Tag Archives: Sex Offenders

Of Sex Offenders, Sentencing, and Suicide

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Dear Judge G. Todd Baugh,

It’s been about a month since the height of the media attention on the less-than-minimal sentence you gave to teacher Stacey Rambold for violating the terms of a plea deal on charges of rape stemming from a sexual relationship he had at his age of 49 with then-14-year-old Cherice Morales.  In some baffling…uh…I guess you’d call it legal reasoning, you expressed that Rambold had suffered enough as a result of being under the “control” of Cherice, who committed suicide just shy of her 17th birthday in 2010.

I don’t want to devote too much time to going over old ground that plenty of other people have covered, like about your use of ridiculous sexist stereotypes, and your blame-the-victim mentality.  What I really want to do, Judge Baugh, is kick a few ideas your way, from a clinical perspective, in the hopes that you might understand Mr. Rambold’s behavior and how and why it led up to his appearance in your courtroom in late August.  Since Rambold just completed his grueling 30-day sentence yesterday, there’s a possibility that he is going to land back in your courtroom on appeal of that sentence.  So let’s just call this a teachable moment.

In handing out a 30-day (of 15-years) sentence, when prosecutors had pushed for ten years (of 20), you argued that Rambold had already been punished enough.  You lamented Mr. Rambold’s loss of his job, loss of his teaching license, loss of his house, and loss of his wife, as well as Mr. Rambold having to suffer the “Scarlet Letter of the Internet” whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.  Hester Prynne didn’t get in trouble for having sex with one of her teenage students.  And Mr. Rambold, unlike Prynne, did not try to protect his sexual partner.  If protecting Cherice was his goal, Rambold would have accepted his responsibility and taken a plea deal from the beginning, to keep Cherice from the threat of being grilled in a courtroom.  (I could go into a lot more detail with the literary comparison/contrast here, but let’s just leave it at that).

Now, it’s weird that you consider Mr. Rambold’s loss of his wife and his house as punishments he received for having engaged in the rape of a minor.  What happened between Rambold and his wife as a result of his sexual relationship with a student (and whatever other factors were involved) has nothing to do with any punishment handed out by the courts.  There are plenty of sex offenders who have partners or spouses who stick by them, and plenty whose wives/partners leave them, but that’s a discussion for another day.

Likewise, Mr. Rambold’s loss of his house is not a punishment handed out by the court for having violated laws against having sex with underage girls.  I’m guessing Mr. Rambold lost his house either in the divorce from his wife, or as the result of losing income.  But either way, that has nothing to do with the sanctions of the court for committing a sexual offense.

Some of the specific sanctions that came directly as legal consequences of Rambold’s actions, like losing his teaching license, are clearly spelled out in the law, and for reasons I think most people would agree are necessary.  Perhaps you disagree, Judge Baugh.  Perhaps you do not feel that teachers owe it to their students, the families of those students, and the community at large to steer clear of sexual relationships where there is a vast age, power, and maturity gap.  Perhaps you think that teachers should be able to have sex with 14-year-old students, so long as they pick the “mature” ones.

Perhaps, Judge Baugh, you even think Mr. Rambold should have his teaching credentials restored, and that he should be placed back in a high school.  But from the standpoint of his pathology, he already broke down his internal barriers that might have kept him from engaging in sex with minors/students.  And those barriers don’t really ever get put back together in full.  They can be patched up a bit.  People like Rambold can learn to stay well away from situations where they’ll end up having to rely on those damaged barriers to keep them out of trouble.  But Rambold’s barriers almost certainly won’t hold if he is put back in among teens in a position of authority and trust.

And speaking of being in among teens, Judge Baugh, you didn’t think that it was all that important that Rambold was hanging out, unsupervised, with minors.  From what I can tell, you rationalized this away (or let Mr. Rambold’s lawyer rationalize this away) as being a non-issue because the minors in question were relatives of Mr. Rambold.  Now, from a clinical standpoint, that may or may not make a difference to whether he would re-offend against those particular children.  But it’s not considered a good idea to leave someone who offended against minors in a situation where that offender is alone with minors, relatives or not.

Just a little question, Judge Baugh, would you leave your underage relatives in the care of Mr. Rambold?  Here’s a hint from the treatment perspective: the correct answer is “No.”

And, Judge Baugh, you indicated that you weren’t too concerned that Rambold’s repeated rules violations led his treatment provider to kick him out of the program—you know, the treatment program Rambold agreed to attend as a condition for avoiding prison.  I’m guessing you’re not aware that failing to comply with treatment is considered an acute risk factor for re-offense.  Or maybe you are aware of how risk assessments work, since you were sure that Mr. Rambold was doing just fine because he had been rated as “low-risk to re-offend.”

But you know what?  Almost all non-violent (the ones who groom victims into compliance, rather than forcing them into sex) and non-hands-on offenders are considered “low risk to re-offend.”  Contrary to popular belief, sex offenders (again, of the non-violent sort) have a low rate of recidivism once they’ve been caught.  And that recidivism rate drops even lower with treatment.

A funny thing about those ratings, though, is that the ratings are generally predicated on the assumption that the offender’s behavior is actually going to match up with the information used to obtain the risk-level rating.  In other words, the rating is only as good as the information used to obtain the rating (and the quality of the rating tool, and the ability of the rater to use the tool correctly).  For instance, when the evaluator is doing the risk assessment, if it is assumed that the offender is not going to be left unsupervised with minors (which should be a given for anybody in Rambold’s situation), but then Rambold is left unsupervised around minors, then that rating loses more than a smidge of its reliability.

I also noticed, Judge Baugh, that you didn’t seem to think it was such a big deal that Mr. Rambold failed to show up for multiple sessions with his treatment provider.  So, Judge Baugh, when people are scheduled for court dates in your courtroom, is it important to you that they actually show up?  Also, how do you proceed with cases when involved parties aren’t there?  I’m guessing that things don’t turn out in favor of the people who don’t appear for their court dates.  So, that’s kind of the same thing that goes on when a sex offender doesn’t show up for treatment sessions—it doesn’t work out in his favor.  Or at least it’s not supposed to.

It’s also quite difficult for a treatment provider to get a feel for what’s going on with a client who fails to show up for appointments.  It’s considered kind of important when you, as a treatment provider, are supposed to be holding an offender accountable for his behavior, but that behavior includes skipping treatment—you know, because skipping treatment isn’t really considered being accountable.  Believe me, nobody wants that kind of liability.  This is why most states, including your home state of Montana, have laws that allow for offenders to be thrown into jail and/or prison when they violate the terms of their plea deals.

As a treatment provider, do you know what else makes it difficult to keep tabs on an offender?  Lies and lying.  Maybe you weren’t aware, but offenders lying to their treatment providers is considered another one of those things that moves an offender away from a “low risk to re-offend” rating.  And Rambold lied to his treatment provider, or rather, failed to tell his treatment provider that he was in a sexual relationship with a new girlfriend.

Now, generally speaking, having a committed relationship is considered a good thing in terms of risk assessment of sex offenders.  But, having a sexual relationship with someone without telling your treatment provider is, in technical language, a no-no.  This is for a variety of reasons.  For one thing, the treatment provider needs to know certain key things about the new partner, you know, like if she has children around.  Also, it’s considered important that any new partners are aware of the offender’s background so that they don’t do things like let the offender hang around the partner’s underage relatives unsupervised.  There are a lot of other potentially problematic factors here, like whether the partner is of an appropriate age, or if the partner has a history of trouble with the law, drugs, drinking, domestic violence, abuse as either a victim or perpetrator, and so on.

Now, just so you know, I work with sex offenders, and I’m not a really big “throw ’em in prison type”—at least not when it comes to offenders who take their responsibilities seriously and don’t screw around with their treatment.  But you might guess that I’m a bit sensitive about offenders who treat the whole thing like a joke, as if they don’t have to follow the rules.  I would think that as a judge, people who fail to follow the rules would bother you too, even if you don’t take all of this clinical info into consideration.

But I do hope you take the clinical information into consideration, because Rambold didn’t just violate the rules once or twice.  He violated them on numerous occasions.  And the rules he violated were, in treatment terms, kind of a big deal.  If this were basketball, this wouldn’t be traveling.  It would be Rambold driving a car onto the court, parking it under the basket, climbing up on top of the car to stuff the ball through the hoop, then flipping off the referee while Rambold’s coach explains to the referee that it’s okay for him to act that way, and gets the referee to agree.

So, Judge Baugh, a girl was abused, then shamed, then stressed to the point where she thought killing herself was a viable option, then shamed and blamed some more in your courtroom years after her death.  And even if you view Cherice as fully responsible for taking her own life (and, believe me, I could hammer you with a bunch more clinical info on that count), and even if you (completely ludicrously) view Cherice as equally “in control” of the sexual relationship she had with Rambold, Rambold completely failed to take his responsibilities seriously.  He was given the opportunity to dodge a lengthy stay in prison so long as he engaged in treatment in good faith.  He didn’t do that.

So, Judge Baugh, if Rambold ends up back in your courtroom on appeal, I would urge you to take the aforementioned clinical (and other) concerns into consideration when you decide how to amend your earlier judgment.  And whatever happens, I would urge you not to help Rambold or any other sex offenders minimize and justify their actions—they’re already pretty damn good at that on their own.

America’s Hate/Love Relationship with Sex Offenders

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If you use social media enough, it’s not that uncommon to come across ‘memes’ about how sex offenders should be maimed or killed in some horrible fashion, memes involving ideas like “Why use animals for laboratory research when there are so many sex offenders available?” or ugly, violent images tagged with bombastic proclamations of homicidal ideation toward anyone who would “hurt my children.”  Now, I understand the desire for a simple solution to a complex problem, but is there really some ‘debate’ about whether any of us want somebody to sexually abuse our children?

Arguably, the source of such black-and-white statements is a lack of knowledge, even a commitment to ignore any real information that might lead to a greater understanding of how to address the problem of sexual abuse, or even what is encompassed in the term “sex offender.”  “Sex offender,” to the oversized segment of the population desiring to eradicate problems through violence, is synonymous with “rapist/murderer of children.” 

But the reality of the term “sex offender” is that it applies to plenty of people who have never had any sexual contact with a child, let alone murdered anybody.  I don’t say this to minimize the seriousness of sex offenses, but to point out that, unlike the term “serial killer, “ “sex offender” does not have a single, well-defined meaning.  What’s legal in one state based on, for instance, the age of the participants, can be illegal in another.  What is normal, adult sexual behavior may be criminalized in a state, while much worse forms of sexual abuse are not defined as crimes, or are given much lighter penalties.

For example, if your 16-year-old son’s 16-year-old girlfriend sends him a nude or semi-nude photo of herself via phone, even if it may be legal for them to be having sex in your home state, your son may now be in possession of a depiction of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct, aka child pornography, which can lead to being charged with a crime and labeled a sex offender.  The label “sex offender” is also applied to exposers, who in the not-too-distant past were characterized as oh-so-comical ‘flashers’ and given a slap on the wrist. 

The sex offender label includes those convicted of statutory rape, which can include people who, if they had waited a few months, or lived in a different state, would have been having perfectly legal sex.  A 35-year-old software engineer engaging in a sexually-charged chat with a 38-year-old insurance salesman pretending to be a 13-year-old girl is disturbing and isn’t going to lead anywhere positive.  A 35-year-old software engineer engaging in a sexually-charged chat with a law enforcement official posing as a 13-year-old girl could lead to being labeled a sex offender under charges of communicating with a minor for immoral purposes, or attempted rape of a child–if the police can get the engineer to take the admittedly-twisted fantasy a bit further. 

To be sure, those convicted of sex offenses have almost certainly done things that range from the unsettling to the unthinkable, things that provoke reactions from disgust to outrage, things that require some form of restitution to the victims and to society at large—forms of restitution that are provided for in law.  But to lump ‘sex offenders’ into a uniform group whose members are all deserving of murder is to take the Carl Spackler approach to problem-solving: blowing up the golf course to get at the gopher, ultimately making the problem worse.  And, no, I’m not suggesting that the gopher was a pedophile.  I am saying that outright hostility toward “sex offenders” ensures that we will never get to a point of dealing with the problem in a way that might eventually reduce instances of sex offenses—but that’s an argument for another day.

For now, what most baffles me is how the self-righteous anger of those who would annihilate all sex offenders can so quickly reverse itself from being focused on the offender to being aimed at the victim.  While there are numerous recent and not-so-recent examples of this, Steubenville immediately comes to mind as a town that is now synonymous with rape and rape cover-ups.  It is also synonymous with blaming the victim.   And blaming the victim is just a different way of saying “siding with the sex offender.”   Let’s be clear about that: to whatever degree one blames the victim, one is, to that same degree, siding with the sex offender.

So how does the threat to smoke out and crush every evil, lurking sex offender get transformed into threats of violence against sexual abuse victims?  Well, when the offender is no longer some random, unshaven, greasy-haired creep in an arrest photo shown on the local news, but instead a high-school football star who is well-known in the community; and when the victim is no longer an unquestionably-innocent seven-year-old, but a 16-year-old girl who got drunk at a party; large swaths of the public suddenly decide to love the sex offender and hate the victim. 

In such situations, all of the Internet-clogging-bravado that fuels adolescent fantasies of being the slayer of sex offenders suddenly gets channeled into death threats and, astonishingly enough, rape threats aimed at high school girls.   Justifications are created to excuse the ‘dumb mistakes’ made by the teen sex offenders who apparently no longer deserve any consequences for their behavior.  And the Internet equivalent of pitchforks and torches are taken up in service of ridiculous arguments about how teen girls need to recognize that if they are going to behave like drunken sluts, they have to accept the responsibility for being sexually assaulted.

So, if you’re going to be all black-and-white about how much sex offenders deserve to be burned at the stake, then don’t pull them from the fire so that you can toss their victims in.  If you so enjoy black-and-white thinking, the only absolutes involved are that nobody deserves to be sexually assaulted, and that nobody has the right to sexually assault anyone.

If things are so black and white, then ask yourself why you would ever choose to side with sex offenders against their victims. 

About the New Letters

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So, last week I was able to officially add to that string of letters that follows my name when I’m feeling professionally pretentious enough to attach it (like on the main pages of this blog).  The new letters: ASOTP.  I am loath to spell out what exactly it means, as that revelation is usually followed by one of a small number of responses, most of which can be boiled down to either a prurient curiosity or an “Ewww!” reaction—if those are really different things.  Different sides of a two-headed coin, I suppose.

Deep breath, throw it out there, let it sink in.

The letters stand for Affiliate Srrm Orrherrm Treatment Provider.

Ahem.  Let me try that again.

The new letters stand for “Affiliate Sex Offender Treatment Provider.”  In other words, I’m now officially allowed to provide therapy specific to the, uh, needs of convicted sex offenders, generally those who are involved in particular sentencing programs that I won’t detail here, apart from saying that they involve community supervision.  And, more accurately, the “Affiliate” portion of that title means that I am allowed to provide such treatment so long as I have a supervisor who is a Certified SOTP (having a contract with such a supervisor being one of the elements necessary to be granted said letters).

While this particular status is new, my involvement in the treatment of sex offenders is not. I’ve been working in one capacity or another with both juvenile and adult sex offenders for a little over six years now—which sounds like both an insanely long and an unimaginably short period of time to me.

So, why, may you ask, would I want to work with sex offenders?  Everybody asks.  And my answer is usually rather vague and abbreviated, dodging the real heft of the answer.  Let me attempt to present the most straight line formulation of this reason that I can, and please follow closely or you may get a lot of incorrect impressions…

My father was a pastor in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, “stationed” in the Midwest for that part of my life when we were both alive.  My father was killed by a reckless driver exactly one week before my third birthday (which is where a lot of that attachment and blankie business comes in).  My mother, my siblings, and I then moved out to the West Coast, where we soon joined a(n) LCMS church with two pastors.

One of those pastors turned out to be a sex offender, of the hands-on, child molesting type, including incestuous molestation.  For the record, I had always been very wary of this pastor and kept my distance, despite his apparent popularity with other kids/teens in the church.  (Someone call Oprah—or whoever has usurped her throne—to see if we can suss out whether this has to do with repressed memories, supernaturalish intuition, or guardian angels).

The information about the SO pastor became public knowledge during my first year of college, when I was already pretty deep into a crisis of faith.

Bye-bye, faith.

Now if you want something to piss out the flame of your faith, there’s nothing quite like having one of the pastors most responsible for your religious education turn out to be a child molester.  This is particularly dousing when it follows that whole bit about God letting your dad, one of His faithful servants, get killed in a totally senseless accident—all while driving a Pacer, nonetheless (my dad was the one driving the Pacer, not God).

I don’t know how common it is for PKs (preacher’s kids, not Penalty Kicks or Player Kills or Purple Kush{es?} you sporty stoner nerds) to feel some sort of obligation to follow in their father’s (or mother’s in some churches that don’t include the LCMS) footsteps.  But for this kid, who never really even had a conversation with his dad, yet was enthralled by the idea of someone devoting his/her life to faith, there was a perceived pressure to aim, or perhaps a desire to feel at least the smallest inclination to lean, in that direction.  There was a weird, but unfulfilled, sense that there should be a calling—that God should be reaching out a hand, or tugging a leash, or kicking a butt.  I mean, if God could go to the trouble of getting that Jonah guy swallowed up and barfed out at exactly the right times and places, why not at least lay out something more profound than watery eyes during the candlelit singing of “Silent Night” at the Christmas Eve service?

So much for that straight-line formulation.

Anyway, while it took the overcoming of numerous mental blocks and bad habits (okay, the habits are still there) to get to the point where the idea of a ‘life of service’ was even a possibility, the calling wasn’t really perceived until it was time to sign up for final projects in the ‘Abnormal Psych’ course of my Master’s Program.  The list went around.  And while I immediately knew to sign up for a presentation on Pedophilia, I found myself choosing Conversion Disorder (‘hysterical blindness’ and the like) instead.  A sense of guilt immediately began eating away at me, until, a short time later, bothered by what I felt was cowardice at steering clear of the topic I really wanted to study, I tracked down the clipboard with the list, erased my name from the line next to Conversion Disorder, and instead, wrote it next to Pedophilia.

An explosion of anxiety and purpose, roughly on the order of the destruction of the first Death Star, or perhaps equal to the magnitude of the reaction of a normal human digestive system to a Jack-in-the-Box meal, tipped my world forever in the direction I had been looking for…or kind of looking for…or at least in some damn direction for the time being while I decided if this was really what I wanted to involve myself in.

At any rate, it was momentous enough to stick in my brain as some kind of pivotal event that all that previous junk had led up to…or to which all that previous junk had led.

More on that later.