJJC%20-%20Improving%20Illinois%27%20Response%20to%20Sexual%20Offenses%20

Author

• Erica R. Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University