Abolish “Sex Offender” Registries!

So vast have governmental sex offender registries become, trapping hundreds of thousands in their nets of public shaming and lifelong hounding, that even some who were most vociferous for their creation are now sickened by their effect on juveniles. A case in point is Patty Wetterling who, following the 1989 abduction and disappearance of her eleven-year-old son, became an early and prominent advocate of such registries. As reported by Sarah Stillman in “The List” (New Yorker, 14 March), Wetterling now has serious misgivings. Following a meeting with a ten-year-old boy in a juvenile sex offender “treatment” facility, Wetterling said: “I kept thinking about this kid, who goes away, gets sex-offender treatment...and is on the public registry—this young person who really wants to return to school, to learn, to make friends, but can’t have a second chance. That’s a life sentence for this kid.”

The New Yorker article also recounts the story of Mark Lunsford, who successfully lobbied for draconian measures against sex offenders following the rape and murder of his daughter in 2005. Some time later, his own teenage son faced being placed on a sex offender registry for heavy petting with a 14-year-old girl! It is no longer unusual to find articles in the capitalist press highlighting cases of teenage boys, most often white and from “middle-class” families, whose lives are being ruined over consensual sexual encounters. Even the rabidly right-wing New York Post (25 July) ran an opinion piece titled “Bogus ‘Sex Offender’ Labels Are Ruining Lives.” This media attention reflects a growing backlash among the white petty bourgeoisie against the state’s horrific abuse of their children in the name of supposedly preventing child sex abuse. Of course in racist capitalist America, black people, Latinos and the poor have always faced the brutal intrusion of the capitalist state into their family life.

A 2013 Human Rights Watch report, “Raised on the Registry: The Irreparable Harm of Placing Children on Sex Offender Registries in the US,” describes how youth offenders are subject to registration “for crimes ranging from public nudity and touching another child’s genitalia over clothing to very serious violent crimes like rape.” The report describes the devastating effects of being forced to register:

“Youth sex offenders on the registry experience severe psychological harm. They are stigmatized, isolated, often depressed. Many consider suicide, and some succeed. They and their families have experienced harassment and physical violence. They are sometimes shot at, beaten, even murdered.”

According to a 2000 Department of Justice report on sexual assaults, 14 years old was the most common age for both victims and offenders. This statistic reflects the reactionary age of consent laws, which deem all youth under a certain arbitrary age (16, 17 or 18 years depending on the state) as incapable of consenting to sex. This turns teenagers and young adults into criminals for having sex with younger teens, even when the sex was in fact consensual. Deemed “Romeo and Juliet” romances, such relationships can have truly tragic endings for the young men, and less often women, who get branded child abusers for the rest of their lives. With laws apparently designed by Alice in Wonderland’s Queen of Hearts, in some states teenagers who take nude selfies and engage in “sexting” are guilty of “distributing child pornography” and “sexual exploitation of a minor” (namely themselves). If that weren’t bad enough, children as young as nine have been convicted and put on registries for pranks like pulling down a classmate’s pants or for play-acting sex with other children. The Human Rights Watch report details cases where a conviction at the age of ten or eleven remains a scarlet letter well into adulthood, and sometimes for life.

Victimless “Crimes” and Victims of the State

The victims of the government-orchestrated hysteria against “sex crimes” are not only children and young people. Public urination can land you on a sex offender registry in at least 13 states. In New York State, so can visiting a prostitute. Of course, former governor Eliot Spitzer, who signed one of the most repressive sex offender laws ever, didn’t have to register himself when he was caught in 2008 paying for a high-priced call girl. Once someone is listed on a public registry for sex offenders, almost all of his personal information—including address, employer and a photograph—becomes easily available online under screaming headlines like “PROTECT YOUR CHILD FROM SEX OFFENDERS.” In a New York Times op-ed piece, “Regulating Sex” (27 June 2015), Judith Shulevitz described the “dire and lasting consequences” of being placed on a registry:

“Depending on the state, these can include notifying the community when an offender moves into the neighborhood; restrictions against living within 2,000 feet of a school, park, playground or school bus stop; being required to wear GPS monitoring devices; and even a prohibition against using the Internet for social networking.”

In California, 20 percent of those on the list have nowhere to live because of these restrictions. In some states, they can even be banned from homeless shelters. Online registries facilitate violent acts like the murder in 2013 of a South Carolina man and his wife by neo-Nazis.

The violent abuse and rape of children is a terrible crime. But once “child abuse” becomes a political football, the capitalist state willfully refuses to distinguish between Jack the Ripper and teenagers having consensual sex. The conflation of crimes like rape with children “playing doctor” serves to whip up a crazed, witchhunting climate in which the powers of the capitalist state can be legitimized and strengthened under the guise of “protecting” children and women. The bourgeois state is not a neutral arbiter or protector of the whole citizenry; it exists to assure the maintenance of capitalist rule through repressing the working class and the oppressed. The frenzied morality drive against everything from online pornography to child sexuality by the government, churches and media also serves ideologically to distract working people from the real evils of this decaying capitalist system.

The Spartacist League is opposed to all laws criminalizing consensual sex. We oppose all laws against “crimes without victims” such as prostitution, drug use and pornography. By the logic of this twisted and puritanical society, physical pleasure is equated with “sin” and the cruelest physical and psychological torments constitute “justice.” It is in this framework that the capitalist state punishes teenagers, with their raging sex hormones, for engaging in the very acts that biology drives them toward during puberty.

We stand against the persecution of anyone who engages in consensual intergenerational sex. The only guideline for sex should be effective consent: mutual agreement and understanding by the parties involved at the time—regardless of age, gender or sexual preference. For decades, we have defended NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association), which advocates for the right of youth to enter into sexual relationships with older people, against state persecution. Down with reactionary age of consent laws! Government out of the bedroom!

As Marxists who oppose the vengeful religious precepts of retribution and penitence on which the whole capitalist system of punishment is based, we are for the abolition of all sex offender registries. This means not just for juveniles but for everyone. Many of the people on these lists were convicted as adults for “crimes” in which there was no victim—consensual sex with minors, paying for sex, or even looking at or communicating with someone on the internet. But even for those guilty of terrible crimes such as murder and rape, Marxists don’t subscribe to the reactionary view that people must continue to be punished (even after serving prison terms) by being excluded from society for life.

Perpetual Punishment: Cruel and Usual

There are already close to 850,000 people on sex offender registries in the U.S., about one-quarter of them convicted as juveniles, and the numbers are growing. Federal law requires those as young as 14 to be placed on public registers for sex crimes. The campaign for ever more repressive measures is aimed at reinforcing conservative “family values” in order to regiment youth and the population more broadly into submitting to the exploitative rule of the capitalists. Yet the very “family values” espoused by the proponents of these registries are in practice being undermined when hundreds of thousands of parents and children cannot live under the same roof due to the restrictions imposed. This effect of the sex offender registries on families was highlighted by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in August when it ruled that amendments to Michigan’s Sex Offender Registration Act (SORA) could not be applied retroactively. Comparing SORA to “the ancient punishment of banishment,” the court decision said:

“SORA brands registrants as moral lepers solely on the basis of a prior conviction. It consigns them to years, if not a lifetime, of existence on the margins, not only of society, but often, as the record in this case makes painfully evident, from their own families, with whom, due to school zone restrictions, they may not even live.”

While a few states have tinkered with the provisions for placing juveniles on sex offender registries to make them slightly less onerous, the gears of government repression grind on. Anthony Metts, whose story appeared in the New Yorker, is a case in point. In Texas in 2003, this young Mexican-American fresh out of high school was pressured by cops into acknowledging that he had engaged in consensual sex with teenage girls a couple of years younger than him, including when he himself was still a minor. He was hit with two felony indictments for “sexual assault of a child” and got ten years of extra-harsh probation: no alcohol, no internet, no going near schools, parks, bus stops, malls or movie theaters, or living within 1,000 feet of a “child-safety zone.”

But things got worse. His photo went on a sex offender registry and expensive and sadistic “treatment” and therapy, for which he had to pay, was required. For refusing to undergo the “peter meter” test (the humiliating “penile plethysmograph,” in which a gauge around the penis measures size changes while sexual images are shown), Metts was jailed for ten days. He got fired from his job. After marrying and having a daughter, he learned he could neither live with her nor even see her without supervision. He is currently serving a ten-year prison sentence for petty probation violations such as failing to charge the electronic ankle bracelet monitoring his movements. His story, with variations, is like that of thousands of other people convicted of nothing that would be a crime in any rational society.

This past February, President Obama signed the International Megan’s Law to Prevent Child Exploitation and Other Sexual Crimes Through Advanced Notification of Traveling Sex Offenders (IML). This law mandates the State Department to mark the passports of every American convicted of sex crimes involving minors with a “unique identifier” and to “alert foreign governments when those Americans travel abroad” (Wall Street Journal, 29 March). Failure by a registrant to provide advance notification to the government of his or her travel plans is punishable by up to ten years in prison. This recalls the 1938 Nazi policy of marking passports of Jewish citizens of Germany with a glaring red letter “J.” Not only does IML compromise the right of citizens to travel freely and violate their privacy; it puts their very lives and those of their companions at risk.

From “Satanic Abuse” to “Children Who Molest”

To her credit, journalist and author Judith Levine has long stood for the abolition of sex offender registries as “cruel and unusual punishment, excessive even for people who have committed heinous crimes” (Counterpunch, 24 October 2014). Levine’s powerful book Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (2002) helped expose the roots of the anti-youth, anti-sex panic and the invention of “children with sexual behavior problems” and “children who molest.” After a brief period of more open attitudes toward teaching children about sex and their bodies in the 1960s and 1970s, U.S. bourgeois society, with its fanatical religious component, has increasingly returned to the Victorian myth that children are asexual beings. In fact, sexuality is part of the makeup of humans from infancy. As Levine writes:

“A wide range of sexual behavior is normative in children. In spite of a paucity of empirical data, we know that masturbation is ubiquitous from early on, more noticeably among little boys than little girls. So is ‘playing doctor,’ inserting fingers into orifices, and other such pastimes. In the so-called latency years, from about seven to eleven, children continue to masturbate, touch each other, and have crushes on their classmates and friends.”

Levine cites a UCLA study that found that three-quarters of kids had engaged in masturbation or some kind of sex with other children before the age of six. Levine goes on to note: “Was there a ‘pernicious influence’ of such experiences, a ‘main effect’ correlating early sex play with childhood distress or later maladjustment, as many psychologists hypothesize? ‘No such correlations were apparent,’ the California group concluded.”

At the head of the campaign to pathologize childhood sexuality in the late 1980s was Kee MacFarlane, who infamously led the interrogation of 400 children from the McMartin Preschool in Southern California at her “Children’s Institute.” Her lurid charges fueled a “Satanic ritual abuse” witchhunt against day-care workers. As we wrote in “Satan, the State and Anti-Sex Hysteria” (Women and Revolution No. 45, Winter-Spring 1996), despite a 1994 U.S. government report announcing that there was no factual basis for satanic cult conspiracy theories, “the witchhunt’s nationwide apparatus of sex cops, prying social workers and quacks, bolstered with millions of dollars, prestige and power, remains firmly in place.”

In 1988, MacFarlane’s collaborator Toni Cavanagh Johnson coined the term “children who molest.” Johnson is now a widely cited, self-published “authority” on supposedly abnormal sexual behaviors in children and their “treatment.” Johnson’s advice includes telling parents to seek professional help if any child from kindergarten through fourth grade “asks others to take off their clothes.” And what passes for therapy for children ensnared in today’s witchhunt are methods based on those employed in the 1950s and ’60s to try to “cure” gay people.

Children, Family and the State

Far from protecting children, the capitalist system and its state are the biggest abusers—condemning millions of children to poverty and homelessness, not to mention destroying the lives of those caught up in the juvenile “justice” system, who are disproportionately black and Latino. As we wrote in “State-Branded ‘Sex Offenders’: Pariahs for Life” (WV No. 1030, 20 September 2013): “The U.S. imperialists bomb children across the globe even as millions go hungry in this country, where the infant mortality rate ranks 51st in the world.” Maternal mortality rates are on the rise in the U.S., where black women are three times more likely to die giving birth than white women.

Periodic scare campaigns—from the “reds under the beds” and anti-homosexual witchhunts in the 1950s to the “war on terror” and “sex offender” panics today—not only reinforce state control over the population, but also serve to drive people deeper into the repressive confines of the family and religion. In fact, the family under capitalism is the main mechanism for the oppression of women and youth and a means for the bourgeoisie to inculcate social conformity and subservience to authority. The institution of the family reinforces, as Friedrich Engels put it, “the supremacy of the man over the woman, and the individual family as the economic unit of society” (The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State [1884]). The family, the state and organized religion form a tripod of oppression propping up the capitalist order.

In this vicious class-divided society, the family is an economic and sexual prison house of frustration and oppression. As we wrote in “The Uses of Abuse” (Women and Revolution No. 29, Spring 1985): “Raping, beating and otherwise abusing children are utterly horrendous crimes—yet state intervention, with its cruel tortures of prison cells and sadistic punishments, its barbed-wire-surrounded orphanages and reform schools, is often not much better.” Our goal as communists is a society in which the institution of the family can be replaced, in which the constraints of economic necessity, which force families together and break them apart, are removed. In such a society, sexual relations can be truly voluntary and the guilt and shame pounded into all of us can be lifted.

It is a tough, no-win dilemma for teenagers under capitalism: whether to stay with your Bible-Belt beating parents, or take your chances in the cruel state apparatus of “therapy” and foster care. For youth, especially gay and transgender, who are kicked out of their homes or forced to run away, their alternative is often selling sex and living on the streets. In response to this dilemma we demand, as our youth organization did in its founding program in 1971: “a radical lowering of the legal age of adulthood and free housing, food and a stipend provided for young people who do not wish to remain at home” (Youth, Class and Party).

As Marxists, we know that to tear down all of bourgeois society’s repressive laws governing sexuality requires a proletarian revolution to abolish capitalism and establish a workers government; and that will be only the first stage of revolutionary change. The goal of world socialist revolution is to create an international communist society in which the institutions of the state, organized religion and the family will have withered away, a world in which truly free individuals in conditions of material plenty will create their own relationships, freed finally and forever from class oppression and social coercion.