Offending Children, Registering Sex

Abstract

Offending Children, Registering Sex Erica R. Meiners (bio) “We all know that there is a difference between a healthy and a normal love of children and a love which is sick and freakish.” With this provocation, literary theorist James Kincaid opens Child-Loving (1992), a book examining representations of the erotic child. While Kincaid’s project focuses mainly on the Victorian era, in our own moment, crowded with televised child beauty pageants, skyrocketing rates of child poverty, and abstinence-only sexual-health curriculum in schools, sexual normativity is still pervasive and perverse. What is authentic sexual development when heteronormativity, for example, is naturalized? What are children’s emergent relationships to sexuality? What is normal love? The number of juveniles charged and convicted of sexual violence and subsequently placed on sex offender registries across the United States should provoke these questions. While public dialogues (and scholarly research) about youth/child sexuality and agency are difficult, even in a culture that fetishizes youth and sex, registries provide a grim and uneven public archive of harm, sexuality, and childhood.1 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).2 Notably, this research indicates that preteens are increasingly charged and convicted of sexually based crimes: “The number of youth coming to the attention of police for sex offenses increases sharply at age 12 and plateaus [End Page 246] after age 14” (Finkelhor, Ormrod, and Chaffin 2009, 2). In Illinois, “fully half” of the juveniles arrested for sexual offenses in 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010 were fourteen years old or younger (Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission 2014, 15). This increase, not unnoticed by law enforcement entities, has created an industry of sexual recovery for juveniles (Finkelhor, Ormrod, and Chaffin 2009, 2). As research suggests that child sexual violence is a cyclical and potentially learned behavior, mandated recovery/treatment programs and registration are particularly punitive, possibly hypocritical. Children arrested for perpetrating sexual offenses are five times more likely than children who have not been arrested (for sexual offenses) to experience sexual violence themselves (Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission 2014, 16).3 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 non-white and poor, can be tried in adult court for crimes committed at age fifteen. (Griffin et al. 2011)4 Across disciplines, scholars have examined sex offender registries, conceptions of sex offenders, and the state’s response to violence against children and women (Lancaster 2011; Jenkins 1998; Levine 2002; Corrigan 2006; Harkins 2009; Bumiller 2008; Wright 2003; Simon 2000). A growing body of research also critically engages with our nation’s overreliance on incarceration (Mauer 1999; Davis 2003; Gilmore 2007). Scarce scholarship, however, has explored the increasing number of young people classified as sex offenders. This essay explores how criminalizing sexual activities perpetrated by minors naturalizes the link between age and consent, creating complex and uneven landscapes for youth to navigate sexuality. This tendency to criminalize child sexual activity flattens the possibilities of youth/child sexual agency and disproportionately affects the most marginal young people. Yet producing meaningful opportunities for public safety and dismantling registries, as this essay will illustrate, requires moving beyond child saving. It is not enough to focus simply on the problem of juveniles on the registry. First, the essay 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 both the individual [End Page 247] and collective impact of being on the registry and critiques reform movements that focus solely on exempting juveniles. As someone who has...