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__ IIwe wish to retain literary property rights to the thesis for a period of years, or until my death, whichever is the later, at which time the literary property rights shall be assigned to Williams College. Sc'!c:eli Ihis oplion ;Jilows Ihe :Illlhm gre:11 Ikxihi ill lenclillg Ill' shmll'lling Ih(' lill1,: of his/hn :lllllllll:llic SOllie silideilis :Il'l: illilresled ill IIsiug Iheir Ihesis ill gr:IUll:lle \l'11Illllwllrk, lu Ihis (:ase. il wOlllci 1lI:lkc selb,' for Ihclll III cult:r :1 !HlllIher sllch 'I () III III,' hl:lI1k, II. ACCESS The Williams College Libraries are investigating the posting of theses online, as well as their retention in hardcopy. L Williams College is granted permission to maintain and provide access to my thesis in hardcopy and via the Web both on and off campus. S,:lc-elill~, Ihis (1[lliul1 ~i1[OIl'S 1'l'se/II'c,Ir,.'r, ~m)[IIj([ 11r,: \lol'ld Iu tlr,: [ vtT,iOI1 U[' \UlII' \Vl1rk. "Why Don't You Take A Seat?" Dateline's To Catch a Predator, Vigilantism, and Narratives of Sexual Predation by Victoria L. Williams Gail M. Newman, Advisor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Women's & Gender Studies WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts April 27, 2009 Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1 1. Catching Predators 7 2. Megan's Law 31 3. Vigilantism, Residency Restrictions and Offender Treatment 47 4. The Irreducible Ambiguity of Desire 65 Conclusion 77 Works Cited 83 Acknowledgements I am not exaggerating when I say that this project would not have been possible without the support and guidance of my advisor, Professor Gail M. Newman. Gail has been my teacher and mentor throughout my four years at Williams, but it was in her role as advisor that I most fully came to appreciate her commitment to intellectual exploration and discovery. She has done more than advise my thesis: she has helped me recognize my own scholarly voice and perspective. I am forever grateful for her both her insights and her friendship. I would also like to thank the team of people who have helped me along the way. First, a special thanks to my secondary readers, professors Jana Sawicki and Cathy Johnson, for their invaluable contributions and criticism. Their feedback pushed me to refine my arguments and consider new questions and issues. I would also like to thank professors Alison Case and Kathryn Kent for their guidance during the earliest stages of this process, professors Sara Dubow and Anna Fishzon for their ongoing interest and advice, and Rebecca Ohm for her help throughout the research process. Finally, thank you to professor Lucie Schmidt, Women's & Gender Studies department chair, for her support and positive energy. I feel truly fortunate to have worked with such a wonderful collection of minds over the last year. It has been one of the defining experiences of my Williams College career. Thank you. 1 Introduction I first saw Dateline NBC's: To Catch a Predator when it debuted four and a half years ago in September of 2004. Billed as a groundbreaking expose of sex offenders on the Internet, the investigation sought to reveal the ease with which men may gain access to minors online. That first airing garnered an overwhelmingly positive response from viewers, law enforcement, and political figures. The show's host, television journalist Chris Hansen, could be seen on major news programs promoting the investigation and taking questions from a titillated public. Some critics did step forward to question the show's tactics (which they argued bordered on entrapment) and its sensationalism. Supporters of the show, however, were more vocal, touting To Catch a Predator as an essential way to educate parents on the behavior of sex offenders. I couldn't help feeling more deeply troubled, not just by To Catch a Predator's tactics but also by the particular ways in which it confronted sexual predation. A highly artificial representation of Internet sex offending, To Catch a Predator exaggerated the prevalence of this particular sex crime over other, more commonplace forms of victimization. Since To Catch a Predator was only supposed to be a one-time special, I assumed that the elevated concern over online predation, and child molestation in particular, would pass once the Dateline-inspired hysteria had calmed. But it did not calm; over the next four years Dateline and Chris Hansen would continue to produce investigations featuring adult men chatting sexually with young teenagers on the Internet. In that time, To Catch a Predator has become one of 2 Dateline's most recognizable and popular series, shooting the show and Hansen himself to the status of pop culture icons. Almost overnight To Catch a Predator became the primary representation of contemporary sex offending in the United States, and Hansen had become the voice of concerned citizens across the country. Despite or perhaps because of To Catch a Predator's high profile in news media, few have explored the narratives that underlie the show's construction of sex offending and how those narratives relate to Americans' overall understanding of these crimes. In this paper I will provide one possible reading of the show that analyzes the way it constructs the relationship between victims, offenders, and the non-offending public. Its primary narrative, I argue, reduces the phenomenon of sex offending to a rigid binary of innocent victim versus evil offender, which in tum positions Hansen as a morally superior vigilante figure. More specifically, I argue that this simplistic narrative excludes more complex representations of sex offending, cases in which offenders are not wholly bad and victims are not wholly innocent. Instead, it presents the innocent victim/evil offender paradigm as the universal truth of sex offending. To Catch a Predator's narrative is so absolute that it cannot even recognize the nuances and ambiguities within its own representation of sex offenders. That narrative gaps and misfires within the show itself threaten to undermine Hansen's main claims about the pathology of the men caught in these stings and the innocence of the teens used to lure them in. These moments illustrate the limitations of an overly rigid narrative and point to the need for a more integrated view of sex offending. I have chosen to focus on To Catch a Predator rather than other depictions of sex offending not only because the show is popular and widely endorsed but because 3 it is the visual crystallization of our broader cultural beliefs about sexual violence. Each one-hour episode reiterates many of the same anxieties that have come to permeate our legal and psychological discourse. At the same time, To Catch a Predator, in its very structure, gives rise to the very questions and inconsistencies that threaten to unravel its own narrative. There is something elusive within To Catch a Predator itself that cannot be resolved by the ideology it puts forth. By breaking down this narrative we may begin to construct a new understanding of sex offending that allows for a greater degree of complexity. My particular approach combines close analysis of To Catch a Predator with analysis of the sex offender legislation that emerged in the 90s and the vigilantism associated with it. My analysis of the television program is partially informed by Kleinian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, which I have chosen for two reasons. First, they help to identify and explain the patterns and structures within the narrative as they relate to identity and perception, and, later (in Chapter 4), knowledge and desire. Second, much of the previous work on reality television relies on Foucauldian analyses of power and surveillance. I believe a psychoanalytic approach provides a new and essential way to think about both the dynamics of the show and our own visceral response to sex offenders. In criticizing To Catch a Predator I do not wish to vindicate the men caught in these investigations nor to minimize the sexual predation of minors in general. Parents are right to be concerned about child molesters and other kinds of sexual offenders. There are, however, serious implications for the particular ways in which To Catch a Predator and our current laws regard sex offenders. It is my hope that by 4 breaking down the common narratives surrounding sexual violence we can begin to make better progress in the prevention and treatment of sexual offending. I have been a peer educator and counselor in sexual assault for the past four years, and it is my commitment to victims that compelled me to enter into this project. Chapter 1 provides an initial reading of TCAP that lays out the components of its primary narrative and shows how thoroughly it is saturated in ideology. It is most informed by Melanie Klein's notion of projective-identification. In one version of projective-identification, the subject projects all negative qualities onto some other in order to preserve his or her own coherent, good self-concept. Any ambiguity within the individual's self-concept is effectively eliminated. I As I argue in Chapters 2 and 3, this same gesture tends to inform the way we talk about sex offenders in legislative debates and treatment. In Chapter 2 I begin to contextualize TCAP as the culmination of a narrative shift toward vigilantism that began with the passage of community notification laws commonly known as Megan's Laws. Chapter 3 provides a critique of Megan's Law and traces the intensification of its vigilante response through residency restrictions against offenders. This same impulse to oversimplify sex offending is shown to operate within the medical community, as well. In Chapter 4 I return to TCAP and explore the possibilities presented by the show's own narrative gaps and tensions, using literary-critical and Lacanian psychoanalytic methods, exploring in the process the question of what might happen when we acknowledge 1 I am using just one variation of projective-identification; there are other variations, but all deal with relations between subject and objects (real or imagined). For more on projective-identification see Stephen Frosh, Key Concepts in Psychoanalysis, Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 2003: 32-39; Robert Maxwell Young, "Projective Identification," in Other Banalities, New York: Routledge, 2006: 60-76 5 the inconsistency and ambiguity of sexual fantasy within out understanding of sex offending. 6 7 1. Catching Predators "Why don't you have a seat right over there?" Chris Hansen Over the past four years, Dateline NBC's To Catch a Predator has maintained its place as one of the most-watched and most well-known journalistic television series. Originally airing as a Dateline special investigation, To Catch a Predator has becomes its own series, conducting sting operations in 10 states to date. The professed aim of the series is to expose the prevalence of online sexual "predators"- men looking for sexual encounters with minors-to parents who might otherwise have no idea who their children are talking to over the Internet. Dateline correspondent Chris Hansen wanted to reveal the ease with which "predators" or "pedophiles" (as they are interchangeably called) can gain access to one's home. Following roughly the same format since its inception, undercover operatives from Perverted Justice, an online watchdog group, pose as young teenagers (referred to as "decoys"). They engage in online chats with adult men and eventually lure them to homes across the United States with the promise of a sexual encounter. The show, however, is more focused on what happens when the men arrive at the undercover house. As they walk through the door, the would-be predators are brought face to face with Hansen, who invites each of them to have a seat and chat about who they are and what they are doing there. The conversations are tense, uncomfortable, sometimes humorous, and often shocking. Hansen reads from the men's sexually explicit chat logs, teasing out their confessions and revelations. Hansen [disgusted]: Could you explain yourself? Target: I'm sorry... 8 Hansen: What kind of conduct is this? Target: I'm sorry I've never done this before. Hansen [incredulous]: So you just woke up this morning and said 'I'm going to get involved in an Internet conversation with a 14-year-old boy. I'm gonna go to his house, strip naked, and walk in with a twelve pack of beer'? Target: No, sir. Hansen: What would have happened, John, if I wasn't here? Target: I probably would have chickened out, sir? Hansen's line of questioning vilifies the offenders rather than exploring the myriad possible motivations driving them. He sifts through their responses, keying into the most damning parts of their testimony. The would-be predators' chat logs and responses often reveal them to be troubled, confused, and ambivalent about their behavior. Hansen: Then why did you come here? Help me to understand. Target: Because I'm a sick son of a bitch. I've never done this before. I talk about it online all the time - I've never done anything with anybody except my wife. Ever!3 While one might imagine TeAP could be an opportunity to look closely at issues of compulsion and the murky nature of motivation and fantasy, Hansen encourages the audience to see these men as unequivocally mal-intentioned and ignores or distorts anything that contradicts the his image of offenders as wholly predatory. After the public shaming he sends them on their way, another man arrives, and the process is repeated once again. In the course of an hour one man after another is paraded across 2 optimumOO, "To Catch a Predator All Stars," YouTube 15 March 2007 Structurally, the series is characterized by a binary opposition between its host and the offenders. According to Hansen, there is a clear, preexisting distinction between "right" and "wrong" and these are appropriate terms for understanding sex offending. Not only do we need these categories, but they are always understood to be under threat. Hansen repeatedly names and expels the threat while retaining his own righteousness and legitimacy. As we will see later, the audience is encouraged to identify with Hansen, allowing viewers to articulate a shared revulsion of offenders, which in tum offers the audience a sense of commonality and coherence. Ultimately, the show's rhetoric of good versus evil is a refusal to accept ambiguity; the behavior of these men is categorically deviant and therefore unacceptable. The only way TCAP can achieve this portrayal, however, is by manipulating the way we see and understand the issue of sex offending against minors. What is left is a narrative that effaces the potential complexity of sex offending and desire in favor of a simplified narrative of predation. In this chapter I will analyze the narrative put forth by TCAP, noting how it simultaneously justifies and explains the action within the show. It presents a very particular story of sex offending that it then insists is both universal and natural. It is universal in the sense that all sex offending, not just offending against minors, can be understood as a battle between good and evil. In addition the story presents as a fundamental truth its own view of sex offenders, especially those who target children, as the ultimate evil, without allowing any speculation about the origin, nuances or 10 outcomes of the individual actions involved. In both its structure and content, TCAP uses the figure of the sexual predator to create and reinforce ideological narratives about the good and proper citizen, community, and the boundaries between criminals and the non-offending public. By reducing the problem of sex offending against minors to Manichean dimensions, the show allows its audience to make sense of the senseless, to ground the confusion of contemporary experience in discrete categories. In effect, this narrative empties all negative, unworthy qualities onto the potential offender and invests all that is good and proper in Hansen and, by extenseion, ourselves. Hansen: Do you think it's appropriate for someone your age to come visit a 14-year-old girl home alone? Dory: No, but she is the one that invited me. Hansen: Does that make it right? Dory: That does not make it right.4 Not only does the narrative obscure the complex nature of sexual desire, fantasy, and compulsion, it also assumes and demands participation-however passive and manipulated-by its audience. By watching we take part in the creation of a narrative that allows us to define ourselves against an unspeakable other-the sex offender. At the same time that we explore how TCAP reinforces this binary in the minds of its viewers, we must also ask how the show fails to uphold its own ideology. The show is inherently messy; at the same that TCAP defines sex offenders as outside the realm of respectable society, it also asserts their constant presence within our communities (hence the need to expel them in the first place). Sex offenders are both 4 "The Hansen Files," MSNBC Online 2008, Here I analyze this narrative more deeply, paying particular attention to the rhetorical tactics that help establish its premise and Hansen's authority. Specifically, the set design, language and narrative progression, and film editing work to process all incongruous images and information into an unproblematic and morally unassailable package. In the following sections I will discuss what these elements tell us and what their implications are. I. Absolute Boundaries Physical configurations and spaces playa significant role in the way TCAP demonstrates the importance of both literal and psychic boundaries. Though never explicitly stated in the show, the choice of location implies that sex offenders are primarily a concern for white, middle and upper middle class households. Minorities and urban spaces are conspicuously absent (except in the few cases in which the "predator" is non-white), and nearly every sting takes place in a comfortable suburb. TCAP does not deny this fact, and even draws attention to it from time to time. Hansen presumes a shared class identification amongst viewers when he denounces the predators' seeming sense of entitlement: "This is a three- to four-million dollar 12 home and these guys are walking in like they own itT'S This emphasis on the legitimacy of the white, suburban neighborhood goes a long way to support the notion that offenders belong outside of these communities, relegated to spaces that are not "our" neighborhoods. And yet at the same time we are alerted to the fact that they are coming from within these communities. The tension lies not in the unpleasantness outside the suburb; these communities are too closed for minorities and the impoverished to pose a threat. It is the potential for internal disorder that makes the expulsion of sex offenders so imperative. The undesirability of outsiders is self-evident, so what we are seeing in TCAP is the policing of those citizens already within these spaces. The moderately urban suburb is treated as an oasis, a space of shared values and concerns, but it is the presence of deviant persons just outside our homes and within our communities that makes it necessary to iterate (again and again) the boundary between us and them. TCAP conjures up this infiltration in order to banish the offenders. It is a symbolic gesture in which Hansen confronts the perceived evil then casts it out. After all, these men are mostly white, middle-class suburbanites themselves. By insisting that they are outsiders, however, Hansen can continue to assert a class and racially determined "us" that creates in the sex offender an unequivocal "them." This divide is multi-leveled. As we have seen, it is affirmed macrocosmically (at the level of physical geography and actual community), but it is also illustrated within the microcosm(s) of the set design. One of the show's hallmarks is that nearly every 5 Chris Hansen, "No Day at the Beach for New Jersey Potential Predators," Dateline: To Catch a Predator, NBC 20 July 2007, transcript It is not enough to bring offenders into our neighborhoods, they must be taken to the kitchen, the heartbeat of the home, the representation of wholesome togetherness. Pursuing the metaphor still further, the offender sits down at the table, the place where family meals are taken. This kitchen table is then the space at which all of Hansen's conversations take place. By confronting predators here, Hansen is able to fully contrast the outside evil against the most idealized of communal spaces. The table itself comes to stand for the entire moral impulse of the show insofar as it quite literally draws a boundary between Hansen and the offenders. Hansen, always standing, positions himself on one end of the counter while the predator sits opposite from him. There is a practical reason for this configuration, of course, in that it reduces the likelihood of a physical altercation between Hansen and his houseguests, but its immediate visual impact is more rhetorical. It emphasizes the complete break between the sick sex offender and the morally righteous citizen, championed in Hansen (with whom we, the viewers, are encouraged to identify). Far from being a mutual dialogue, the exchange is balanced against the predator. Every open-ended question, every attempt to "understand" what these men were thinking is really an attempt to reveal their duplicity and derangement. Hansen stands, empowered and authoritative, while the predators sit, cowed and ashamed. From his position of power, Hansen's tone is alternately dismissive, amused, annoyed, and self-righteous. In the eleventh investigation, aired in 2007, Hansen becomes more confrontational than ever before. In the following excerpt, he interrupts the would-be offender four times, taking control of the exchange with 14 leading questions and assertions. As the potential offender, Eugene Daily, stumbles through an explanation, Hansen cuts to the most lurid parts of his chat log: Hansen: You talk about her being the daughter you never had. Daily: Yeah. You saw that in the chat room, I know ... You know, this is embarrassing. This is what I knew was going to happen. I knew all along this was going to happen. All the way down I kept on saying to mys- Hansen: Then why did you do it? Help me to understand. Daily: I don't know. I don't know. You know, I can kick myself in the f-ing -head. Because I know ... I'm so-I'm so stupid. It's like- Hansen: You even talk in the chat about you can only come over a half-hour. Because you've got to pick up your wife. Daily: Well, yeah. Well, I wasn't going to-you know, I was saying- Hansen: Where's your wife? Daily: She's at work. Hansen: She's at work. And you've got to go pick her up. Daily: I've got to go pick her up. Hansen: And who knows? Who knows what? [Reading from chat log] 'We can do it if it clicks.' Daily: No. Well, yeah. That's-that's talking.6 The pointed nature of these interruptions, contrasted against the offender's inability to express himself, lend Hansen an air of authority: this display of concision and control is composed to make Hansen appear all-knowing and all-capable. His posture and assertiveness in tum lead us, the viewers, to believe he is asking the right questions, that we should share his focus. For example, he invokes Daily's wife, drawing a contrast between his obligation to his family and the selfish choice to squeeze in a 6 Hansen, "No Day at the Beach for New Jersey Potential Predators." Dateline, transcript Rather than viewing Hansen as an instrument for uncovering truth (like any other investigative journalist), viewers come to see him as truth itself. He has become so thoroughly linked to these investigations that he is often treated as an expert on child molesting. Hansen has made several appearances on behalf of TeAP and was even asked to testify before Congress.7 As the single constant figure within each installment of the show, his popularity has skyrocketed, and "Have a seat" has become something of a catchphrase.s His apparent expertise and ability to mesmerize potential predators with a simple request gives him at least the illusion of mastery. Insofar as he can assert this control over offenders and provide a reassuring narrative of good versus evil, he can appeal to an audience's desire for understanding and coherence. This phenomenon has much in common with early film theory's readings of the Lacanian gaze. According to film scholar Todd McGowan, initial readings of Lacan assert that we as viewers identify with the gaze of mastery, that we desire and are drawn to a sense of control9 Hansen represents the illusion of coherence and 7 The testimony was before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Energy and Commerce Committee regarding Internet service providers and social networking sites. Hansen describes this experience in his online weblog on the Dateline NBC website. Part of his testimony included showing clips from To Catch a Predator. Hansen, "Searching for a Solution," NBC Online 28 June 2006 Hansen [speaking to a middle school math teacher]: That raises an obvious question. If you're willing to have conversations like this and come visit a 13 year-old boy, what have you been doing with students? Teacher: Definitely not this. Hansen: And why should I believe you? Teacher: Because I have successfully taught school for 23 years. IO Here Hansen does not pause to consider the implications inherent in the idea that a respected member of the community might desire sexual contact with minors. Both here and in his interaction with Daily, his questions obscure that which is troubling and inconsistent in order to drive home the simplistic idea that anyone who desires sex with a minor must be a bad person and must be removed from our sight. Hansen enters the investigations and individual interviews armed with the assumption that offenders are evil, then attempts systematically to prove as much. II II. Absolute Readings The configuration of spaces, people, and power is also emphasized in the language of the show. The narration, placed alongside and over the interviews 43.3 (2003): 27-47. McGowan goes on to argue that we are really drawn to the thing that eludes mastery: the Lacanian Real, or objet petit a. I will discuss how mastery and the Real figures in TeAP at greater length in Chapter 4. 10 fredmertz75, "Dateline: To Catch a Sex Predator. .. Math Teacher Busted!" YouTube 9 Feb 2007 Hansen resumes his narration, taking back control over the representation of the exchange. 12 While in that instance he turns away from the ambiguous, at other times he manages to turn ambiguity to his own advantage. In the following example Hansen narrates over the interaction between an offender and the decoy. And here he [James Wiles] is inside the undercover house greeted by a 19 year-old actress hired by Dateline... Wiles keeps his online promise [to bring M&Ms]. Decoy: Well I'm going to go change, I'll be back okay? [Appears to be touching his pants over his genitals] We've blurred his graphic body language that seems to tell us exactly what's on his mind. 13 12 Furthermore, loverboy212x's comment is not included in the transcript of the episode. (Hansen, "No Day at the Beach" < http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19838639/>.) 13 slickslickster, "To Catch a Predator: James Wiles (humbubger)," YouTube 10 March 2008 What exactly is on Wiles' mind is never elaborated, but Hansen's tone leaves little doubt as to what we are supposed to infer. What might be a benign, albeit lewd, scratching gesture is distorted to indicate a sinister act of sexual stimulation. Again, the potential offender is reduced to the dimensions of a villain, which contrasts neatly with the blonde, virginal-looking decoy. What's more, the extensive blurring over Wiles' genitals leaves us no choice but to take Hansen at his word. In these ways Hansen quite literally tells us how to watch and, by extension, what matters in these scenes. The Wiles scene also emphasizes the importance of audience participation in TCAP. No matter how strongly Hansen alludes to the sexual nature of Wiles' actions, we ultimately draw the conclusion that it is a lewd act in our own minds. The show is thus as simplistic in its presuppositions about its audience as it is self-confident about its message. It assumes the audience will automatically and universally interpret these men's behavior in the same way. The language of the show implicates the audience or encourages our participation in other ways, as well. Hansen's use of "we" to signify the TCAP crew very often may be interpreted to include the viewer at home, as in "While we usually only have proof of intent in chat logs, for the first time we hear a man tell the decoy face-to-face what he plans to do with her sexually.,,14 Insofar as the audience also witnesses this TCAP "first", we are included in that statement. Given these rhetorical patterns and our identification with Hansen, it is easy to see how audience members come to take ownership of "our investigation.,,15 14 Hansen, "No Day at the Beach for New Jersey Potential Predators," In addition to Hansen's specific language and mode of address, the narrative structure gives the viewer the illusion of involvement and emphasizes his or her superiority over the offender. Each segment of the show follows the same basic pattern: Hansen identifies the upcoming "predator" and shares selections of that offender's chat log. After the chat log we get a shot of the man entering the house, and the confrontation begins. Hansen conducts an interview with the offender, occasionally narrating over the exchange, and the man eventually leaves. Sharing the chat log sets up a context for what we eventually see in the interview. The most explicit and damning parts of the chats are used to introduce each offender and to remind us that--Iest we forget-these men are only interested in one thing. Paul Clemente is a 22-year-old college studentfrom San Diego. Clemente spoke online with someone he thought was a 13-year-old girl. poLclemente: too young then. like older guys? red_poet13[decoy]: ya poLclemente: dnt tell me ur already doing the.....u know? Atfirst, Clemente says she's too young, but soon asks her ifshe's had sex, and what positions she's used. Finally, he gets down to business... PoLclemente: So when's the time I can come to your house? of course when your mom is not around. I'm asking when, so we can go out. poLclemente: r u good doing it on a hot tub? red_poet13: doing wut? poLclemente: the sex 16 16 Hansen, "Scary Chats and a Repeat 'Predator' [Long Beach, CA Investigation]," Dateline: To Catch a Predator, NBC Online 30 January 2006, transcript Armed with this knowledge, the viewer, like Hansen, is in a position of power over the offender. Often Hansen confronts the offender with sections of the chat log that we have already heard, giving the effect that it is we who are confronting him. What's more, Hansen maintains that the chat log is the standard of truth against evasive predators. Hansen: The problem is, for you, is that I know that you've had chats with other people online who said they were underage. Target: Only just chatting...you know? Hansen: Yeah, but see what you saidjust a minute ago is not what you're saying now. So every time I ask you a question you seem to be dodgy, uh, answering it - not telling the truth. Why? Until I confront you with the evidence that you in fact did so. So why should I believe anything you say?17 The offender is then the only figure who is not somehow in on the sting. His ignorance and shock render him powerless. He is trapped before he even realizes what is happening to him. III. Absolute Distortion Video editing provides a more total way for TeAP to control its own narrative by dictating exactly what we see and how we see it. Take for example the case of David Kaye. Kaye was a rabbi and vice president of the Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values. 18 A respected member of his community, he became part of the show when he went online and agreed to meet a young male teen for sex. Hansen later recalls in his book that Kaye was "one of the most disturbing" of the offenders. 19 17 fredmertz75, "Dateline: To Catch a Sex Predator. .. too many lies," YouTube 31 Jan 2007 The footage that aired in November 2005 looks just like any other TeAP segment. Kaye walks into the kitchen, chatting with the decoy, who slips away to "change his shirt." The decoy gets Kaye to flirt with him: "I gotta ask, are you still going to be up for tonight after seeing your girlfriend?" "We'll see," Kaye replies. At that moment Hansen walks in and asks a clearly startled Kaye to take a seat. The following action takes only about three minutes. The cameras do not take a wide angle; we never see both Hansen and Kaye's faces in a single shot. Instead we get a series of shot-countershots that isolate the speakers and put them in opposition to one another. Hansen appears to lean forward as he steadily probes Kaye. Kaye, though he appears to respond immediately to Hansen's questions, seems evasive. He insists on knowing who Hansen is. The quick cuts and Kaye's responses make the entire scene feel polarized and adversarial. When Hansen finally identifies himself Kaye's shock is apparent. As the hidden cameramen emerge Kaye gets up from the table and approaches Hansen, arms outstretched, as if to throttle him, but it becomes clear that he is only trying to block the cameras. Bracing himself against he table, Kaye now leans forward and insists, "You've gotta stop this! You don't have any right to ..." Hansen's narration then steps in and asserts, "Now they knew this was all being taped for the record, and for broadcast on Dateline." He does not take seriously Kaye's moral claims against the show and chooses to frame his reaction solely as the desperation of a criminal caught in the act. 20 In Your Home. New York: Dutton, Penguin Group, 2007: 26 20 Hansen, "Catching Potential Internet Sex Predators," Dateline NBC 10 November 2005 < http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9927253/>. 22 The charged nature of this scene has since gone down in TeAP history. In the book Hansen dwells on Kaye's case, and several different videos with the footage have been posted on YouTube. Kaye's high position within his community, coupled with his seemingly deranged reaction, have made him one of the most memorable individuals in the series?! Yet we only know the Dateline version, cleaned up and cut down for television. In March of 2008, however, a full-length version undermining the show's moral claims surfaced on the Intemet.22 This raw footage is substantially longer and was taken from the perspective of a single camera stationed above the table, allowing for a view of both Hansen and Kaye together (a vantage point we only see before Hansen's entrance in the edited version). The scene, rather than following a quick back-and-forth between the two men, is labored. Hansen does ask questions ("What are you doing here?" "Why don't you tell me what your plan is?"), but Kaye's responses are marked by long pauses and sighs. His silence at some points seems to act as his own form of resistance. We can see him processing the situation in his mind. Hansen asks him to have a seat three times before he does so. Kaye knows he has the right to know who Hansen is, but Hansen refuses to identify himself right away. In this version, Hansen is the wily, evasive one: he continues to read portions of Kaye's chat log, raising his voice at more explicit points, hoping to provoke a reaction. Possibly realizing they are in a stalemate, Hansen identifies himself and gets the made-for-TV moment reality producers crave. Kaye rushes toward the cameras and Hansen, trying to block the 21 Hansen, "Reflections on 'To Catch a Predator" transcipt, Dateline NBC 13 March 2007 Given Hansen's aggressive behavior throughout this scene, Kaye's final accusation resonates as a deeper criticism of TCAP's tactics. We see his horror, his shame, but we now also see him as fighting back. His outrage throws the entire narrative into jeopardy, for he not only stands up and resists but questions the ethical ramifications of the investigation. Kaye's story reveals how thoroughly the show's moral message is dependent upon a selective representation of sex offenders. We do not see Hansen's effort to provoke these men as any effort at all. When it comes to the edited segments, even if the viewer finds fault with the insinuating style of his interviews, the seemingly immediate, often cowed response from the offender reinforces Hansen's role as a moral authority against these "predators." The edited dialogue moves along so seamlessly that it becomes the natural way of watching and assessing the offender. And yet there is nothing natural at all about TCAP or its premise. When would-be offenders think they are talking to an underage teen, they are really talking to legal adults, many well into their 30s and 40s. In that regard, no minor is ever victimized and no real crime has ever been committed. The chats themselves are misleading, for though the men are left to initiate the discussion, the decoys are the ones who invite them to the house. The idea, then, that these men are the predators is questionable if not completely irrelevant. At the same time, the audience is made aware of these constructions. We even see the hidden cameras emerge as Hansen reveals his identity to the offenders. What is so confounding about TCAP is the way 24 in which it can make claims about the essential nature of sexual "predators' while exposing its own mechanisms. We are intended to believe that despite or within the show's own network of lies and illusions we can understand the truth of sex offenders, namely that they are highly intentional and unequivocally evil. Rather than seeing the work of Dateline and Perverted Justice as the selective construction of a limited and specific narrative, many viewers take it to be representative of the entire problem of sexual violence.23 Of course, the idea that reality television can promote an ideology of crime is nothing new,24 as TCAP predecessors such as Cops, America's Most Wanted, and Unsolved Mysteries can testify. In his essay "In 'The Shadows of Shadows,'" Gary Cavendar argues that the language and visual rhetoric of these earlier series work to establish a firm division between the criminal and the crime fighters (with whom we identify). The formula presents "criminality [as] a totalizing characterization" while the "'them vs. us' dichotomy speaks to a perceived cohesive social order, which the criminal threatens.,,25 This reductive narrative is easy to accept because it is packaged within the "seemingly innocuous symbols and conventions of the crime genre"- 23 The viewer emails repeatedly praise the show as "eye-opening." One viewer writes, "thank you for exposing this problem to society...predators are out there in high record numbers." Another takes for granted the scale of Dateline's work: "It is amazing just how far reaching this epidemic is. We need more investigations on this problem and far, far more investigators to get these pedophiles off the internet." "Viewer Emails About This Special Report," MSNBC Online 16 May 2008 < http://www.msnbc.msn.comlid/11022685/>. 24 Stuart Hall would argue (and I'm inclined to agree) that all television is saturated with ideology. Whether it is explicitly fictional or insists on its factuality, "all [media] work by using language words, text, pictures still or moving; combined in different ways through the practices and techniques of selection, editing, montage, design, layout, format, linkage, narrative, openings, closures - to represent the world to us." (Hall, "Media Power and Class Power," Bending Reality: The State ofthe Media, Ed. James Curran, London: Pluto Press (1986): 8-9.) 25 Gary Cavendar, "In 'The Shadows of Shadows': Television Reality Crime Programming," in Entertaining Crime: Television Reality Programs, New York: Walter de Gruyter, Inc., 1998: 86-87. 25 essentially, as entertainment.26 Pamela Donovan asserts that these programs say more about contemporary politics than actual criminal trends.27 The tough on crime stance of the late 1980s and early 1990s is apparent in shows like America's Most Wanted. TCAP's predecessors also fail to contextualize crimes, applying a linear narrative (crime, capture, incarceration) rather than exploring possible forms of prevention and rehabilitation. Like TCAP, these shows characterize crime as "a problem of unprincipled or purely evil individuals, not a social problem or indicator of broader socioeconomic crises.,,28 It seems that not much has changed between the height of these programs' popularity and TCAP's ascendancy in the ratings and popular culture. Structurally, however, TCAP's depiction of offending does something quite different from what other programs have done in the past. Early crime television imposed an ideological narrative over an already-committed crime. Something actually happened "out there" in the real world that we must confront. TCAP, on the other hand, manufactures a crime in order to (re)produce a set narrative, which it then presents as reality. The "sting" format allows Perverted Justice and Dateline to set the terms of these investigations before the offenders even log on. The show presumes there are men looking for sex with minors online, creates a situation in which a willing "teen" asks to meet for sex, then insists that these men are predators. By calling them predators, Hansen gives us the impression that these men are deviants. Most of the men caught, however, insist-predictably, yes-that they have never 26 Ibid., 91 27 Pamela Donovan, "Armed With The Power of Television: Reality Crime Programming and the Reconstruction of Law and Order in the United States," in Entertaining Crime: Television Reality Programs, 121. 28 Margaret DeRosia, "The Court of Last Resort: Making Race, Crime, and Nation," in Reality Squared, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002: 242. 26 done this before and have no prior records. In fact, only one of the more than 200 men exposed on TCAP was ever listed on a sex offender registry.29 While this might suggest that Internet offending is more common than we realize, I would argue that the circumstances of the sting itself are too atypical to be representative of any reality. Specifically, though Perverted Justice volunteers do not make the first online contact, they are allowed to steer the conversation toward sex. Also, Hansen does not always tell us how long Perverted Justice interacts with their contacts before arranging a visit. Without access to all the chat logs, there is no way to determine how much cajoling and grooming is actually happening on the part of Perverted Justice itself. (Similarly, TCAP does not disclose how many men refuse to participate in these chats to begin with.) Under these circumstances it is easy to see how men who might otherwise be inclined to stay in the realm of anonymous conversations would be made willing to meet a curious and eager teen. That certainly does not excuse their behavior, but it does problematize their predetermined status as "predators." With this highly artificial setup the show is so removed from real crime and actual victims that it can only be understood as pure narrative. More unsettling than its own distortions is the way in which TCAP's producers and Hansen himself fail to see past their own rhetoric. Hansen is single- minded in his belief that what he is doing is right and necessary. When questioned in the American Journalism Review about the series' tactics and potential ramifications, Hansen responded, "I think.. .it's for the greater good.,,3o Insisting on the idea that we 29 "The Hansen Files," MSNBC Online 2008 In November of 2006, a Texas S.W.A.T. team surrounded the home of Louis "Bill" Conradt, Jr., a prosecutor in North Texas. Married with adult children, Conradt had previously engaged in an explicit chat with a teenage boy he thought to be a minor. 31 The teen was actually one of the Perverted Justice decoys working for TCAP. The two set up a meeting, but Conradt never showed up at the TCAP house. However, he had still committed a crime according to Texas Law, which states that any individual who "knowingly solicits a minor" online must be tried for a sex offense.32 Dateline cameras were rolling when law enforcement descended on Conradt's home. When he refused to come out, officers broke in through the front door, where they found him holding a gun. After reassuring everyone that he meant them no harm, Conradt fatally shot himself in the head.33 In an effort to distance itself from the incident, NBC released the following statement: NBC News' "Dateline" was in Texas reporting on its "To Catch A Predator" series in conjunction with online watchdog group Perverted Justice. In the midst of that effort, Rockwall County Assistant District Attorney Louis W. Conradt Jr. contacted a decoy from Perverted Justice who was posing as a 13-year-old boy. 31 Tim Eaton, "Prosecutor Kills Himself in Texas Sting Over Child Sex," New York Times New York, N.Y.: November 7, 2006. 32 The law goes on to state that "It is not a defense to prosecution" if "(1) the meeting did not occur; (2) the actor did not intend for the meeting to occur; (3) the actor was engaged in afantasy at the time of commission ofthe offense." (Texas Penal Code Sec. 33.021, emphasis mine) 33 Hansen, To Catch a Predator, 9 28 Local authorities launched an investigation into Conradt's online communications and went to his home with an arrest warrant. In the course of that investigation, Conradt committed suicide. There was no contact whatsoever between Conradt and "Dateline" at any point in the investigation.34 This segment never aired on any TeAP episodes, but in his book of the same name, Hansen relates the incident in his own words, concluding, "The man who oversaw the prosecution of hundreds of criminals chose to die rather than face the same process himself.,,35 That is all we hear from Hansen and the show, and Conradt's story is relegated to a single paragraph in the 239-page volume. The language, far from being evasive about the suicide, embraces it and makes it conform to the now-familiar rhetoric of good versus evil. Conradt is not in any way a victim in this situation or even a tragic figure. His "crime" has stripped him of his humanity in the eyes of the show, and Hansen's remark suggests the community is better off without him. From Conradt's position, however, the situation did not present him with many options. To step outside would label him a sex offender in the eyes of the public. Perhaps he chose to end his life rather than face that humiliation and stigma. Hansen accounts for Conradt's choice of behavior not as an act of desperation in the face of intractable social stigma but as an act of cowardice. Again we see the projection of all possible negative readings onto all sex offenders, whether they deserve the term or not. 36 More importantly, though Hansen avoids any critical 34 Associated Press, "Texas prosecutor kills himself after sex sting," MSNBC Online 6 November 2006 This stands, of course, in stark contrast to an actual jury trial, which presumes innocence and strictly regulates its procedures in order to preserve that presumption. IV. Conclusion We can be certain, however, that, according to the ideological narrative put forth by TCA?, men like Conradt are up to no good when they log on. Hansen constantly drives home the point that any individual engaged in a sexually explicit chat with a minor must suffer from an irrepressible and highly intentional desire to violate minors. And yet all this moralizing does not fully account for the role of fantasy in these men's actions. What if TCA? actually took Eugene Daily seriously when he said his online behavior was just "talking"? Like so many other men featured on the show, Daily knows what he is doing is wrong but cannot explain why he travels to meet the minor he believes he spoke to online. His desire is a mystery to both Hansen and himself, so the reinscription of this desire within a comforting and familiar ideological framework becomes imperative-in fact, the imperative of the entire show. 37 Hansen, To Catch a Predator, 9 30 In the following chapters I will situate TCAP within the context of a sex offender panic that has been growing since the 1980s. The trajectory of this panic has led policy makers and private citizens alike to adopt a vigilante mentality, the kind of attitude that has made TCAP such a success. In the final chapter I return to the series in order to further explore what is at stake when we embrace ideology and deny the irrationality of fantasy and desire. 31 2. Megan's Law! "Perhaps a sexual predator's life should be just a little more toxic than someone else [sic] in the American citizenry." Rep. Randy Cunningham (R-CA), speaking before Congress, May 7,1996 By no means did the television phenomenon that is To Catch A Predator arise out of a vacuum. The notion that criminals pose an unequivocally sinister threat to innocent offenders has been around since at least the 1980s, and in that narrative sexual offenders constitute an exceptional class of criminals in need of special forms of punishment and surveillance.2 In order to better understand the impact of To Catch A Predator and its discourse on sex offenders, we need to examine the legal and social precedents that contributed to its development. Megan's Law, for example, continues to shape and be shaped by dominant narratives of sexual violence. Arguably the most well-known piece of legislation concerning sex offenders, it is the most recent major federal law passed regarding sex offenders and law enforcement. The narratives surrounding Megan's Law laid the foundations for increasingly more stringent responses to sex offenders. President Bill Clinton signed the federal version of Megan's Law on May 17, 1996, as an amendment to the Jacob Wetterling Act. 3 The law, which passed virtually I A portion of the research included in this chapter was originally conducted for another paper, '''The Most Innocent Victims of All': How 'Megan's Law' Helped Shift the Discourse of Sexual Victimization," which was presented to Professor Sara Dubow of the Williams College History Department in December, 2008. It is with her permission that I continue that work here. 2 Historian Philip Jenkins argues that sex panic, and concerns about child molesters in particular, are cyclical. He identifies the 1980s as the starting point for the wave of panic we are currently experiencing - or perhaps just now leaving. (Jenkins, Moral Panic: Changing Concepts ofthe Child Molester In Modern America, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) 3 The Jacob Wetterling Act was passed in 1994 as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. It requires local law enforcement to maintain a registry of information regarding recently released sex offenders, including but not limited to the crimes of which they were convicted, their home and work addresses, and physical descriptions. The federal government would then have 32 uncontested in both houses of Congress, required all states to "release relevant information" concerning an offender whenever it is deemed "necessary to protect the public.,,4 States decide which institutions and individuals should be notified based on their own assessment of the offender's risk of recidivism.5 Traditionally groups qualifying for notification include immediate neighbors, schools, churches, and daycare centers. Since any state failing to establish a notification system risks losing part of their federal funding for law enforcement, there is a version of Megan's Law in all fifty states. Though Megan's Law passed unanimously in the House of Representatives and the Senate, the law was not without its critics. Legal scholars were quick to point out the unconstitutional aspects of community notification, citing its potential violation of ex post facto and double jeopardy. Additionally, because it is predicated on the belief that sex offenders were more likely than other convicts to reoffend, Megan's Law would presume sex offenders guilty before they ever had the chance to commit another crime.6 This is just a small sampling of the arguments against access to this information as part of a national registry. (Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Program, 42 uses § 14071) th nd 4 u.S. Senate 104 Congress 2 Session. Megan's Law. Congressional Record, Vol 142 No. 64. 9 May 1996; U.S. House of Representatives. 104th Congress 2nd Session. Megan's Law. Congressional Record, Vol. 142 No. 62. 7 May 1996; Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Program, 42 USCS § 14071 5 This provision varies widely from state to state. While many states use a three-tier system for determining an offender's threat level and the extent of notification required, others have no such structures. Louisiana, for example, does not differentiate between dangerous and non-dangerous offenders. There, offenders are expected to personally notify law enforcement, the superintendent of schools in their area, and all neighbors within a mile of their residences, regardless of their offense. Karen J. Terry and John S. Furlong, The Megan's Law Deskbook: A Guide to Sex Offender Registration and Community Notification (Kingston, NJ: Civic Research Institute, 2003), 11 6 For more on the specific legal criticisms of Megan's Law, see the following: Michele L. Earl Hubbard, "The Child Sex Offender Registration Laws: The Punishment, Liberty Deprivation, and Unintended Results Associated with the Scarlet Letter Laws of the 1990s," Northwestern University Law Review, 1996; Alan R. Kabat, "Scarlet Letter Sex Offender Databases and Community Notification: Sacrificing Personal Privacy for a Symbol's Sake," American Criminal Law Review, 35 33 community notification from a legal perspective. There is also an ongoing debate within the psychological community regarding how best to manage sex offenders (which I discuss in the following chapter). Given that there was substantial criticism circulating in various discourses, why have Megan's Law and other "sexual predator" laws continued to flourish? Mona Lynch argues that though sex offender laws are ostensibly based on the rational principles of risk-management, the language lawmakers use to discuss sex offenders is marked my excessive emotionality and moral panic.7 Their responses expressed a desire for retribution and punishment. While there is now prolific legal criticism on Megan's Law, fewer scholars have challenged the underlying narratives that propelled Megan's Law's passage. These narratives organized sex offending around literal and psychic boundaries between absolute evil against unquestionable purity, the sanctity of the suburb against an unspecified outside. As we'll see, this dichotomy was applied to all cases of sex offending but found its most unequivocal representation in extraordinary cases of stranger violence against children.8 To understand the full impact of Megan's Law we must understand the messages it has carried both to and from the general public not just its impact on offenders and the criminal justice system. (1998); Eric S. Janus, Failure to Protect: America's Sexual Predator Laws and The Rise ofThe Preventive State, Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2006 7 Mona Lynch, "Pedophiles and Cyber-Predators as Contaminating Forces: The Language of Disgust, Pollution, and Boundary Invasions in Federal Debates on Sex Offender Legislation," Law and Social Inquiry 27, no. 3 (Summer, 2002): 529-566 8 For a broader discussion of the sexual panic of which Megan's Law was a part, see Judith Levine's Harmful to Minors: The Perils ofProtecting Children from Sex (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 34 I. A Familiar Story Megan's Law in itself did not change how American's conceived of the sex offender, but it did reflect a trend in the way the media and political discourse constructed sex crime. From the late-1970s through the 1980s, feminist scholars had published extensively on sexual violence, arguing that rape and sexual assault were products of a culture that encouraged the subjugation of women and children. Furthermore, they asserted that offenders committing these crimes were more likely to be acquaintances or family members of victims-not psychopathic strangers.9 By the mid-1980s, however, their efforts were being undermined by forces within Ronald Reagan's administration and a barrage of sensationalist media coverage. In 1986 the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography (or Meese Report, after Attorney General Edwin Meese) asserted that individual men, influenced by pornography, were responsible for women's sexual victimization. IO By scapegoating pornography the Conservative-led commission simultaneously pathologized offenders and de- emphasized what feminists saw as the systemic nature of sexual violence. This focus on the marginal rather than the mainstream carried over into news accounts that spotlighted horrific acts of sexual violence in which the perpetrators were mentally unstable strangers. In the mid-80s the media seized on cases of satanic 9 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1975); Catherine MacKinnon, "Difference and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination," (1984); Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, (New York: Perigee Books, 1981); Andrea Dworkin, "Silence means dissent: Andrea Dworkin on women & pornography," Healthsharing 5, no. 3 (June 1984): 23-25. Women's Studies International, EBSCOhost (accessed November 13,2008); Diana Russell. Rape in Marriage, (New York: Macmillan, 1982) 10 The report's authors "reached the conclusion, unanimously and confidently, that the available evidence strongly supports the hypothesis that substantial exposure to sexually violent materials as described here bears a causal relationship to antisocial acts of sexual violence" (emphasis mine). U.S. Department of Justice, Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, Final Report, by Henry E. Hudson, et al. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1986), 1845 35 ritual abuse. Eventually dismissed as hysteria,II these stories were quickly replaced by accounts of sexually violent crimes committed against children. Two of the best- known victims of the late-80s and early 1990s were Jacob Wetterling and Polly Klaas. Jacob, an 11-year-old Minnesota boy, was abducted at gunpoint in 1989; 12- year-old Polly was taken from her home during a slumber party in 1993. 12 Though these were isolated incidents of stranger abduction, excessive media coverage of these and other stories gave the illusion that there was an epidemic of victimization at the hands of deranged psychopaths. An article in Time magazine, for example, profiled the child molester and murderer Westley Allan Dodd. Though Dodd was clearly extraordinarily pathological (his diary entries muse detachedly on murder and necrophilia), the article casts him as the typical sex offender. 13 The public outrage over these events are in stark contrast to the story of Katie Koestner, a student at the College of William and Mary whose rape made national news in 1991. One of the first widely publicized cases of acquaintance or "date" rape, Koestner's accusations were met with overwhelming backlash. 14 This backlash was in part a reaction to the perceived ambiguity of the situation. That is, Koestner openly II The satanism scare was largely dismissed after the acquittal of Peggy and Ray Buckey, mother and son daycare providers accused of raping and abusing the children in their care. In the immediate aftermath contemporary scholars began publishing analyses describing ritual abuse as a socially constructed panic with little factual basis. (Jeffrey S. Victor, Satanic panic: the creation ofa contemporary legend (Chicago: Open Court, c1993); Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, Satan's silence: ritual abuse and the making ofa modern American witch hunt, (New York: Basic Books, 1995); James T. Richardson, Joel Best, and David G. Bromley, ed., The Satanism scare, (New York: A. de Gruyter, c1991» 12 Dirk Johnson, "Small Town is Shaken by Child's Abduction," New York Times, October 30, 1989; Sharon Cohen, "Life Without Jacob: 'I'm Just a Mom Who Wants Her Kid,'" Associated Press, February 10, 1990; Scott Carlson, "Guidelines Proposed for Jacob Wetterling Act," Star Tribune (Minneapolis), April 8. 1995; Michelle Locke, "Kidnapping Shatters Community's Calm," Associated Press, October 6,1993; "Winona Ryder Offers $200,000 To Help Find Missing Girl," Associated Press, October 9, 1993; "Kidnapping Summons City To Action," NYT, October 15, 1993 13 Nancy Gibbs, "The Devil's Disciple," Time, January 11, 1993,40 14 Katie Koestner, speech delivered at Williams College, August 30, 2006. 36 acknowledged that she liked her attacker, even inviting him to her room after their date; he was not the malevolent stranger so often portrayed in the media. News accounts, however, struggled to articulate this ambivalence-that her rapist was not a psychopath and that she was not a helpless victim. IS The media were unwilling or unable to recognize dating violence as a legitimate form of sexual assault within the current paradigm of evil perpetrator/innocent victim. The Time article shied away from identifying Koestner's attack as rape. Instead, it framed the issue as a he-said, she-said debate highly open to interpretation. The article diluted Koestner and other victims' claims rather than try to present a more complicated notion of what sexual violence looks like. 16 Throughout the 1990s date rape victims were met with more skepticism than support. I? Indeed, it was easier to talk about the threat from strangers, because it clearly defined boundaries between victims and offenders. Nowhere was the situation more black and white than in attacks involving children. The abuse and murder of New Jersey girl Megan Kanka, for whom Megan's Law was named, was thus one of a string of cases related to "stranger danger." On July 29, 1994, seven-year-old Megan was lured into the home of neighbor Jesse Timmendequas, who sexually assaulted her before strangling her to death. The crime made national news and generated overwhelming public outcry. News accounts were quick to point out Timmendequas' status as a twice-convicted sex offender before any 15 According to one account, the photographer who shot the cover for Koestner's Time article decided to go with a different model because Koestner herself did not look enough like a victim. Koestner shared this anecdote at a talk at Assumption College in Massachusetts. It was reported by student Brenna McGinn in "A True Story of Date Rape: The Katie Koestner Story," Le Provocateur 4 April 2002. 16 Nancy Gibbs, "When is it rape? He was a classmate, a co-worker or a date. He says she wanted it. She calls it a crime. A battle of the sexes rages over drawing the line," Time, 137, no. 22 (June 3, 1991) 17 Date Rape Backlash: Media and the Denial ofRape, videocassette, produced by Sut Jhally (Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 1997). 37 details about the assault or his eventual confession were officially released. Within 18 three months New Jersey passed the nation's first sex offender notification law. It was not long before Megan's parents, Richard and Maureen Kanka, began to campaign for a national Megan's Law. Little actual campaigning was ever necessary, though. When Representative Dick Zimmer (R-NJ) and others introduced the bill there was virtually no substantial debate to speak of. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, eager to appear tough on crime and sensitive to families, hailed Megan's Law as an essential tool for combating sexual violence. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D- CA) and Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) justified community notification, lamenting "how commonplace victims like Megan Kanka have become in our society.,,19 If victims like Megan were "commonplace," then by extension sexual predators, offenders who are pathologically driven and highly prone to recidivism, were also the norm. Megan's Law reiterated and amplified the threat of stranger violence. The need for notification is based on the assumption that citizens do not already know who these offenders are, or at least do not know them well enough to know that they have been convicted of a sexual offense. Since these high-profile victims were children, public discussion of Megan's Law tended to conflate all sex offenders with child molesters or pedophiles. In the language of the law itself, community notification is 18 New Jersey residents had begun collecting signatures petitioning the governor to create a community notification law within a week of the attack. It would be another three years before Timmendequas was tried for the crime. (James Barron, "Vigil for Slain Girl, 7, Backs a Law on Offenders," NYT, August 3,1994; "Man Charged in 7-Year-Old Neighbor's Killing," Associated Press, July 31,1994) 19 Dianne Feinstein and Louise Slaughter, "Letter to the Editor: Repeat Sex Offenders Should Serve for Life," NYT, September 8, 1994 38 intended to apply only to sexually violent predators,20 but it explicitly states that any offender convicted of committing a crime against a minor, regardless of the severity, will also be subject to the notification laws.21 II. The Child Victim Megan's Law affirmed a fear of "stranger danger" and child molesters over other types of sexual offenders, and this anxiety and disgust was apparent in Congressional records. Lawmakers consistently characterized these offenders as bestial and psychotic. Rep. Charles Schumer (D-NY) described sex offenders as "relentless predators," beyond the possibility of rehabilitation or cure: Long prison terms do not deter them. All too often, special rehabilitation programs do not cure them. No matter what we do, the minute they get back on the street, many of them resume their hunt for victims, beginning a restless and unrelenting prowl for children, innocent children to molest, abuse, and in the worst cases, to kill.22 In this way lawmakers utterly dehumanized offenders. At one point they refer to Timmendequas as an "unspeakable danger and perversion"-not an individual but the total embodiment of an abstract anxiety. 23 Legal analyst Daniel Filler argues that this dehumanization was "almost inevitable" given that "predator" was written into the title of the legislation. Such language primed audiences to think of offenders in 20 Most psychologists emphasize that not all sex offenders are alike. Sexually violent offenders or "predators" are distinct from non-violent offenders who victimize acquaintances and family members. According to John Q. LaFond, a leading expert in sex offender laws, conflating these two groups inevitably leads to ineffective policies. (LaFond, Preventing Sexual Violence: How Society Should Cope with Sex Offenders, Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association (2005), 43-44) 21 Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Program, section (a)( 1) includes this list of relevant offenders: (1) each person who has been convicted of a criminal offense against a victims who is a minor; (2) each person who has been convicted of a sexually violent offense; and (3) each person who is a sexually violent predator." 22 Rep. Charles Schumer (D-NY) addressing Congress. Like most of his colleagues, Schumer failed to cite studies when discussing recidivism rates among sex offenders. (U.S. House of Representatives, Congressional Record, Megan's Law, 104th Cong., 2nd Sess., May 7,1996) th nd 23 Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ) in the House, Congressional Record, Megan's Law, 104 Cong., 2 Sess., May 7, 1996 39 animalistic, subhuman terms?4 Sex offenders were thus coded as uncontrollable deviants and pedophiles. They were the ultimate outsiders and others. On the other side, children were the perfect victims. Just as Megan's Law was part of the shift of attention away from acquaintance abuse and incest,25 so it helped place political focus on child victims. The same insistence on predation versus innocence also set a high standard for adult women like Koestner. This transition can be traced back in part, again, to the Meese Report, which devoted special emphasis to the impact of pornography on families and children.26 The Report sparked a series of 27 child pornography and child safety operations that carried over into the 90S. In March of 1996, just before Megan's Law's passage, the Justice Department released a study of incarcerated sex offenders that found two-thirds of those convicts had attacked children.28 Though intended to serve all citizens, Megan's Law was almost uni versally conceived as a law to protect children. Senator Bob Dole (R-KS) asserted that the bill would require states "to notify communities of the presence of convicted sex 24 Daniel M. Filler, "Making the Case for Megan's Law: A Study in Legislative Rhetoric," Indiana Law Journal 76, no. 2, Spring 2001, 10. 25 Some states do not notify the community of offenders who commit incest for fear of further traumatizing their victims. The collateral consequence, of course, is an increased silence surrounding incest and its prevalence. (Barry Meier, "'Sexual Predators' Finding Sentence May Last Past Jail," NYT, February 27, 1995) 26 An entire section was devoted to the "Special Horror of Child Pornography." (Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, Final Report, 405) 27 Operation Borderline was conducted in the late 1980s by the Customs Agency and attempted to catch citizens purchasing child pornography through the mail. In 1995 the Federal Bureau of Investigation began Operation Innocent Images, which continues to monitor child pornography on the Internet. The grassroots child Internet safety organization CyberAngels was also established in 1995. For more on Operation Innocent Images and CyberAngels, see their websites http://www.fbi.gov/page2/feb06/innocentimages1Oyears2.htm and http://www.cyberangels.org/about.php. (Bob Cohn, "A Fresh Assault on an Ugly Crime," Newsweek, March 14, 1988,64) 28 Michael 1. Sniffen, "Study: Children Were Targets of Most Sex Offenders," Associated Press, March 3, 1996 40 offenders who might pose a danger to children" (emphasis mine), a characterization echoed almost word for word by the New York Times when describing "[a bill regarding] sex offenders who might still pose a danger to children.,,29 In fact, the Senate debate makes no reference to citizens or the general public but distinguishes the threat to children and families four times. In the substantially longer House debate, children and families are referenced over 45 times, but allusions to the greater public are minimal and vague.30 The sense that sexual predator laws were intended for children first and foremost was compounded by their various titles. The Jacob Wetterling Act and Megan's Law explicitly invoked specific child victims whose cases were already known throughout the country.3l There was no way to escape the understanding that "Megan's Law is Megan's legacy....Her gift to all children.,,32 The Jacob Wetterling case was so powerful that it became the inspiration for sex offender registration despite the fact that it was never solved; law enforcement and the media speculated that the perpetrator was a sexually deviant offender but have since been unable to capture a suspect. Regardless, lawmakers established the registration system on the th nd 29 U.S. Senate, Congressional Record, Megan's Law. 104 Cong., 2 Sess., May 9,1996; Jerry Gray, "House Approves Bill to Require Notification on Sex Offenders," NIT, May 8, 1996 30 Women, one of the biggest groups affected by sexual violence, were mentioned just three times in the House debate. These references were all mentioned within a letter submitted in absentia by a female representative. House Congressional Record, Megan's Law, May 7, 1996 31 It is worth noting that the offenders who committed these crimes went largely un-discussed. Unlike serial killers, who become well-known in their own right, sex offenders are apparently so abject that they themselves are rarely named. One article that did explore Jesse Timmendequas' background sums up the situation succinctly, "Her name was Megan. Most people do not know his name." William Glaberson, "Stranger on the Block: At Center of 'Megan's Law' Case, a Man No One Could Reach," NYT, May 28,1996 32 Rep. Dick Zimmer (R-NJ), House Congressional Record, Megan's Law, May 7,1996 41 belief that a case like Jacob's could have been solved had they had that tool at their 33 dlsposa.· 1 The appeal of the Wetterling and Klaas, and eventually Kanka, cases was largely due to the perceived innocence of the children. Dwelling on "a beautiful little girl named Megan Kanka,,,34 lawmakers and the media polarized the debate into one of purity versus "unspeakable danger and perversion.,,35 Legislators often established this dichotomy through extensive use of personal narratives.36 Representatives in the House and Senate retold Megan's story to varying degrees at least five times. In addition, some shared stories from their own districts and states. The persistent use of these narratives rather than empirical analysis had at least two components that significantly shaped the debate leading up to Megan's Law in at least two ways. First, it emphasized emotional responses to the exclusion of analysis. That is, these anomalous cases became the bases for their policy decisions despite the availability of 3 more empirical evidence. ? The evocative details of a little girl playing in her driveway and a body dumped "in a pile of weeds" captured the stark horror of innocence lost to unrepentant evi1. 38 Second, it reduced the crime to a linear, cause- 33 Elana Varon, "House Panel Agrees to Anti-Crime Proposal," States News Service, July 31, 1991; "Reno signs guidelines against molesters," United Press International, April 7, 1995 34 Rep. Dick Zimmer (R-NJ), House Congressional Record, Megan's Law, May 7, 1996 35 Supra note 16 36 In her cross-historical study, Claire Wardle asserts that the use of personal narratives, with their attendant emotional claims on their audience, were common to news coverage in the 1990s. (Wardle, '''It Could Happen to You': The move towards 'personal' and 'societal' narratives in newspaper coverage of child murder, 1930-2000," Journalism Studies 7 no. 4, 2006) 37 For example, a 1991 study found that 96% of female rape victims under the age of 12 knew their attackers, and 20% of those children were assaulted by their fathers. These numbers represent only reported cases. (U.S. Department of Justice. "Press Release: Child Rape Victims, 1992." Bureau of Justice Statistics. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 22 June 1994) 38 Glaberson, "Stranger on the Block," NYT, May 28, 1996 42 and-effect outline, as opposed to a nuanced, multi-dimensional model. 39 In effect, the personal nature of these narratives precluded any debate on the actual provisions of the law. Only one congressman, Rep. Melvin Watt (D-NC), argued against the passage of Megan's Law. Rep. Watt: However, I thought it would be a dereliction of my duty as a Member of this body not to point out two very troubling aspects about this bill. First of all, our Constitution says to us that a criminal defendant is presumed innocent until he or she is proven guilty. The underlying assumption of this bill is that once you have committed one crime of this kind, you are presumed guilty for the rest of your life. That, Mr. Speaker, is contrary, whether we like it or not, it is contrary to the constitutional mandates that govern our Nation. We should not be presuming people guilty unless they have committed a crime. Once they have paid their debt to society, they should be allowed to go on with their lives. The second concern I have about this issue is that my colleagues in this body have over and over talked to us about how important States rights are. Yet, in this area, somehow or another we cannot seem to justify allowing States to make their own decisions about whether they want a Megan's law or do not want a Megan's law. The speaker who followed Watt, Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) responded with two different stories of missing children from his home state. Rep. Upton: Mr. Speaker, there is no greater crime, I do not believe, than a child that has been molested, perhaps killed, or not killed but sexually molested by somebody else. I had a woman in my district talk to me in tears about her 9-year-old that was raped. Thank goodness he was convicted. He is now serving in Jackson Prison. But he is going to get out. The experts say that he is going to do it again and again and again. However, when he gets out, I want a law like Megan's law, so whether he goes to St. Joe or Kalamazoo or South Bend, anyplace else, the victim, the family, the police, the community are going to be able to watch him forever. He is going to have a tattoo on his head that is going to be there forever. Mr. Speaker, last year I had two little boys, sons of migrant workers from Texas, in my district who were stolen allegedly by a sexual molester, because he has not been convicted yet I use the word allegedly, out from Iowa, picked them up in the twin cities in Michigan [sic]; and thank goodness, because it was a nationwide case and CNN and ABC News and "Good Morning 39 Slavoj Zizek, citing Lacan, characterizes narratives as the "occlusion of antagonism." That is, "narrative as such emerges in order to resolve some fundamental antagonism by rearranging its terms into a temporal succession." (The Plague afFantasies, 10-11) 43 America" had his picture, they found him in New Orleans. I do not want that to happen again to that family.4o Rep. Upton's anecdotes were intended to stand alone as evidence of the need for Megan's Law, effectively dismissing Watt's dissent. At no point does Upton address Watt's points about constitutionality, and to debate the factuality or relevance of these tragic stories would be an insult to the grief of these children's parents. Upton further identifies with these parents through his frustration with current legal constrictions, acknowledging that "because he [the sex offender] has not been convicted yet I use the word allegedly;" otherwise it is clear he believes wholeheartedly in the guilt of the accused. The emotionality of Upton's stories is privileged while constitutionality is ignored and due process is rendered suspect. III. A New Twist on the Old Story Megan's Law distinguishes itself from its predecessors in the way that it conceives of the public and their rights. Unlike sex offender registries, which were intended to benefit law enforcement, Megan's Law puts the power to monitor sex offenders in the hands of everyday citizens. Community notification is based on the belief that, armed with the right information, citizens are better equipped to protect themselves than law enforcement.41 Just prior to Megan's Law's passage, the media portrayed law enforcement as confined by policies that ignored the special danger posed by sex offenders, not to mention limited manpower and resources. The New 40 House Congressional Record, Megan's Law, May 7,1996 41 LaFond captures some of the absurdity of this premise. "Think about this. The government is telling people that it cannot protect them from a person the government considers very dangerous and that every person is now responsible for his or her own and loved ones' safety. That is truly remarkable. If the person really is that dangerous, then he should be subject to intensive control while living in the community. Simply casting an extremely dangerous sex offender adrift in society with a 'warning label' attached is irresponsible." LaFond, 124 44 York Times special report on Jesse Timmendequas emphasizes the fact that Timmendequas had been in and out ofjail and treatment programs several times. Police and psychologists acknowledged that he was a danger to the community but "without a notification rule, the state has no role after any sex offender. .. completes a sentence.,,42 Thus the bureaucracy, so far removed from crime on the ground, failed the people and those entrusted to protect them.43 The emphasis on the public's right and ability to protect itself was based on the Kankas' belief that they could have prevented Megan's death if they had been aware of Timmendequas's record. Community notification was explicitly passed as a preventive measure, asserting that certain knowledge or behaviors on the part of everyday citizens could keep them safe from sexually violent offenders. Critics noted, however, that this language of prevention might give people a false sense of security. For example, community notification only alerted the public to convicted offenders, and there was no evidence that notification could keep dangerous offenders from reoffending. Supporters countered by characterizing Megan's Law as a psychological tool aimed at offenders, that citizens themselves do not need to act for the law to have an effect. If offenders know that they are being watched, that they have no 44 anonymity, they will be discouraged from committing another crime. At the same 42 Glaberson, "Stranger on the Block," NYT, May 28, 1996 43 In a letter to Rep. Zimmer, Ernie Allen (president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children) hailed Megan's Law as a "commonsense approach" to child victimization. Regarding the question of Congressional procedure, Zimmer asserted, "Some of the amendments [to Megan's Law] were quite good...But we didn't want the legislation changed so that it would have to go back to the House again. It's important that we get this into law as soon as possible to save lives." (House Congressional Record, Megan's Law, May 7, 1996; Jerry Gray, "Senate Approves Measure Requiring States to Warn Communities About Sex Offenders," NIT, May 9, 1996) 44 Winick, "A Therapeutic Jurisprudence Analysis of Sex Offender Registration and Community Notification Laws," in Protecting Society from Sexually Dangerous Offenders, 217 45 time, the public should be given at least the opportunity to take precautions whenever a sex offender takes up residence in their neighborhoods. The "public" privileged by Megan's Law was primarily understood to be families and parents.45 Dismissing the question of civil liberties and offenders' rights, lawmakers justified community notification as part of every parent's "right to know that their children are in danger.,,46 This emphasis on parents reflected the political atmosphere of the time. Under fire from Republicans, Clinton and the Democratic party sought to appeal to social conservatives by supporting legislation that favored families and children.47 Sen. Dole, Clinton's opponent in the 1996 presidential campaign, noted derisively that if "you give President Clinton five minutes on television, he'll mention children 15 times." Such public criticism was part of the Republicans' own efforts to position themselves as the genuine family-values party.48 By distinguishing sex offenders from the general public, the discourse around Megan's Law created two discrete and oppositional categories. Sex offenders became marked in such a way that, so long as they were on the registry, they could not be integrated fully into the community. In Megan's neighborhood, for example, they were virtually erased from existence. After Timmendequas' arrest his two roommates, 45 For a discussion of the racial disparities built into Megan's Law, see Daniel M. Filler, "Silence and the Racial Dimension of Megan's Law," Iowa Law Review 89, May 2004. 46 Sen. Slade Gorton (R-WA), Senate Congressional Record, Megan's Law, May 9,1996 47 Clinton literally surrounded himself with grieving parents at the signing of Megan's Law. Present were the Kankas, Patty Wetterling (Jacob's mother), Marc Klaas (Polly's father), and John Walsh (whose son was abducted and murdered in 1981). (Weekly Compilation ofPresidential Documents, Vol. 32 (1996): May 17, Presidential remarks; Alison Mitchell, "Clinton Signs Bill on Warning of Sex Offenders," NYT, May 18, 1996) 48 '''Family Values' and Women: Is GOP a House Divided?," NYT, Aug 21, 1992; Elizabeth Kolbert, "Politicians Find Window Into the Heart of the Christian Right," NYT, November 1, 1995; Peter Applebome, "An Array of Opponents Do Battle Over 'Parental Rights' Legislation," NYT, May 1, 1996; Sandra Sobieraj, "Dole Pledges Crime War, No Parole for Violent Offenders," Associated Press, May 11, 1996; Alison Mitchell, "Banking on Family Issues, Clinton Seeks Parents' Votes," NYT, June 23, 1996; 46 also convicted sex offenders, moved out. The neighborhood then razed their house in a symbolic act of purification and created a public park in its place.49 Yet lawmakers downplayed the potential burden of ostracism. The belief that sex offenders were more likely to reoffend against innocent children outweighed what Rep. Charles Schumer dismissed as the "minimal inconvenience or embarrassment" of community notification.50 As we will see in the next chapter, however, Megan's Law has had significant material and ideological effects on how sex offenders and private citizens live their lives. The absolute opposition between deviant offenders and proper citizens has led to actual cases of vigilantism, which, though uncommon, are now being reinforced by sex offender residency restrictions. The persistent belief in sex offender recidivism and resistance to rehabilitation has undermined claims of psychologists seeking alternative ways to reduce sexual violence. 49 Brendan Schurr, "House Where 7-Year-Old Girl Was Slain to Be Razed for Park," Associated Press, December 21, 1994 50 House Congressional Record, Megan's Law, May 7,1996 47 3. Vigilantism, Residency Restrictions, and Offender Treatment "You better start fleeing the state because we aren't going to put up with you anymore." Florida Senator Nancy Argenziano1 Nearly 13 years after Congress made Megan's Law a federal mandate, there is still no conclusive evidence that community notification actually reduces recidivism among sex offenders. A 2005 meta-analysis of Megan's Law's impact and effectiveness revealed a dearth of significant research, and most of the available studies found notification had little or no influence on offenders' likelihood of reoffending.2 While some argue that community notification makes citizens at least feel safer and more empowered against sexual violence,3 the potentially positive effects of Megan's Law have yet to be measured. Several negative effects (both material and ideological), however, have been observed. Law enforcement officers report that Megan's Law has significantly increased their workloads,4 but federal law I Quoted in Abby Goodnough, "Florida Legislature Is Near an Agreement on Sex Offenders," NYT April 22, 2005 2 (Sarah Welchans, "Megan's Law: Evaluations of sexual offender registries," Criminal Justice Policy Review 16.3 (2005): 123-140) These findings continue to be confirmed in empirical studies that measure the impact of community notification on the number of sexual offenses reported. A 2008 study found community notification did not affect the number of reported rapes in 6 of 10 states. Of the remaining states, 3 experienced a decrease and 1 showed a significant increase. (Bob Edward Vasquez, Sean Maddan and Jeffery Walker, "The Influence of Sex offender Registration and Notification Laws in the United States: A Time-Series Analysis," Crime and Delinquency 54.2 (2008): 188) 3 Bruce 1. Winick, "A Therapeutic Jurisprudence Analysis of Sex Offender Registration and Community Notification Laws" in Protecting Society From Sexually Dangerous Offenders, ed. Winick and Lafond (Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2003): 216 4 In one study, more than half the officers surveyed felt Megan's Law increased their workload, but fewer than half believed it had any impact on recidivism. (Richard G. Zevitz and Mary Ann Farkas, Sex Offender Community Notification: Assessing the Impact in Wisconsin, National Institute of Justice, Research in Brief: December 2000: 5-6; Peter Finn, Sex Offender Community Notification, National Institute of Justice, Research in Action (1997» 48 does not require or provide for any increased funding.s Offenders themselves report difficulty finding employment and housing.6 And law enforcement and offenders are not the only ones materially affected by community notification. One recent study assessing the impact of Megan's Law on the housing market found that the property values of homes in the immediate vicinity of a sex offender tend to decrease.7 Perhaps even more troubling than the material effects of Megan's Law is its continued impact on the public's attitudes towards sexual violence and sex offenders. Since the passage of Megan's Law in 1996, studies have shown that community support for notification is often based on misinformation. A majority of respondents in one Florida survey felt that community notification was effective, even though they had little experience with it in their own neighborhoods.s 76.3% believed that the public should be notified of all sex offenders regardless of the severity of their crimes, and 73% would support policies ranging from treatment to electronic 5 Lawmakers at the time believed Megan's Law would "probably... cost some money" but did not appropriate any funds for its implementation. States failing to comply with the law, however, would lose some portion of their federal funding (Rep. Patricia Schroeder (CO), House Congressional Record, Megan's Law, May 7, 1996; §140n, Section G, subsec. (c)). Effective implementation of registries and community notification is especially challenging in rural and economically depressed regions where law enforcement and crisis centers lack adequate funds and manpower (Elizabeth Ward Saxl, interview by author, Williamstown, MA, January 16,2009). 6 A qualitative study in Kentucky found that upon release many offenders lose their jobs and can only find low level employment. One convicted sex offender described the situation this way: "They have a list of places that will hire ex-cons. But, if you're an ex-con and a sex offender, they won't. And they tell you straight up. Several places will hire ex-convicts, but all of them say no to sex offenders. All of them." (Richard Tewksbury and Matthew Lees, "Perceptions of Sex Offender Registration: Collateral Consequences and Community Experiences," Sociological Spectrum 26.3 (2006): 320; Kevin Brown and Jon Spencer and Jo Deakin, "The Reintegration of Sex Offenders: Barriers and Opportunities for Employment," The Howard Journal 46.1 (2007): 32-42) 7 Leigh Linden and Jonah E. Rockoff, "Estimates of the Impact of Crime Risk on Property Values from Megan's Laws," American Economic Review 98 (2008): 1103-1127 8 A separate survey in a different Florida county also found that a majority of community members . believed most forms of notification are effective at reducing sexual abuse. (Jill S. Levenson and Timothy Fortney and Juanita Baker, "Public Perceptions About Sex Offenders and Community Protection Policies," Analyses o/Social Issues and Public Policy 7.1 (2007): 137-161; Brannon, et al., "Attitudes About Community Notification: A Comparison of Sexual Offenders and the Non-offending Public," Sex Abuse 19 (2007): 369-379) 49 monitoring "even if there is no scientific evidence showing that they reduce sexual abuse.,,9 These responses indicate that, when it comes to sexual offending, public opinion and reactions are guided more by fear and a desire for retribution than facts and a commitment to reintegration. Often the public does not differentiate between types of offenders, associating all offenders with the worst sexual criminals. This tendency is reinforced in states that subject all offenders to some form of notification. Many states, it should be noted, will assign a risk level to an offender upon release- usually following a three-tier system in which the offender is considered at low, moderate, or high risk for reoffending-, but in nearly all cases, that designation remains permanent for as long as the offender is on the registry.lO Megan's Law itself does not require that a tier system be in place. Allison Redlich has found that, generally, the less a respondent knows about sexual abuse, the more likely he or she is to support Megan's Law. 11 Megan's Law operates on the premise that citizens, and parents in particular, should be provided with the information to keep them safe. As Redlich warns, if parents do not have adequate knowledge about sex offending, Megan's Law becomes useless. As we have seen in Chapter 2, however, this ignorance of (and at times complete disregard for) the facts was a defining aspect of Megan's Law's passage. The public and lawmakers' perceptions of the risk posed by sex offenders were influenced by a series of extreme, isolated cases. 12 Congress not only affirmed the 9 Levenson, et al., 150 10 Sex offenders register for either 10 years or life, depending on the severity of their offense. II Allison Redlich, "Community Notification: Perceptions of Its Effectiveness in Preventing Child Sexual Abuse." Journal ofChild Sexual Abuse 10.3 (2001): 112 12 W. Kip Viscusi's characterization of risk assessment in the U.S. is directly relevant to the phenomenon of sexual predator legislation: "In a democratic society, governmental action is 50 nation's fear of sexual predators but also institutionalized the idea that the government could not protect its citizens from this threat. By doing so the government "underscore[d] the erosion of trust in professional decision-making" and empowered private citizens to lash out against sex offenders. 13 Together these effects provide the foundation for one of the most extreme consequences of community notification and the focus of the current chapter: vigilantism. The strong emotional response to sex offenders has led to several cases of vigilantism. More troubling is that the logic of vigilantism has been written into law through the passage of sex offender residency restrictions. These laws represent the intensification of the moral panic reaffirmed by Megan's Law, and, given Megan's Law's inadequacies. risk exacerbating the problem of sex offender recidivism rather than preventing it. I. Vigilantism and The Law In 1990 Washington became the first state to enact a community notification law, and to this day it remains one of the harshest sexual predator bills in the country.14 Joseph Gallardo experienced some of the worst and most well-known vigilantism as a result of Washington's notification provisions. According to news reports, in 1986 Gallardo was accused of performing oral sex on his girlfriend's 10- year-old daughter, but when his girlfriend refused to press charges, the case was dropped. Four years later, police, responding to a separate incident at the home, came responsive to citizen preferences. If these preferences are flawed because of errors in risk perception or erroneous decisions, then the pressures on governmental action may serve to institutionalize individual irrationalities." (Viscusi, "How Do Judges Think About Risk?," American Law and Economics Review 1.1-2 (1999): 27) 13 Brown, et al., 33 14 In addition to community notification, the Community Protection Act of 1990 provided for the civil commitment of sexually violent predators. (Washington, Community Protection Act of 1990, Chapter 71.09) For more on civil commitment, see note 39. 51 upon suspicious occult materials and reopened the sexual abuse case against Gallardo. Though no clear connection was made between Gallardo's apparent occult interests and the incident with the girl, he was categorized as a high-risk sexual offender under Washington's new predator law. Upon Gallardo's release from prison in 1993, law enforcement began distributing fliers and signs around Gallardo's new residence that read: Viewed as an extremely dangerous untreated sex offender with a very high probability for re-offense... Has sadistic and deviant sexual fantasies which include torture, sexual assaults, human sacrifice, bondage and the murder of young children. As a result unknown individuals burned down Gallardo's home before he could move into the neighborhood. Fearing further violence, Gallardo moved to New Mexico to live with his brother but was driven out of town by protestors who had learned of his conviction in Washington. IS While Gallardo's story is particularly violent, similar incidents have occurred across the country. In New Jersey, a father and son team broke into a home and assaulted a man they believed to be a convicted sex offender mere months after the passage of Megan's Law in that state. They learned of the offender's presence through the newly instituted community notification policy.16 In 1998 an unknown assailant fired shots into a two-story home occupied by a convicted sex offendeL More recently there have been cases of actual murders involving convicted sex offenders. In 2005, a man reportedly "upset by a child 15 David Van Biema, "Burn Thy Neighbor," Time Magazine, July 26,1993; Jonathan Martin and Maureen O'Hagan, "Killings of 2 Bellingham sex offenders may have been by vigilante, police say," Seattle Times, August 30, 2005 16 The son in this case was also an officer at a corrections facility in Pennsylvania. (Jon Nordheimer, "'Vigilante' Attack in New Jersey Is Linked to Sex Offender Laws," NYT, January 11, 1995) 52 abuse case in Idaho" murdered two sex offenders living together in Washington. He found them using the state's public registry. A similar pair of murders targeting sex offenders occurred just one year later, in Maine. 17 Studies have also shown that sex offenders are quite often subject to less violent forms of vigilante action due to notification, such as harassment and social ostracism. ls Supporters of community notification argue that vigilantism in any form is relatively rare, and compared to the number of currently registered sex offenders (approximately 386,000)19, it is. However, residency restrictions, the latest trend in sexual violence legislation, have effectively written vigilantism into the law. Residency restrictions bar convicted sex offenders from living within a certain distance of schools, daycare centers, public parks, and sometimes churches and bus stops?O Their express purpose is to limit an offender's access to potential victims, thereby preventing sexual abuse. Akin to banishment, these rules are based on the assumption that sex offenders are most dangerous to those in their immediate environment. This does not take into account the fact that these men are mobile. There is nothing in these laws that can stop an offender from making contact with victims outside his residential zone. Research has shown that offenders who establish direct contact with their victims usually do so more than a mile away from their own 17 "Type of Gun Identified in Vigilante Incident," NIT, June 20, 1998; Martin and O'Haga, supra note 13; Carolyn Marshall, "Man Charged in Killings of Sex Offenders," NYT, September 7,2005; Amy S. Clark, "Sex Offender Murder Suspect Kills Self," Associated Press, April 17,2006 18 Zevitz and Farkas, 2000; Tewksbury and Lees, 2006; Brannon, et al., 2007 19 Bureau of Justice Statistics, Summary ofState Sex Offender Registries, 2001, by Devon B. Adams, U.S. Dept. of Justice, March 2002 20 Some of the most extensive versions are in Iowa, Georgia, and Florida. (Boyd, Justin H., "How to Stop a Predator: The Rush to Enact Mandatory Sex Offender Residency Restrictions and Why States Should abstain," Oregon Law Review 86 (2007)) 53 homes. 21 What's more, released sex offenders are not more likely to seek residences near high concentrations of children?2 Regardless, residency restrictions remain popular with constituents and the lawmakers who pass them because on the surface they appear to solve the problem of sex offending. This popular support makes it that much more difficult for sex offender specialists and victim advocates to educate the 23 public and block the passage of residency restrictions. Residency restrictions have not gone unchallenged in the courts, though. Sex offenders have challenged residency restrictions as violations of their ex post facto and due process rights, as well as constituting excessive punishment.24 These were among the claims brought by Iowa sex offenders in the class-action lawsuit Doe v. Miller in 2005.25 In this case offenders argued that the residency restriction passed in 2002 was so stringent it ruled out most of the housing options in the state and was 21 These Studies go on to note that residency restrictions ignore known patterns of offending, namely that the number of offenses in a community is not linked to the number of offenders living there. Most offenders also know their victims. This particular study was conducted in Minnesota, where no repeat offender had made contact with a victim "at or near a school, park, or daycare center close to his home" in 16 years. Much like the citizens in Florida who supported legislation without any scientific basis, Minnesota lawmakers passed residency restrictions that have no demonstrable function for their state. (Grant Duwe and William Donnay and Richard Tewksbury, "Does Residential Proximity Matter? A Geographic Analysis of Sex Offense Recidivism," Criminal Justice and Behavior 35.4 (2008): 500) 22 Richard Tewksbury and Elizabeth Mustaine, "Where Registered Sex Offenders Live: Community Characteristics and Proximity to Possible Victims." Victims and Offenders 3 (2008): 95 23 Though it may seem counterintuitive, victim advocates do not generally support extreme sexual offender laws like residency restrictions. They believe sex offender policy should reflect the needs of both victims and offenders, and often that means ensuring stable housing and employment for offenders. It also means targeting much more prevalent forms of sexual violence, such as incest and acquaintance rape, over relatively rare cases of stranger abuse. 24 The restrictions often prevent released sex offenders from living or staying overnight with family members who live in restricted zones. Sex offenders have argued that this violates their right to privacy regarding decisions within the family, but the vast majority of courts dismiss these claims. (Steven J. Wernick, "In Accordance With a Public Outcry: Zoning Out Sex Offenders Through Residence Restrictions in Florida," Florida Law Review 58 (2006)) th 25 Doe v. Miller, 298 F. Supp. 2d (8 Cir. 2005) 54 therefore punitive?6 The district court ruled in favor of the offenders, but the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision. The Court of Appeals contended that there was not strong enough evidence to suggest that the restrictions do not prevent recidivism. What's more, "they supported the authority of the state legislature to create such a measure to protect its citizens 'where precise statistical data are unavailable' in light of the fact that the restriction advances the state's interest in protecting children.,,27 Since then Doe v. Miller has been the precedent for many other judges hearing sex offender residency cases?8 While there is virtually no evidence that residency restrictions prevent recidivism among convicted sex offenders,29 critics point out that these laws carry collateral consequences that actually impede law enforcement and the successful reintegration of sex offenders. Logistically, residency restrictions often eliminate a majority of housing options for sex offenders. One study in Florida found that only a quarter of all housing in Orange County was available after implementation of its residency restriction. That number dropped to 4% when bus stops were added to the list of prohibited zones.30 In Miami the restrictions are so extensive that a collection of offenders were forced to live under a bridge (the empty lot they originally occupied being too close to a daycare center). One man in California had been ejected from a 26 The Iowa law prohibits convicted sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of any childcare facility or school. (Iowa Code § 692A.2A) 27 Paul Noroian and Fabian M. Saleh, "Residency Restrictions for Convicted Sex Offenders," The Journal ofthe American Academy ofPsychiatry and the Law 34.3 (2006): 423. 28 In Illinois, judges also upheld a residency restriction law while acknowledging that there was no evidence of its effectiveness. (Boyd, "How to Stop a Predator,": 4) 29 What's more, just a handful of people are responsible for most of the (little) research currently available on both Megan's Law and residency restrictions. 30 Paul A. Zandbergen and Timothy C. Hart. "Reducing Housing Options for Convicted Sex Offenders: Investigating the Impact of Residency Restriction Laws Using GIS." Justice Research and Policy 8.2 (2006): 19-20 55 series of hotels so many times due to his offender status that the state eventually gave him a tent to live outdoors. Yet he and the Miami offenders are among the lucky ones. A Georgia man faced life in prison after failing to register because he was homeless as a result of the residency restrictions. Of all the homeless shelters in the state, only 3 one would accept male sex offenders, and that was full at the time. ! A lack of stable housing makes it nearly impossible for law enforcement to maintain accurate registries or properly supervise registrants. The push to zone sex offenders out of certain neighborhoods effectively drives them underground. Some states and counties do take responsibility for the effects of residency restriction, but their responses often look more like extended sentences than relief. In New Yark, officials have provided housing for affected offenders, but these offenders must live together in trailers that are moved to a new community every couple of weeks. According to a Department of Social Services official, this solution keeps offenders from being a "burden to any single neighborhood.,,32 Yet the cost of keeping displaced offenders in temporary residences places further strain on law enforcement agencies already burdened by large sex offender caseloads?3 These policies represent a zeal to punish and contain offenders rather than reintegrate them. Such situations also raise the question of the impact of residency requirements on offenders themselves. Experts warn that the restrictions put significant emotional stress on offenders, which actually increases their likelihood of reoffending. And the 31 A year after Georgia's residency restriction passed, at least 15 offenders had been arrested for homelessness. ("Sex Offenders Living Under Miami Bridge," NYT April 8, 2007; Catherine Saillant, "Sex offender is free-and reduced to a riverbed," LA Times, September 8, 2007; Shaila Dewan, "Homelessness Could Mean Life in Prison for Offender," NIT, August 3, 2007) 32 Corey Kilgannon, "Suffolk County to Keep Sex Offenders on the Move," NYT, February 17,2007 33 Supra note 4; Monica Davey, "Iowa's Residency Rules Drive Sex Offenders Underground," NYT, March 15,2006; Laura Masnerus, "Zoning Laws That Bar Pedophiles Raise Concerns for Law Enforcers," NIT, November 27,2006 56 situation is getting worse. A domino effect has been observed in which the passage of residency restrictions in one area prompts neighboring municipalities or states to adopt even harsher laws in an effort to deter exiled offenders from relocating to their communities.34 This reactionary legislation forces offenders to remain on the move. Pushing them into more rural, isolated areas creates undue economic hardship, disrupts any potential or established social connections, and discourages offenders from continuing or pursuing treatment,35 Convicted sex offenders are already more likely to live in socially and economically depressed areas without residency restrictions.36 Buffer zones, especially those that bar offenders from places of worship, public parks, and bust stops, would seem to exacerbate that problem. Such places are directly related to one's quality of life, and for offenders who are already regarded as untouchable by the community at large, the absence of these resources is that much more demoralizing. These restrictions are based on the belief that a sex offender's overall quality of life is of less concern than someone in the non-offending 3 public ? and that such offenders will always pose a threat to their communities. If through the law we tell offenders that they are not legitimate citizens and that they can never change, why would any be motivated to pursue treatment? 34 Robert F. Worth, "Questions About Legality and Effectiveness," NYT, October 3, 2005; Davey, "Iowa's Residency Rules...," NYT, March 15,2006 35 Research indicates that "attachment to a conventional other such as a spouse, stable employment, [and the] transformation of personal identity" reduce recidivism across classes of offenders. (Laub, John H. and Robert J. Sampson, "Understanding Desistance from Crime," Crime and lustice: A Review ofResearch 28 (2001): 13; Zandbergen and Hart, 2006; Tewksbury and Mustaine, 2008) 36 Tewksbury and Mustaine, "Where to Find Sex Offenders: An Examination of Residential Locations and Neighborhood Conditions." Criminal 1ustice Studies 19.1 (2006): 61-75; "Where Registered Sex Offenders Live: Community Characteristics and Proximity to Possible Victims." Victims and Offenders 3 (2008): 86-98 37 The judges in Doe v. Miller did not find Iowa's residency restrictions to be punitive but rather regulatory and that the state had an obligation "to protect the health and safety of the citizens of Iowa." (298 F. Supp. 2d (8 th Cir. 2005)) 57 II. Vigilantism and Treatment William Edwards and Christopher Hensley have already observed that "few aspects of the court system or criminal justice statutes pertaining to sex offenders are fundamentally aligned with the offender's potential for transformation and change.,,38 We can make the very same assertion about the medical community and the forms of treatment currently available to sex offenders. On the surface it seems that we as a nation have become more invested in sex offender rehabilitation, evidenced by the number of states that have established civil commitment laws since the 1990s. These laws require offenders to enter full-time, in-patient treatment facilities upon release. However, critics point out that they are first and foremost designed to be an alternative form of imprisonment, a way of keeping offenders out of the community for as long as possible?9 The outpatient treatment offenders do receive is usually a provision of their parole, which means medical professionals must answer to law enforcement (if they are consulted at all).40 38 William Edwards and Christopher Hensley. "Restructuring Sex Offender Sentencing: A Therapeutic Jurisprudence Approach to the Criminal Justice Process." International Journal ofOffender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 45.6 (2001): 647 39 Offenders are eligible for release from these facilities upon successful completion of their treatment programs. However, many offenders are already deemed untreatable, leaving them to serve indefinite sentences. Though civil commitment is a dramatic containment measure, it does not constitute vigilantism according to my current project. The law does not give offenders and the public a chance to interact, and that is why I do not devote more time to it here. (W. Lawrence Fitch and Debra A. Hammen, "The New Generation of Sex Offender Commitment Laws: Which State Have Them and How Do They Work?" in Protecting Society From Sexually Dangerous Offenders, ed. Bruce 1. Winick and John Q. LaFond (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2003); Janus, Failure to Protect) 40 The medical community is often subordinated to the criminal justice system when it comes to sexual offending. For example, Section 2(B) of the Jacob Wetterling Act allows the Attorney General of any state to make the final evaluation regarding an offender's risk level. Also, many states use the Federal Registration Act Risk Assessment when evaluating the dangerousness of offenders, despite the fact that it is generally not accepted as a way to assess risk in the scientific community (Susan 1. Sachsenmaier and Stephen 1. Lally, "Toward a Scientific..." in Sex and Violence, ed. Farrington, Hollin, and McMurran, (New York: Routledge, 2001): 29). The federally-funded Special Needs 58 This emphasis on control informs nearly all sex offender treatment programs. The most common form of treatment currently available to sex offenders in the u.s. is the "risk-need" or "risk management" model, whose primary aim is to contain rather than rehabilitate sex offenders. In risk management, professionals41 assess the sex offender's level of risk, then prescribe treatment at higher or lower intensity to match the risk posed by the individual. The primary aim of this model is to identify what makes the patient offend and develop strategies for reducing or controlling those tendencies.42 Victim advocates recognize the need for a more comprehensive system for sex offender reintegration than treatment alone. They tend to support a version of risk management called community containment. In this model of reintegration, professionals assess each individual sex offender's level of risk based on his psychological state (not the category of crime committed) before his release from prison. A team of specialists, including law enforcement, victim advocates, and treatment providers, then work together to ensure the offender is adjusting successfully. Registration, community notification, and residency restrictions may Offender Bulletin issued in 1998 encourages vigilance amongst law enforcement officials. It warns that "therapeutic techniques utilizing trust, support, and nondirective approaches to evaluation and treatment may allow the sexual offender to exercise his well-honed skills of manipulation and deception against the practitioner. Sex offenders are far better at manipulation than many therapists can comprehend." (Dennise Orlando and Nathan Dotson, Special Needs Offenders Bulletin, Federal Judicial Center, no. 3 (1998): 9) 41 Professionals does not always mean therapists, see Note 40. 42 Tony Ward and Mark Brown, "The Risk-Need Model of Offender Rehabilitation" in Sexual Deviance, ed. Ward, Laws, and Hudson (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc, 2003); Tony Ward and Claire Stewart, "The Treatment of Sex Offenders: Risk Management and Good Lives," Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 34.4 (2003): 353-360 59 form part of the offender's program, but they are tailored to the offender's individual needs and subject to change based on ongoing evaluations.43 Since risk management and community containment share an explicit interest in minimizing sex offenders' danger to the community, they continue to focus on the negative aspects of the offender's identity. That is, risk management circumscribes offenders within a rhetoric of containment that actually approaches that of residency restrictions. Not only that, it assumes the patient will always be at risk for reoffending and that sexual offenders in particular can never fully overcome their urges. 44 The patient is thus encouraged to conceptualize his offending as part of his essential identity, but it is an identity that must be suppressed. However, more recent studies have shown that while a few exceptional offenders may truly be compulsive, the notion that all or most sex offenders are highly prone to recidivism is largely unfounded. At the very least, their rates of reoffense vary greatly depending on factors like general criminality and socioeconomic status.45 Regardless of whether or 43 Only a few states (Oregon, Minnesota, and Texas) have implemented non-mandatory residency restrictions tailored to the individual offender. (Boyd, "How to Stop a Predator. .. ," 8) The perceived leniency of community containment has also driven lawmakers to make it more difficult for offenders to qualify for this form of treatment. (Janus, Failure to Protect, 61) 44 This emphasis on compulsion is strangely at odds with the equally common formulation of offenders as highly-intentional manipulators. It is the combination of these ideas, however, that fuels the panic surrounding sex offenders. We pass extreme measures because we believe we are dealing with a type of criminal that cannot control his own (deviant) desires and is capable of the most skillful deception. Most troubling is that this construction is not the work of tabloid headlines but literature written by professionals in both criminology and psychology. See Eric Leber, Understanding Child Molesters: Taking Charge (California: Sage Publications, cl997); Michelle L. Meloy, Sex Offenses and The Men Who Commit Them: An Assessment ofSex Offenders on Probation (Hanover: University Press of New England [for] Northeastern University Press, Boston, c2006); Anna C. Salter, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders: Who They Are, How They Operate, and How We Can Protect Ourselves and Our Children (New York: Basic Books, c2003). 45 Some aspects of risk management appear to be informed by now-dubious research on sex offenders' likelihood of reoffending. More recent research has found that sex offenders are actually less likely to reoffend than other kinds of criminals and that their subsequent offenses are more likely to be nonsexual. Our criminal justice system, however, typically assigns sex offenders to registration and community notification based on the nature of the crime committed, not their actual risk of recidivism, which takes into account overall criminality. For example, pedophiles are generally thought to be 60 not sex offenders are more likely to reoffend, these patients will inevitably be better served by therapy that treats them like human beings. An offender's level of compulsivity does not automatically justify the moral claim that he is evil or deliberately villainous. Community containment acknowledges the possibility of rehabilitation and is more humane toward individual offenders, but it, too, is premised on reducing what is believed to be the irrepressible urges of most sex offenders. It is essentially a more sophisticated version of parole. That does not mean that risk management and community containment are not useful approaches, but we should be skeptical of offenders' claims that they cannot make any improvement in their tendency to reoffend. Some sex offenders might need to be subjected to more rigorous surveillance, but a problem arises when treatment specialists employ risk management to the exclusion of more affirming forms of therapy. Just as residency restrictions limit sex offenders in their choice of housing and recreation, so risk assessment approaches limit a patient's self-concept to his offender status. A promising new approach to sex offender treatment is the Good Lives Model (GLM). The GLM is based on an explicit commitment to improving the lives of its patients. Its express goal is to "equip individuals with the necessary internal and external conditions (capabilities) to secure primary human goods in socially acceptable and personally meaningful ways.,,46 The GLM assumes that all humans desire a certain set of "primary goods," including but not limited to knowledge, inner among the most compulsive offenders, but a 2006 study found that less than two percent of subjects committed another sex crime against a child within a five year period. (Patrick A. Langan and David J. Levin, Recidivism ofPrisoners Released in 1994 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2002); Lisa L. Sample and Timothy Bray, "Are Sex Offenders Different?: An Examination of Rearrest Patterns," Criminal Justice Policy Review 17.1 (2006): 94) 46 Ward and Stewart, "The Treatment of Sex Offenders," 356 61 peace, spirituality, excellence, happiness and creativity.47 Criminal behavior often occurs when the individual uses inappropriate means to attain these goods. In the case of child sexual abusers, an offender may be seeking the primary goods of mastery and intimacy through a sexual relationship with a child. Where risk management might call for aversion therapy in this situation, the GLM acknowledges the basic human need motivating the sexual offender and guides the patient toward more socially acceptable behaviors that promise a similar effect. The GLM provides a positive counterpart to risk management by encouraging the patient to pursue activities and identifications beyond his offender status. As the offender sets more affirming goals for himself, he will find that offending conflicts with the pursuit of those goals.48 What's more, since the course of treatment is dictated by the patient's (pro-social) desires, he will find himself more personally engaged and therefore more likely to complete the treatment program.49 Skeptics argue that there is no proof any form of treatment actually reduces recidivism. They cite studies in which treated and non-treated offenders show little or no difference in their rates of reoffending.5o It is true that the value of treatment has not been conclusively proven using any objective measures, but many sex offender 47 Ibid. 48 For example, in one case study promoting the GLM, an offender on the verge of returning to his gang was able to dismiss this urge when he recognized how it would conflict with his attendance at the local university. (Paul R. Whitehead and Tony Ward and Rachael M. Collie, "Time for Change: Applying The Good Lives Model of Rehabilitation to a High-Risk Violent Offender," International Journal ofOffender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 51.5 (2007): 593) 49 Ibid., 581 50 Some such studies include R. Karl Hanson et aI., "Evaluating Community Sex Offender Treatment Programs: A 12-Year Follow-Up of 724 Offenders," Canadian Journal ofBehavioural Science 36.2 (2004); James A. Seager et aI., "Refusers, Dropouts, and Completers: Measuring Sex Offender Treatment Efficacy," International Journal ofOffender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 48.5 (2004); Kristen Zgoba and Jill Levenson, "Variations in the Recidivism of Treated and Nontreated Sexual Offenders in New Jersey: An Examination ofThree Time Frames," Victims and Offenders 3 (2008); 62 specialists maintain that existing data is optimistic enough to warrant making treatment more readily available to sex offenders.51 We should keep in mind, too, that current research tends to measure success of treatment based on whether or not the patient reoffends within a certain time period. The statistical imperatives of this yes- or-no question often fail to account for any other types of change. For example, was the patient's subsequent crime less violent than his pre-treatment conviction? How has the patient's quality of life improved since beginning treatment? Tony Ward, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Wellington in Australia, has written extensively on the application of the GLM to sex offenders, but the method has yet to catch on with American practitioners. I argue that this hesitation is at least symptomatic, if not the result of the very cultural biases against sex offenders discussed here and in the previous chapters. In America, popular opinion, public policy, and treatment programs all reduce sex offenders to pathological monsters whose movement amongst the proper citizenry must be severely curtailed or completely prohibited. These attitudes create barriers for the reintegration of sex offenders, which in turn lead to policies that may encourage recidivism.52 Even if sex offenders are more compulsive, there is no reason not to treat them with a measure of dignity. As the GLM insists, the key to reducing sex offender recidivism is their humanization-that "offenders are best viewed as psychological agents seeking meaning, rather than mechanisms that need 51 LaFond, Preventing Sexual Violence, 82 52 According to Tony Ward and Shadd Maruna, our preoccupation with sex offender pathology "creates the impression that offenders are intrinsically bearers of risk and that specific risk factors inhere or are embedded in them, a bit like pins in a pincushion. Thus, there can be a failure to appreciate how social and cultural factors on occasion can actively generate high situations of risk" (emphasis mine). (Ward and Maruna, Rehabilitation (New York: Routledge, 2007): 81) 63 'restructuring. ",53 The problems and solutions regarding sex offender treatment do not reside in the use of one model over another, but rather in the assumptions underlying the treatment applied. The GLM cannot stand alone as the answer to sex offender recidivism. That is why Tony Ward and other GLM supporters advocate the application of the GLM in addition to risk management models. This attitude toward treatment is useful for legal and cultural confrontations with sex offenders, as well. The combination of risk management and the GLM is an example of how an integrated approach, in this case the two-pronged strategy of punishment and healing, might be more effective at reducing recidivism. More broadly, by shifting the focus away from hyperbolic rhetoric toward a considered analysis of the research, we can move away from extreme, vigilante measures that insist on the containment and expulsion of all sex offenders. Whether or not sex offenders are subject to high rates of actual vigilantism is not the issue; the current state of our laws and our culture shows that we have embraced the vigilante mindset Residency restrictions are the spatial enactment of the public's inability and unwillingness to confront the often complex nature of sexual offending. And though there is almost no evidence supporting residency restrictions do it, they remain politically efficacious because they satisfy the public's need to expel the unseemly from their midst. Pushing sex offenders to the margins of society (literally) provides only the illusion of coherence and stability, while possibly fostering the very conditions that help make sex offending happen. 53 Whitehead et aI., 582 64 In the following chapter I return to TeAP for a deeper analysis of how the show's narrative, like the narratives behind Megan's Law and residency restrictions, must confront its own limitations. The categorization of sex offenses under the binaries of good and evil will inevitably fail in the face of ambiguities and contradictions that cannot be reconciled with this closed narrative. 65 4. The Irreducible Ambiguity ofDesire "I'm not looking to be with her. We were just talking."! "Desire is not subject to cleaning up, to being purged of its nasty, messy, perilous dimensions, full of contradictions and the complexities of simultaneous longing and denial." Katharine M. Franke2 The rigid narrative of sexual predation outlined in Chapters 2 and 3 is reflected in Dateline's To Catch a Predator. In its structure and ideology, TCAP is informed by the same vigilante mentality that gave rise to Megan's Law and residency restrictions. Echoing various legislative debates, the series pits two opposed characters against each other in the drama surrounding sex offending: the moral citizen and the evil offender. In order to protect the former, we must identify and expel the latter. This account, however, proves to be too complete, too coherent. There is something underneath this facile narrative that disrupts the whole project. Hansen presents his account of sexual offending as natural and intuitive, but there are clearly gaps within this representation. Some element within the organization of the stings themselves has yet to be resolved. I want to argue that this slippage emerges out of the audience's encounter with desire and sexual fantasy as it is embodied in the figure of the female decoy.3 In this chapter I will first identify where we can observe this break down, exploring Hansen's treatment of the potential predators' desire. 1 Wagner, To Catch a Predator, aired 27 February 2007 by NBC, transcript 2 Katherine M. Franke, "Theorizing Yes: An Essay on Feminism, Law, and Desire," Columbia Law Review 101.1 (2007): 207 3 I am choosing to focus on the girl and not the boy for two reasons. First, any discussion of intergenerational sex between men and boys would need to address the historical and political associations between pedophilia and homosexuality. Such an analysis is beyond the scope of this project. Second, the young female's sexuality is clearly marked as aberrant and therefore more subversive. Hansen often describes the female decoy as "precocious," while the young male's interest in sex is unqualified. 66 From there I compare these confrontations with how we might read the girl in this situation. The first indication of a failure in rCAP's ideology is the show's tendency to repetition. Though one sting operation would have been enough to make their point, Dateline has financed over 16 investigations and aired almost as many episodes. This repetition continues within the episodes themselves as anywhere from six to ten men per hour are confronted and dispensed with uniformly. At the very center of these repetitions are Hansen's interviews with the offenders, drawing our attention to them and emphasizing their importance. The uniformity with which he confronts each offender in each new situation reveals the brittleness of rCAP's ideology. Rather than building an argument from the evidence gathered, Hansen imposes his narrative from the top down and ignores those elements that elude his grasp. If the interviews are central to the series, then the encounters with Perverted Justice in the beginning and law enforcement at the end provide a legitimizing frame for what we are seeing.4 Yet they, too, are flimsy justifications at best. There is a sense that Perverted Justice is only there to facilitate the encounters,S and the police arrests are so brief that they appear more as an afterthought than an essential response to the crime. Tacking police on at the end is intended to link the narrative to an authority outside Dateline, but in fact, the stings' devising and implementation is largely determined by the needs of the show itself. Hence even within the legitimizing 4 At the same time that PJ and law enforcement frame and legitimize Hansen, they are still relegated to the periphery. There is a sense that Perverted Justice is there only to facilitate the encounter, while the arrests are so brief that they appear more as an afterthought than the essential response to a crime. S Hansen himself acknowledges that TCAP employs Perverted Justice less for their expertise than as a way to avoid lawsuits. (Hansen, To Catch a Predator, 5) 67 frame, the importance and authority that is given to the interviews only highlights their failure to truly understand what motivates a man to pursue a minor online. As we saw in Chapter 1, Hansen's interviews with the potential sex offenders often deny the most complicated aspects of the men's testimony in order to assert a narrative of pathology and predation. Many of these men are eager to explain their behavior, but most cannot articulate why they engage minors online. Hansen steps in to make sense of this confusion. Hansen: And what did you do exactly? Khan: I came to meet someone that was underage. Hansen: That was underage. And why did you do that? Khan: I don't know. Hansen: It sure seemed like you knew what you wanted during this chat,6 Here Hansen posits a notion of knowledge that is simultaneously linear and hierarchical. He presents the chat log as the sole and unquestioned authority on the offender's intent, privileging the content of the chat log over the offender's spoken testimony. The offender's testimony cannot stand alongside or in addition to his online activity-that is, they cannot be equally true. In this formulation we may only believe one or the other, and any contradiction within the interview is treated by Hansen as a lie. The process of locating truth and knowledge in the chat logs effectively punishes these men not for soliciting a minor online but for the nature of their 6 To Catch a Predator, aired 6 March 2007 by NBC, transcript 68 fantasies. 7 Hansen, who has access to the chatlogs, wields them as truth and therefore endows himself with all the power in exchange. We see this played out in the following example, in which Hansen attempts to humiliate Yazan Asfour for his apparent bondage preferences. Hansen: What are you doing here? Actually, it's pretty clear to us what he's doing here and who he is. It's all in his online chat. Twenty-six-year-old Yazan Asfour uses the screenname "slave2mistresses" - that gives you an idea ofwhat's on his mind. ...Like the previous man, Asfour chatted with a decoy who told him she was 13. But unlike Khan, Asfour mostly wanted the girl to do things to him. We can't get too detailed, but we can say he prefers to be treated like a dog and also a toilet. We'll have to leave it at that. [From here the audience is shown images of Asfour in a submissive position wearing a dog collar.] Hansen: What were you planning on doing? [pause] Did you bring your collar with you? No? What is all this slave talk? And you're sayin' all this to a girl who said she was 13?8 The derision in Hansen's line of questioning reinforces the sense that Asfour's masochism is just as deviant as, if not more so then, his desire for the decoy.9 Furthermore, at the level of narration, Hansen thoroughly dominates Asfour in this exchange. His voiceover interrupts the questioning and silences Asfour. When Asfour is again allowed to speak, Hansen uses the chatlog to assert his power over Asfour. By playing this sadistic role, Hansen is acting within the very model he is critiquing in Asfour's chat. Hansen's posturing and the treatment of Asfour's fantasies shows 7 Indeed, the expression of fantasy is enough for the law, as well. In the Conradt case, police were prepared to arrest Bill Conradt, Jr., on the basis of his online chats alone. He never actually arrived at the TeA? house. S slickslickster, "To Catch a Predator: Safraz Khan and Yazan Asfour," YouTube, 20 November 2007 In order for this ideology to function, Hansen must assert the absolute innocence of the decoy. At the same time, both Hansen and the offenders presuppose her innocence. Her lack of desire is the basis for Hansen's moral and legal claims against the offenders, while for the offenders it is an opportunity to absolve themselves. By claiming that they had no sexual intentions with the decoy, that they just came over to talk or "hang out," the offenders ally themselves with her innocence. Just as both men assert her innocence to different ends, so their common insistence on her virginity has decidedly different implications. For Hansen it is the decoy's default status; for the offenders, the decoy's virginity itself is sexualized. The tendencies held in common between interviewer and interviewees is hidden by the overt sight of the two men talking past one another; they may use the same terms but do so with different meanings and connotations. What appears to be a never-ending point-counter-point between two evenly positioned opponents, however, is not at all even. Rather, Hansen retains his power throughout the interview, imposing a hierarchal understanding of their testimony. What's more, Hansen's concept of knowledge does not allow him to recognize that the offender is 10 For more on gender and dominance, see Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds ofLove: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem ofDomination, New York: Pantheon Books, 1988. 70 often not operating within the same framework. In one encounter the offender argues that he was just "joking around,',ll a speech act that operates outside the realm of intention and action. J2 This failure to recognize the possibility of a different way of knowing is an essential gap in Hansen's knowledge-power paradigm. It is only the revelation of Hansen's identity that ends the exchange, but this action does not break the stalemate. The same struggle is bound to play out in the next interview because the last one did not offer any new insight into the problem. The climax in each interview only serves to highlight Hansen's power. His narrative prevails because he says so, not because any essential truth has been revealed. What we are seeing when we watch TeAP, then, is not the affirmation but the limit of ideology. Hansen must insist on the absolute innocence of the girl in order to make sense of the offenders and uphold the narrative of the show. He can only justify going after these men if they are predators, and they can only be predators if the girl is pure, if she has no desire. According to Todd McGowan, this construction of the girl is in itself a kind of fantasy. Through the recourse to fantasy, ideology shows itself to be fissured, to be in need of support through fantasy for it to function effectively. If ideology and the symbolic order were not haunted by a Real - that is, if they were self-enclosed structures - there would be no need for fantasy to keep subjects within them. In this way even the most ideological film testifies to the point of failure of ideology, of its need for a fantasmatic supplement. 13 The decoy's innocence is the "fantasmatic supplement" that allows Hansen's ideology to function. Any indication of her desire must be quickly effaced. This II Wagner, To Catch a Predator, aired 27 February 2007 by NBC, transcript 12 To Catch a Predator, aired 27 February 2007 by NBC, transcript 13 McGowan, 40 71 tension is visually apparent in the structure of the show. In early episodes, as the offenders enter the TCAP house, they first see the decoy (really an adult actress made to look like a young teen). She welcomes them in but quickly disappears on some pretext, and Hansen emerges in her place. Inserting Hansen, the ideological force of the show, back into the scene effectively denies the desire of the girl and asserts his moral authority. Over time the series became less anxious about this structure, gaining confidence in its own narrative. We see this in a later episode in which the decoy is allowed to chat up the offender for a longer period of time. Rather than switching the decoy for Hansen, however, Hansen emerges behind her, and the two share the scene for a moment (Figure 1). This brief moment further allies the decoy with Hansen as protector and reinforces the primacy of his narrative. Figure 1. The decoy reacts as Hansen slowly emerges from around the comer. 72 These encounters with the decoy, however, destabilize any claim that she is wholly innocent. For one brief moment we see her engaging with the offender, performing the role of a "precocious" teen. The decoy must be sexual enough to facilitate this meeting, but after that she must be completely non-sexual in order to sustain TCAP's narrative of predation. After Hansen enters the scene her innocence is privileged and her sexuality is explicitly denied. Despite the show's efforts to obscure or deny this desire, however, it still lingers as excess, unable to be incorporated into the totalizing ideology, threatening to undermine Hansen's crusade. In confronting this excess it becomes possible to apply the same understanding of desire and its complexity that we see in the men to the girl. If these men can explore desire through fantasy, so can she. Like Hansen, we take it for granted that the offenders are seeking sexual gratification online; but there is erotic potential in the decoy's position, too. Not just an object of their fantasies, the girl is exploring her own desire and desirability. Understanding the chat room as a space for erotic play allows us to recognize its utility for a girl who may be just beginning to explore her sexual identity. What's more, it makes "joking around" sound less like an evasion and more like a plausible way of experiencing these encounters. The Internet acts as both a screen onto which these fantasies may be safely projected and a dangerously liminal space, a tension that is apparent but vigorously denied within TCAP. This liminality is a space of multiple possibilities in which the individual need not occupy one category or another, but instead moves between 73 categories fluidly.14 In this way the Internet facilitates the exploration of sexual fantasy by providing a space in which the individual may express his or her desires and ambivalences without compromising himself or others. The Internet can be bracketed as its own realm of experience, not just separate from everyday action but subject to its own rules and forms of expression. That is, the logic of a singular, rigid identity need not apply within the multiple and amorphous communities of cyberspace. Desire, and sexual fantasy in particular, operates in much the same way. As legal scholar Katherine Franke points out, desire does not play by the rule of law (or, I would add, any other rigidly superimposed framework). Desire is not subject to cleaning up, to being purged of its nasty, messy, perilous dimensions, full of contradictions and the complexities of simultaneous longing and denial. It is precisely the proximity to danger, the lure of prohibition, the seamy side of shame that creates the heat that draws us toward our desire, and that makes desire and pleasure so resistant to rational explanation. It is also what makes pleasure, not contradiction of or haven from danger, but rather a close relation. (emphasis mine)15 By treating desire as its own psychic experience, we allow for the expression of contradiction inherent in the "simultaneous longing and denial." Online and in fantasy the subject is liberated from the everyday constraints. Of course, this same release through the Internet, on the other hand, can be experienced to such an extent that, rather than securing the boundary between reality and fantasy, it actually facilitates the breakdown of this division. TeA?, however, denies the irrational and ambiguous nature of the Internet. At no point in the show does Hansen or any psychological professional treat the Internet 14 Victor Turner, "Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology," From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness ofPlay (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982),20-59. 15 Franke, "Theorizing Yes," 207 74 as a psychic experience separate from reality. On the contrary, it treats computers and the Internet as a tool that predators consciously manipulate to gain access to their victims. Such a characterization implies that there is no separation between the expression of a deviant sexuality in fantasy and deviant behavior. 16 But there is a separation; sexual fantasy need not be the desire for some object or experience, merely toward some object.17 The satisfaction (or frustration) of desire through fantasy is a self-contained experience "distinguished from the ideas of attaining, getting, fulfilling, or realizing."18 Hansen: [narrating] Calling himselfjohn_raven2000, he tells the decoy who is posing as a 13-year-old that he's 24, and says, "I'm too old to do anything with you." But that doesn't last long. Soon after, the sex talk begins. 19 TCAP refuses to recognize a distinction between talking and doing. Instead, it posits a direct, even causal, connection between desire and action. What's more, TCAP actually facilitates the collapse of fantasy into action through this very refusal. This breakdown is analogous to the "passage into action" that clinicians observe in trauma victims. In this scenario, the clinician helps the patient defuse the destructive potential of anti-social fantasies, not by denying them but by affirming them as real and distinct experiences, all the while encouraging the patient to reflect on his or her fantasies. The TCAP sting, on the other hand, by insisting on arranging a face to face encounter, instead pushes the offender into action by disallowing the reflection on the 16 This breaking down of boundaries is apparent, too, in the make-up of the show itself as the lines between journalism and law enforcement, reporting and entertainment, become blurred beyond recognition. 17 Jerome A. Shaffer, "Sexual Desire," The Journal ofPhilosophy 75.4 (April 1978), 180. 18 Ibid., 184 19 orbeni, "Pedophile Drives 5 Hours Only to get Tased Like a Bitch, You Tube, 31 January 2008 If, however, we can begin to think of desire and sexual fantasy as constituting their own psychic reality-separate from action-we can begin to rethink the decoy herself. Recognizing this, we can begin to conceive of a girl who is legally a minor yet who has the capacity for sexual desire. The contradiction between the girl's legal status and her sexuality reveals our own understanding of childhood, innocence, and sexuality to be artificial. The age of consent is ultimately an arbitrary number, but once established it renders minors completely asexual. That is, in order for child molestation and obscenity laws to function, they must be based on some unequivocal truth, in this case the (a)sexual status of minors. They must remain innocent to justify the punishment of their offenders. Legislation that takes into account adolescent female sexual desire would require a complete reevaluation of knowledge, one that allows for multiple, potentially contradictory truths. Hansen's concept of knowledge and truth then mirrors legal discourse, which accounts in part for his air of absolute authority. He is working within a familiar and pervasive understanding of truth: Hansen is the law. Hansen derives his power not 20 Donna BentoIila, "Trauma and the Failure to Mourn: A Lacanian Perspective on Serious Acting-Out and Passage into Action," Presentation prepared for the XVIII Annual I.F.P.E. Conference, Toronto, Canada, 19-21 October 2007; Dr. Marilyn Charles, Correspondence with the author, 3-6 February 2009. 76 merely from the gestures discussed in Chapter 1 but from our core understandings of truth and reality, understandings that have been institutionalized in our legal system. Just as Hansen and the law are essentially the same, so the underlying tension operating within rCAP (exposed through the "recourse to fantasy") also operates within the law. Legislation aimed at protecting minors, like Megan's Law and residency restrictions, presume the absolute innocence of minors, but this gesture obscures the subjectivity of the very minors for whom these laws were written. Megan's Law was written in Megan Kanka's name, yes, but the law invests all subjectivity in the "predators" and the public that is empowered to carry out the law. In this model, children and adolescents are rendered objects within the discourse of sexual predation without a space to act themselves. In fact, of course, minors sometimes can be subjects if not full agents in their own experiences, and more often than not experiences of sexual victimization are more complicated than the law may allow. In this context rCAP presents itself as the crystallization of a pure narrative, one that underlies and justifies not just its own efforts but those of state and federal lawmakers. rCAP is not a reality TV anomaly but the representation of our country's very inability to confront the complexity within and between our conceptions of desire, sex, and sexual offending. 77 Conclusion There is no denying that sex offenders, especially those who target children, are among society's most disturbing figures. Parents and lawmakers are right to take sex offending seriously, to recognize it as a widespread problem that can have lasting effects on individual victims. But though we have taken sex offending out of the shadows and, in the case of TeAP, into our very living rooms, we have not arrived at a more thorough understanding of this issue, That is in part because the narratives circulating within our laws and popular culture oversimplify the problem, framing it as a matter of victimization and predation, absolute outsiders and pure victims. In response, vigilantism has become the law of the land, ideologically if not literally. This vigilantism has become more and more entrenched in the last ten years, with the increasing popularity of residency restrictions. Much of the popularity of these laws can be attributed to the unequivocal moral distinction they make between offenders and the non-offending public. They satisfy a public need for punishment and retribution, yet that need should not be our only response to these offenders. What we need is a more complex understanding of and response to sex offending that does not rely on rigid and insufficient categories. The focus on absolute good versus absolute evil does not account for the overwhelming majority of sexual abuse and rape cases. Narratives that deploy the child victim as the embodiment of this purity render adult women suspect when they come forward with their own sexual victimization. There is an inverse relationship between the agency we ascribe to minors and the agency we ascribe to adults, which in tum holds adult female victims to a near-impossible standard of innocence themselves. This is most 78 damaging in cases of acquaintance rape, or date rape. In these cases, the woman often agrees to a certain level of intimacy with her attacker. In addition, she may not view her attacker as a pathological monster; she may even like him. 1 This narrative hurts child victims, as well. The emphasis on "stranger danger" effectively obscures incest and acquaintance abuse. Similarly, by insisting that all sex offenders are wholly bad, we fail to grasp the complex emotional responses of many incest victims. In these cases the offender is often a close family member or friend, and the victim may be tom between protecting that person and speaking up. In the child's eyes, the offender is both loved and feared. If we fail to address this dilemma we risk silencing current and future victims too confused or protective of their loved ones to come forward. Even with regard to crimes committed by strangers, the vigilante mentality that would stand for justice may actually do more harm than good when it comes to sex offending, and its pervasiveness within our laws and culture makes it that much more troubling. If nothing else, the vigilante narrative is a tenuous formula prone to gaps and incoherence. As we saw with TCAP, even the most tightly controlled narrative can misfire. That is because the narratives we create are constantly running up against the observable facts of lived experience? In some cases it is incest or I Increased outrage and sensitivity regarding sex offending does not always help adult victims of acquaintance rape. In 2007 a Nebraska judge banned the words "rape," "sexual assault," "victim," "assailant," and "sexual assault kit" in a case involving a woman who said she was drugged and raped by her date. The defense team argued that such language would unfairly bias the jUly against their client. As a result, both the plaintiff and defendant were required to use the word "sex" to describe the event. (Dahlia Lithwick, "Gag Order: A Nebraska judge bans the word 'rape' from his courtroom," Slate, 20 June 2007, TCAP is a valuable object of analysis insofar as it portrays both the narrative and its failure. The narrative that attempts to simplify and rationalize sex offending through ideology reveals itself to be strained and conflicted. We need not shy away from this confusion; an integrated understanding of sex offending allows for a broader perspective on the issue. The emphasis on ideology over a more comprehensive analysis may not be coming to an immediate end, but it is shifting. Take for example the rhetorical differences between George W. Bush and the newly-elected Barack Obama's. When held together, the two presidents' ways of speaking and presenting problems are vastly different. In his farewell address Bush clung to the polarizing rhetoric that defined his time in office, insisting that "good and evil are present in the world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise.,,3 Obama's inaugural address, delivered five days after Bush's farewell, integrated the positive and negative to paint a more complex portrait of America. Though he championed the achievements of the u.s., he did not shy from invoking its violent and racist history.4 He pointedly (Bonn und Munchen: Francke, 1960), p. 363. Quoted in Schon and Rein, Frame Reflection: Toward the Resolution ofIntractable Policy Controversies, New York: BasicBooks, 1994) 3 George W. Bush, Jr., Farewell Address, televised broadcast from the White House, 15 January 2009, reprinted by NYT Interpretive frames are useful for making sense of all kinds of phenomena, no just sex offending, but careful consideration of all the information and contradictions involved will actually help us take decisive action against sex offending. If anything, we need analysis that takes the time to confront the messy, uncomfortable facts of sex offending, not a sieve that catches only the most manageable conceptions of victims and offenders. The result will not be a failure to act but merely a different kind of action. For example, rather than vilifying all offenders as pathological monsters, lawmakers could amend Megan's Law so that all states must differentiate between levels of offenders and even allow offenders to move between risk levels during their tenure on the registry. For offenders already sentenced to treatment, treatment specialists could begin to include aspects of the Good Lives Model, combining risk management with more affirmative therapies. In order to achieve these kinds of policies, we need to move away from revenge and vigilantism toward the reintegration and rehabilitation of offenders based on sound research and statistics. By taking a nuanced view of sex offending we may finally get past the hysteria and moral panic that has dominated political and social discourse for nearly 30 years. As psychologist D. Richard Laws writes, we must prioritize our concerns, which means accepting that Many aspects of sexual deviation are simply part of the contemporary societal landscape. 'Normalizing,' as I am using the word, does not mean ignoring that the school bus driver may be an exhibitionist or that the choirmaster may be a bit too interested in his charges. Rather it means that distasteful things go on around us all the time, and we have very limited 5 Obama, Inaugural Address, 20 January 2009 ability to intervene against most of them. Some amount of deviant behavior is present all the time. 6 Recognizing that there is a difference between the "distasteful" and truly threatening does not make us weak or permissive toward sex offenders but rather strengthens our responses to their crimes. What's more, it frees us as individuals to accept the ambiguity and perceived deviance within ourselves. Though we may not go so far as to identify with the men of TeAP, there is a familiarity in the fact that they have fantasy lives, and that at times there is some similarity between their fantasy lives and our own. 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