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December 10, 2004

Boy's sex offense still resonates

Incident at age 12 has consequences five years later

By Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News

It started with a phone call, then a knock on the door.

An Arvada police detective told the couple he was looking into allegations that their 14-year-old son, nicknamed Victor, had sexually assaulted an 8-year-old girl two years earlier.

They were shocked. Their son was shocked. There were tears, then a confession. A guilty plea followed, and Victor found himself among a growing number of young people on Colorado's Sexual Offender Registry.

"It was an 'I'll show you mine if you show me yours' type of thing," said Victor's mother, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity. "He did touch her, but there was no penetration. When she said that was enough, he stopped."

When Victor pleaded guilty to sexual assault, he joined approximately 750 juveniles ages 12 to 17 who were on the Colorado Bureau of Investigation's registry as of this summer.

Since 1998, the number of names on the registry has more than doubled, from 3,600 to roughly 7,690, largely because of a national crackdown on sex offenders and because greater public awareness has led to more reporting. In Colorado, juveniles make up roughly 10 percent of the registry.

Victor was required to begin a treatment program, including a set of stringent rules and guidelines, and his parents committed to spending thousands of dollars on counselors, polygraph tests and court costs.

He also became part of a program considered one of the strictest in the nation.

Some say too strict.

The rules also are indiscriminate, painting teens such as Victor who committed one offense with the same brush as teens who are serial sexual predators, some experts say.

But others say the standards, written in 2002, are fair, but that many judges and psychologists don't realize they can adjust treatment for individual cases.

"There are times when we are guilty of using a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter approach," said clinical social worker Tom Leversee, a member of Colorado's Sex Offender Management Board, which developed and oversees statewide standards for the supervision of sex offenders.

"We need to get better at individualizing treatment."

Strict rules for probation

Victor is 17 now and still has a couple months of probation remaining, during which time:

• He can't go to the movies, the mall, amusement parks, parties or anywhere there is likely to be children. He has to phone his parents every hour.

• He can't go shopping with friends without first filing an action plan with his treatment team, promising to avert his eyes if he sees young children, for example. If he meets those requirements, he still can't go shopping with girls his own age, only with boys his own age. He can't have a girlfriend.

• He has to take his meals on the porch if his parents invite over another family with kids.

• His little brother can't have friends over to the house - even if Victor is away.

• He has to take periodic polygraphs, which cost his parents $225 each.

"It's put a major damper on a typical 16-year-old's life," the mother said. "I get so frustrated because I look at what they're putting my son through - group therapy once a week, individual therapy twice a week, probation twice a month. And I read in the paper about these people who are actually sexually offending walking around on the streets."

"It's a high price to pay for something he did at age 12."

His father is torn.

"On the one hand, this is too horrible a price to pay for something so minor," he said. "But if there weren't any consequences for what he did, what lesson would that teach my son?"

That's one reason the parents didn't hire an attorney to fight the charge. The other is that had the case gone to trial and Victor was found guilty, he could have been incarcerated.

As for Victor, he said he can't even think about college or plan for the future; he is completely focused on getting through the next two months without having his probation extended.

Tough task begins

Once Victor confessed, he was assigned a treatment team consisting of a therapist, probation officer, polygrapher, case worker and his parents.

First, he answered several hundred questions as part of a psychological evaluation.

Next, a device was attached to Victor's penis to measure his arousal when pictures of boys and girls of various ages were shown.

Then he was hooked up to a polygraph and asked about his sexual history and fantasies.

"It's like peeling back an onion," said Greg Brown, supervisor at the Boulder County Probation Department. "Some guys who we think are low-risk, we find are high-risk after we do the sexual history."

"It can take a year to get a picture of what the guy is engaged in," Brown added. It may have been just the one victim, or it may have been several.

Victor passed a polygraph test on his version of what happened the day he had contact with the girl, said Dr. David Mirich, a forensic psychologist who talked about Victor's case with the family's permission.

Victor passed his next polygraph, filled with questions about whether he had ever touched his younger brother inappropriately.

But he failed his third because he had installed a PlayStation for a neighbor boy. Victor was deceptive about violating the order that he not be alone with a child, not even for five minutes.

Victor also made things worse for himself when he was caught with marijuana. The incident didn't extend his probation, but it meant he was subject to random urine tests and had to go to an extra group therapy class.

Recently, his mother came forward and told the treatment team that her son was not going places where he said he was going. Her admission likely saved Victor more trouble if the team had discovered the lie instead, Mirich said.

"The parents deserve a lot of credit for supervising this child," Mirich said.

Said the mother: "Our entire family really is on probation. We have to watch every move we make."

Megan's Laws swept nation

Like the rest of the nation, Colorado cracked down on sex offenders in the 1990s. The rape and murder of 7-year-old Megan Kanka in 1994 by a twice-convicted sex offender living in her New Jersey neighborhood caused a public outcry.

All states enacted Megan's Law, which requires sex offenders to register with police make their addresses known to the public.

Juvenile sex crimes were increasing, and some studies showed most sex offenders could never be rehabilitated. Incarceration seemed to be the only way to protect the public.

Until two years ago, juvenile sex offenders in Colorado were treated like adults. But in 2000, lawmakers ordered the Sexual Abuse Management Board to develop more flexible treatment plans for teens, with greater emphasis on rehabilitation.

The aim was to strike a balance between protecting society and giving young offenders a chance to turn their lives around.

But many psychologists and parents complain that therapy teams often are reluctant to invoke that flexibility. So, a kid who was naively experimenting is given the same treatment as a kid who has been a repeat abuser, critics say.

The result is, Colorado has one of the highest rates of offense reporting in the nation, they say.

"The problem is, the pendulum has swung too far. We've gone from complete denial of the problem 20 years ago to now being very hypersensitive, reactive and punitive," said Gail Ryan, with the Kempe Center for child-abuse prevention in Denver.

She likes the flexibility of the new juvenile standards, but says they rely too much on polygraphs. She believes juveniles are more likely than adults to flunk them, even when they're not lying.

When the juvenile sexual offense law was being drafted, most experts didn't want a juvenile registry, or expected it to contain only a few names, Ryan said. Those few would be offenders with multiple victims who weren't responding to treatment.

Ryan fears that too many young offenders will be labeled for life.

"The community's assumption that all these kids are destined to be this way for life is just not accurate."

Victor's father shares that view.

"Yes, what (my son) did was wrong. But there is no gray area in the system," he said. "He's treated as if he was a serial rapist or something. That's far from the truth."

"Nobody is willing to say, 'This looks like an isolated incident, let's back off,' " he said.

A 19-year-old from Thornton who must spend the next 31/2 years in sex-offender treatment couldn't agree more.

He said there was no intercourse, just fooling around on the bed with a girl he said looked 18. She was 14. The girl's father walked in on them.

The teen was convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He wasn't put on the registry but was given four years of treatment. He has to report to his probation officer six days a week, go to "sexual boundaries" therapy once a week, and give a quarter of his paycheck to pay for the treatment.

He is required to avert his eyes when children pass, to take polygraph tests and to submit to spontaneous urine analyses.

"One mistake is ruining my life," he said.

Juveniles must petition the court to get their names off the registry, but few do. "That's still uncommon," said Philip Tedeschi, a clinical social worker and member of the state's Sexual Offender Management Board. "I'm not sure they're taking full advantage of that opportunity."

The statutes also allow judges to keep the juveniles' names off the registry, if they feel the damage done by stigmatizing the child outweighs the risk to the public.

Simple inquisitiveness

Some juveniles who wind up on the sex offender registry have mental health problems, dysfunctional families and histories of sexual abuse.

But many also are normal kids with a simple inquisitiveness about about sex. They are typically described as naive experimenters who have the hormones of 17-year-olds but the social maturity of 12-year-olds.

Often, they have trouble making friends their own age, said Tedeschi. They're more at ease with younger kids, and when their hormones kick in, they sometimes experiment with those youngsters.

Victor appears to fit this profile.

"I don't think he's deviant; I think he's normal," said Dr. Mirich, his therapist.

Another large group of juvenile sex offenders are delinquents who typically drink and use drugs, fight and get sexually aggressive with peers.

A small number of youths, however, are more troubling.

These include juvenile psychopaths - self-centered and sexually aggressive kids "who tend to be the most dangerous youths, who can't really be treated in the open community," Tedeschi said.

The other dangerous ones are early-onset pedophiles who truly prefer sexual contact with children rather than with people their own age.

The victims, in two-thirds of cases, are children significantly younger than they are, and almost half the time it's someone in their own households, said Ryan.

In a third of cases, the offenders use coercion, force or violence to get the younger child to do what they want.

"More often, they use subtle pressure - 'I won't like you,' 'I won't let you play with me,' 'I'll get you in trouble with your mom,' " she said.

"The harm they cause at the moment of offending as juveniles is very real," Ryan said. "We certainly don't want to minimize that this is a terrible thing for anyone to do to anyone."

Some offenders resist change

Jean McAllister, executive director of the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault, deals with the victims young offenders leave in their wake.

Colorado's rules are strict, she concedes, but they may not be tough enough for the hardest cases, said McAllister.

Two years ago, for example, a 13-year-old Arapahoe County boy was convicted of raping a child about five years younger than he was. His treatment team ultimately discovered there had been two more victims.

After he was caught in a lie about medications he was taking, his therapy team revoked his probation.

The boy is now in a foster care facility that is locked down 24 hours a day. Unless he makes a dramatic turnaround, he might be institutionalized well past his 18th birthday.

"We're still not great at identifying which kids aren't going to re-offend, (and) which ones are more treatable," said McAllister.

She worries that too many juveniles are released too early.

Victor's therapist, Mirich, said the rules may seem harsh, but they're there for a reason.

A treatment team's first priority is ensuring the offender won't hurt another child.

That's why an offender must be totally honest with the team about every detail of his personal life - to ensure that they can trust him and know that he isn't hurting another child.

Mirich agrees that Victor is paying too big a price for his mistake. But, he said, Victor didn't help himself when he broke the rules, including being alone with his neighbor to install the PlayStation and once hugging a girl on the day they met, an infraction that cost Victor the privilege of being with any girls his own age.

Victor is angry.

"My parents have been going broke over this whole thing," he said. "It's ruined our family."

There are so many rules, so many lists of "don'ts," that sometimes it's easier just to stay home and do nothing, Victor said.

"I'm not allowed to date anyone. I'm not allowed to talk to girls. They have control over my whole life. For something that happened when I was 12. And I haven't shown any deviancy whatsoever since then.

"Right now, I'm pretty isolated. I don't want to do a single thing because I'm scared of getting in trouble."

Posted by Nealus at December 10, 2004 01:08 PM

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