Letourneau is director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Malone is an award-winning journalist who reports on child sexual abuse and victimization. They are co-writing a book about child sexual abuse prevention and the history of U.S. sex crime laws for Basic Books
Most of us would say that you can‘t put a price tag on keeping kids safe from sexual violence. Yet we do. And the amount is either generous or entirely inadequate, depending on which metric we are looking at.
Incarceration is one area in which we invest serious resources. A research paper we published with our colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health tallies, for the first time, the amount that U.S. taxpayers spend incarcerating people for sex crimes against children each year—an impressive $5.4 billion. There are currently around 145,000 adults incarcerated for sex crimes involving kids, and the majority of these inmates will remain incarcerated for about eight years, some much longer. We will invest approximately $49 billion on the current cohort of inmates, with new prisoners arriving all the time. This sounds like progress, and to some extent it is. We need laws and consequences that send the unmistakable message that the sexual abuse of children is immoral, illegal, and intolerable, and that adult perpetrators will be held criminally accountable. But there is a wrinkle in all of this. By the time these men—and it is typically males—engage with the criminal justice system, a child, and in some cases several children, have already been victimized. This raises a couple of questions: Is this the best we can do when it comes to serving victims of sexual abuse? And is there a way to stop people from offending against a child in the first place? The answers are no and yes.
Up until a couple of years ago, we allocated almost no federal dollars to the primary prevention of child sexual abuse. That is, we failed to invest in developing, testing, or disseminating programs designed to prevent the sexual victimization of kids before the criminal justice system even needs to get involved. But Congress recently began adding funding to the federal budget for this very purpose. In the 2022 fiscal year, $2 million was allocated toward child sexual abuse prevention research. This is a great start, but strikingly different to what we spend on punishment—for every dollar that we spend on prevention research we allocate $2,700 toward incarceration. The latter figure doesn’t include costs related to the detection and prosecution of crimes or the post-release costs associated with parole, sex offense registration, and public notification.
We need to address this imbalance. There are over 37 million adult survivors of child sexual abuse living in the U.S. today. 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 13 boys will go on to experience sexual abuse before the age of 18, and while many will live healthy happy lives, survivors are at increased risk for debilitating psychological, physical, and financial harms. These statistics are so overwhelming, the ramifications so pervasive and complex, that we can feel powerless to do anything more than we’ve always done, which is lock up offenders. This myth about the inevitability of child sexual abuse leads us to overlook, and underfund, the development and dissemination of prevention strategies.
One of us directs the country’s leading center for child sexual abuse prevention research, the other has a decade of experience reporting on sexual abuse perpetration and harm. For the past couple of years, we have been working on a book about about how to better prevent child sexual abuse, which includes taking a close look at the history and impact of U.S. sex crime legislation. During this time, we have met many people who have experienced the devastating consequences of victimization. One of whom is a young man named Connor.
Connor (his name has been changed to protect his identity and that of his victim) was 10 when he began sexually abusing a six-year-old relative. He abused this boy at least five times over the next three years. When it was finally detected, Connor, then 13, was adjudicated in juvenile court of first-degree criminal sexual conduct with a minor. He spent the next four years in juvenile prison and, at 17, became the youngest person committed to his state’s sex offense civil commitment program. Sex offense civil commitment is the involuntary and indefinite confinement of people convicted of sexual offenses in secure facilities following their prison sentence. It is ostensibly for treatment, though Connor’s program at the time was not housed in a hospital with rolling green grounds, but in a prison block originally built for death row inmates. The program director did not want Connor there, reasoning that he presented a low risk of reoffending and that his young age and slight build would make him vulnerable to the adult offenders at the facility.
The director was right. Within hours of Connor’s arrival an older resident tried to rape him. Sexual victimization became the norm during Connor’s four years in the facility. Adult men—all of whom had been locked up for years or decades—would expose themselves or masturbate in front of him. They’d come up behind him when he was alone in his room and tell him how much they wanted to rape him.
“I didn’t know how to navigate it,” Connor said. “It was completely different from juvenile [prison]. It’s a whole other level… knowing the consequences are going to be worse than just a fist fight.” Connor was not innocent. He caused real harm to his young relative and action was needed to end the abuse, provide services to his victim, and guard against future harm. Yet there were opportunities to intervene before Connor began sexually offending…..
Luke Malone has put the emphasis on prevention since he began to study the plight of young men who were troubled by their thoughts of addiction to pre-pubescent children.
It’s an issue of great national and international importance. Around one percent of adult men meet the diagnostic criteria for pedophilia, which means there are at least 1.2 million pedophiles currently living in the U.S. There are likely more, but reliable statistics aren’t available for female pedophiles. While some do go on to offend, a surprisingly large number are doing everything they can to avoid giving in to their desires.
Maybe such people amongst us feel bonded to, yet disgusted by, Epstein’s behaviour with under age kids? Just as they may feel compassion for predatory male behaviour, for having an addiction to pursue girls and adult women, and/or boys. They feel disgusted by their own thoughts, by being who they are, but rarely find help and may become a harmful predator.
Thousands of vulnerable kids and adults are sex trafficked globally. It is a terrible crime but makes the traffickers wealthy. There is a constant demand, so there is a supply. Moral codes are non existent. The traffickers will find ways to silence their victims, so murder or threat of harm, is part of the playbook.
And yet, when a young person kills her trafficker, she gets a jail sentence!
Woman who said she legally killed sex trafficker gets 11 years in prison
Chrystul Kizer, shown in court with attorney Gregory Holdahl, was sentenced to 11 years in prison after pleading guilty to reckless homicide.
(Sean Krajacic / Associated Press)
Associated Press
Aug. 20, 2024 7:43 AM PT
KENOSHA, Wis. — A Milwaukee woman who said she was legally allowed to a kill a man because he was sexually trafficking her has been sentenced to 11 years in prison after pleading guilty to a reduced count of reckless homicide.
A Kenosha County judge on Monday sentenced Chrystul Kizer to 11 years of initial confinement followed by five years of extended supervision in the 2018 death of Randall Volar, 34. She was given credit for 570 days, about 1½ years, of time served.
…………
Kizer, now 24, said she met Volar on a sex trafficking website. He had been molesting her and selling her as a prostitute over the year leading up to his death, she said. She told detectives that she shot him after he tried to touch her.
The victim would seem to kill in self defence.
The human hive mind is confused about who is the victim and has the right to plead self defence. Laws are made by powerful people but are usually flawed if not scrutinised and clarified to ensure no injustice or further harm is caused by the legal process.
In America there is an attempt to prevent sex abuse through an awareness programme:
Certainly this world would be a better place if we could all protect one another from mental issues developing which could result in uncontrollable actions against vulnerable others.
Any kind of abuse when one is still a child will scar a developing mind.
Tina Brown wrote the following on Substack:
In the course of writing The Palace Papers, my 2022 book on the royal family, I came across a shocking story in a memoir by Eleanor Berry, daughter of the then-Daily Telegraph owner Lord Hartwell. Berry tells how, at the age of ten, Ghislaine invited her to come upstairs and see her bedroom. Berry noticed an odd-shaped hairbrush, a strap, a slipper, and other implements laid out on the child’s dressing room table. Ghislaine proudly said, “This is what Daddy uses to beat me with. But he always allows me to choose which one I want.” This sadistic offering of power to the powerless—her father asking her, in essence, to procure herself for him— makes it more understandable how susceptible she would be to the twisted machinations of Jeffrey Epstein.
The victim becomes the aggressor.
More on Ghislaine and her bully of a father, from a book by Tom Bower, Maxwell, the Final Verdict
At the beginning of 1991, Ghislaine was receiving a monthly income from Maxwell’s Liechtenstein trust through the Bank Leumi in New York. No one has been able to gain access to those Liechtenstein bank accounts or understand the flow of money to Ghislaine. After his death, at least £25 million remained unaccounted for from the debris of the Maxwell empire in New York and a lot more disappeared into unknown bank accounts in tax havens. Some of that money financed Ghislaine Maxwell’s lifestyle. The result was clear. Through her father’s considerable presence in New York, not least through his ownership of the New York Daily News, she had met most of the city’s financiers and power brokers. Liberated by Maxwell’s death, Ghislaine bought a house in Manhattan and burst into New York’s gossip columns as a brash, party-hopping socialite. Among those she met was Jeffrey Epstein, an investment manager for the super-rich. Undoubtedly, her attraction to a magnetic man with unusual sexual habits was influenced by her childhood. Rich, domineering men could seduce her. Until Ghislaine, then aged thirty, arrived in Tenerife to inspect her father’s yacht after his death, she had been relatively invisible except when she disingenuously congratulated a London policeman after being stopped for drunken driving. Known in the Mirror building as arrogant, she was an aspiring status-seeker, enjoying lunch with Mick Jagger and other celebrities who instantly accepted her father’s invitation. Her life had been dominated by her father’s tyranny. Betty Maxwell, Ghislaine’s mother, would recall that her youngest daughter had been woefully neglected since her birth in 1961. ‘I was devastated,’ Betty would recall of the occasion when her four-year-old daughter had exclaimed, ‘Mummy, I exist.’ During her childhood, Ghislaine had witnessed her father’s merciless bullying, especially at the family’s regular Sunday lunches. Maxwell would question his children about world affairs. In the event that they made a mistake, the meal was interrupted while he physically beat the errant child in front of the others. ‘Bob would shout and threaten and rant at the children until they were reduced to pulp,’ Betty Maxwell wrote about her husband after his death. If a comment in a school report was not perfect, Maxwell caned the child. ‘Remember the three C’s,’ he growled, ‘Concentration, Consideration and Conciseness.’ Ghislaine could expect little protection from her mother even in front of her friends at her birthday party. Betty, who had met Robert during the liberation of France in 1944, collaborated with the beatings of her children just as she connived in her husband’s financial crimes. Except that Maxwell could be particularly protective towards his daughter. As a teenager, Ghislaine was once summoned to Maxwell’s office in Holborn while he was speaking to Roy Greenslade, editor of the Mirror. ‘What’s this about you nearly drowning?’ he asked his daughter. He had heard about an incident in the sea from Gianni Agnelli, the Italian tycoon with whom Ghislaine had been staying. ‘Oh, you don’t mean that little accident,’ replied Ghislaine. ‘There was no danger.’ ‘You’re always taking risks, doing stupid dangerous things,’ said Maxwell. ‘Oh Daddy,’ she exclaimed. Maxwell became serious: ‘I told you about jumping out of a helicopter with my skis on. It won’t happen again.’ Even while Ghislaine studied at Balliol, she succumbed to her father’s control over her boyfriends. Her reward in 1987 was to push the button for the bottle of champagne to crack on the bow of the newly built Lady Ghislaine, sealing her anointment as the mogul’s favourite child and his obedient servant. Her loyalty during the last year of her father’s life is described in this book. But does that oppression explain why she developed a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, a paedophile? Or that she seemingly became his pimp? In 2013, I met Ghislaine at a summer party in a large compound overlooking the sea in St Tropez. The host was a London property developer. I had last seen Ghislaine forty years earlier while filming the BBC documentary. Not surprisingly, she knew nothing about that venture – or, curiously, about the two books I had written about her father. While we chatted over a drink she seemed uninterested in him. Similarly, she seemed oblivious to the presence inside the glass-walled bar of a naked girl, writhing to the music. Nor did she express any emotion when a rocket from the party’s firework celebration landed on Club 55 on the beach below, setting fire to a hut. The fifty-two-year-old woman was hardened and alone. By then, her association with Epstein had become notorious and her friendship with Prince Andrew proven by a series of photographs. She did not want to speak about that except to say that her relationship with Epstein had ended years earlier. Subsequently, I was told by a member of her family that she had enjoyed two long-term relationships with other rich men after parting from Epstein in 2001. That was untrue. Their relationship had continued, even if it was not intimate. In 2019, pursued by the media and women alleging that she had trafficked them on Epstein’s behalf, she disappeared in America. To protect her location, even her family can only reach her – by phone or email – through a third party. Ghislaine Maxwell is a hunted woman, undoubtedly a casualty of her father and mother. While one can declare a final verdict on Robert Maxwell’s life, her ultimate fate is yet to be written – an outcome which her father could not have imagined in 1991. Maxwell’s death shocked the world. Few will forget the moment that the news was first broadcast. I heard it in Moscow while speaking to the former head of the KGB’s Department S, a man responsible for sending ‘illegal’ agents into the West. During his last months, Maxwell had been a frequent visitor to the Kremlin. Bizarrely, it later transpired that he was negotiating to sell blood donated by Russians in the West – a market inspired by the new HIV crisis. Even thirty years later, the end of Captain Bob’s life remains astonishing, and provides a lesson which should never be forgotten.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
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