Writing for Counter Punch, author David Rosen says that “sex offenders” are to 21st century America what “witches” were to Puritan New England.
Who is a sex offender? Where is the line drawn between the sexually acceptable and the immoral, let alone the illegal? Is it a boundary not fixed, but a terrain of social struggle that shifts over time?
A “sex offense” is sometimes real, involving an innocent person being sexually – physically and psychologically — harmed by an offender. Too often the victim is a loved-one or a young person. Sometimes the offense is imaginary, the cyber fiction of an online experience, including “unacceptable” – if faked — pornography like rape and pedophile phantasies. And sometimes it a misunderstanding or mix-message, a failure in communications that leaves one participant a grieved person.
Read the full editorial here.