You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (38 page)

One California father recently wrote about the predator paranoia at his young son’s school.
²⁵
In the article, one mother said she did not think she would
ever
let her son ride his bike around the block alone, saying “The world is a very different place now than it was when we were growing up.” (She attributed the increased danger to the Internet.) Parents like her were the reason why the school did not allow elementary-age children to bike to class. When the writer suggested walking or biking as an answer to the school’s traffic problems at a PTA meeting, others responded with disbelief. One father referred him to the Megan’s Law website and suggested another traffic solution: “Get rid of all the predators. Then you won’t have any more traffic.”

This fear-driven “house-arrest” of children is occurring nationwide. It has alienated America’s youth from nature,
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made them fearful,
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and has contributed to a tripling of the childhood obesity rate since 1980.
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On a broader level, predator hype distracts the public and its political discourse. Smog in the United States is responsible for thousands of premature deaths a year and billions in health care costs. The most susceptible to its harms are children and the elderly. A unanimous recommendation for more stringent air quality standards by a 2008 Environmental Protection Agency advisory panel has been brushed aside by both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama.
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Since deaths due to smog do not inspire the same excitement as deaths due to sexual abuse, the media and the politicians are relatively muted.

Those who commit sexual crimes against children deserve punishment, however, the reaction to the heinous kidnapping/rape/murder of Megan Kanka in 1994, which inspired Megan’s Law, is similar to punishing all future murderers for the heinous crimes of serial killer, necrophile, and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer. This political overreaction to isolated atrocities in the area of child molestation occurs regularly and there are repercussions.

When politicians beat their breasts and create barbaric
mandatory
punishments for molesters, they do not point out all the molesters who are not monsters. Although it is a crime worthy of punishment, do taxpayers really want to spend $29,000 annually to imprison a man for years who flashes a girl or grabs a girl’s chest?
^30
,
31
Is it wise to give this man a scarlet letter through sex offender registration instead of giving him a chance at treatment with the carrot of redemption?

Another twist is that one third of all sex offenses against minors are committed by other juveniles.
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This figure does not include the numerous young adults who have sexual relations with teenagers across the age of consent lines.
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Age of consent laws are frequently used by parents who do not like their daughter’s boyfriend. In these cases charges are brought against the will of the “victim.”
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Thirty-two states apply sex offender registry requirements to kids.
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It is questionable how many of these kids and young adults deserve to be publicly branded forever as baby-rapers.
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The repercussions extend to non-molesters as well. The legal rules politicians tear down for sex offender cases protect innocent people from unjust prosecution. For such a loathsome crime it is easy to falsely accuse, as no evidence of injury is necessary. When I was a teacher in 2003 I physically took an eighth-grade girl to the principal’s office by her arms. She later accused me of knocking her down during the trip to look up her skirt. The only witnesses were her two good friends. I was fortunate that the two went against their friend and told the truth, but the girl’s mother still believed the story because “her daughter would never lie to her.” As the mother of a minor it would have been her decision to press charges and if she was wealthier, or I was wealthier, she might have.

One protection of the accused that politicians usually target in molestation cases is the statute of limitations. This rule prevents charges from being made so long after an alleged offense that a defense would be difficult. How would I be able to defend myself against that girl’s charges if she did not make them until 2013?

DNA testing has shown that accused does not mean guilty. When it can be used in criminal investigations it clears the named subject
a third of the time
.
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The heinous nature of child molestation allows politicians to overlook the difference.

In addition to the billions spent on abstinence-only education, billions are also spent on criminalizing consensual adult sex. One of the only studies of the cost of prostitution enforcement was done in the mid-1980s.
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It found that in Dallas the average arrest, court, and incarceration costs amounted to roughly $2,900 per prostitution arrest, and that large cities spent an average of over $16 million on prostitution control every year.
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Half of the sixteen cities studied spent more on prostitution control than on either education or public welfare. Although judges are loath to use strapped prison space on prostitutes, police still focus resources on prostitution.

This prioritizing is not without consequences. During Houston’s crusade against prostitution in 1975, eleven percent of the police department’s criminal investigative force handled prostitution cases exclusively. While Houston waged this failed prostitution battle, reported felonies increased and their rate of arrest decreased. In the mid-1980s, Cleveland spent eighteen officer hours on prostitution duty for every violent offense that failed to yield an arrest.

This was at a time when national polls showed (1) ninety-four percent of people who called the police believed they should have responded faster than they did, (2) less than half the population could say prostitutes did more harm than good, and (3) people ranked prostitution’s severity 174
^th
out of 206 offenses. “A store owner knowingly puts ‘large’ eggs into containers marked ‘extra large’” placed 175
^th
.

The federal government has been replacing sex education with abstinence-only education for over a quarter of a century. In 2009 a CDC panel reviewed sixteen studies of abstinence-only programs and judged them ineffective at promoting their only goal—abstinence. The same panel analyzed over fifty studies of comprehensive sex-ed programs and found they reduced sexual activity, increased the usage of birth control/protection, and reduced the occurrence of STDs.
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Although federally mandated sexual disinformation is counteracted by parents and the Internet,
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the youthful ignorance is still astounding. This is particularly true among the poor, who are more likely to not have involved parents or Internet access. In a poll of thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds from disadvantaged areas in seven cities, seventy-four percent thought that letting semen drip out of the vagina after sex prevents pregnancy, seventy percent did not know that douching is not a form of birth control, and fifty-six percent did not know that a female cannot get pregnant through oral sex. This may appear to be harmless innocence until it is realized that almost a third of these children had already had sexual intercourse.
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This ignorance has resulted in significantly higher teenage rates of pregnancy, abortions, and sexually transmitted diseases than in countries with sex-ed. The following chart shows how America compares to Canada, France, and Sweden on these issues. Canada has more sex-ed than America, although approaches vary by province. France and Sweden have compulsory sex-ed in their schools.

The blatant disregard of scientific evidence while dumping billions into abstinence-only education is bewildering.
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It suggests that fundamentalists
want
sexually active teens to suffer. By keeping teenagers ignorant their fear tactics become valid, because unprotected sex
is
dangerous.
⁴⁴

There are two problems with this “let sinners rot” strategy. First, by hijacking America’s public school systems via the federal government, not only are the children of fundamentalist Christians being punished, which is arguably their parents’ prerogative, but so are children of impoverished families.

Second, there is the question of the rights of the children of fundamentalist Christians. Do parents have the right to bar factual information from their children, particularly when it involves a public health concern? The European Parliament has recognized that children have a right to sex education irrespective of their parents’ wishes.

The taboo has also hindered the academic study of sex. In the past, cultural artifacts were intentionally hidden or destroyed. In the sixteenth century Spaniards systematically demolished sexual objects found during their sacking of the Americas.
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Perhaps the most famous archeological purging was of Pompeii in Italy. When excavated in the 1700s, the numerous sexual frescos, statues, and other artifacts were either trashed or removed to a secret chamber in Rome. Although more recent excavations in Pompeii have been opened to the public complete with sexual images, shame still reigns. Tourists are falsely told that these areas were brothels when they were actually places like public baths.
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Censorship has not only hampered the study of sex culturally but also biologically. The court systems’ protection of First Amendment rights in the 1950s and 1960s first set the groundwork for American scholarship in these areas to begin,
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however, the taboo still contributes to a lack of funding.

The study of homosexuality’s biological causes is one area that is just beginning to blossom. Scientific evidence of its biological nature has only recently received academic acceptance.
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This belated finding refutes the notions that gay people choose their sexuality and that they can voluntarily change—notions that have often been behind homosexual persecution.

The delay of research into inherent biological differences regarding male and female sex drives has been another cause of grief. Understanding that men are biologically predisposed to view sex more as a physical act, whereas women are predisposed to see it as an emotion-laden bonding activity, illuminates the callousness of some men toward sex transgressions. These transgressions range from cheating to rape.
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Understanding different sexualities does not excuse sexual transgressions, but it helps to bridge the chasm between the male and female conceptions of the breach—a chasm that causes considerable pain. Currently people often acknowledge gender differences but not their biological underpinnings. Communication is reduced to clichés with men saying, “It was just sex,” and women saying, “All men are assholes.”