…and pointing with anger and derision at the revelations that Josh Duggar, now 27 and married with children, once sexually molested several minor girls and the issue was dealt with extra-judicially.
I’ve written about the Duggars before, here. They are a fundamentalist Christian family who have very strict rules about dating and sex within dating (basically, there is none; not even kissing), do not believe in birth control (“19 Kids and Counting”), have a reality TV show, and had already aroused intense ire on the left for all the reasons you would think.
But now the left feels it really has something to sink its teeth into. Hypocrites! Degenerates! Coverup! Child molesters!
Most of the articles on the subject make a huge point about the fact that Josh molested “minor girls.” But they don’t call him a minor at the time, although his stated age (a month after his 14th birthday for the first charge, and about a year later for the second, although that’s not as clear) indicates that he was most definitely a minor at the time, too. The charges appear to have been fondling, and the details provided in the articles I read indicate it was touching on the girls’ breasts while sleeping.
There is no indication of the ages of the girls except that they were minors. Were they around his age? Or were they young children? Children much younger than he was at the time don’t have much in the way of breasts, so my guess (and it’s only a guess) is that Josh was not a pedophile, but chose girls who were around puberty or past it.
When I was being trained in the field and worked on some research involving child sexual abuse, the definition of sexual abuse rather than sexual play was that there had to be at least a five year difference in age between the minor perpetrator and his/her minor victims. It is inappropriate sexual behavior for Josh Duggar to have touched any girl of any age on her breast while she was sleeping, but it is not necessarily actionable abuse (even in juvenile court, which is exactly where he would have landed if this had gone that way) if the age differential is not large enough.
At least, that’s the way it used to be many years ago. Perhaps this has changed; many things have. This article indicates that they certainly have; 14-year-old perps and even younger can land on 25-year sex offender charts due to the Adam Walsh Act.
Many professionals in the field think this is wrong, and I agree. Molestation by children of that age, especially acts such as fondling, are incredibly common and ordinarily are not the mark of sex offenders of the future:
Basic data about child-on-child sex abuse is detailed in an authoritative, Justice Department-sponsored analysis of crime data from 29 states. Conducted by three prominent researchers, the 2009 analysis found that juveniles accounted for 35.6% of the people identified by police as having committed sex offenses against minors.
Of these young offenders, 93% were male, and the peak ages for offending were 12 through 14, the researchers found. Of the victims, 59% were younger than 12 and 75% were female.
The report referred to a popular misconception that juvenile sex offenders are likely to reoffend, and said numerous studies over the years have shown the opposite ”” that 85 to 95% of offending youth are never again arrested for sex crimes.
University of Oklahoma pediatrics professor Mark Chaffin, a co-author of the 2009 report, says efforts to deal constructively with juvenile sex offenders are complicated by the tendency of some legislators and others to lump them together with adult sexual predators.
“That used to be the message ”” that we should apply the template from what we know about adult pedophilia,” Chaffin said. “Now that the data has shown most of those assumptions were wrong, it’s difficult to undo those messages that people in the advocacy and treatment fields were putting out a generation ago.”
Experts say the young offenders differ from adult sex offenders not only in their lower recidivism rates, but in the diversity of their motives and abusive behavior.
While some youths commit violent, premeditated acts of sexual assault and rape, others get in trouble for behavior arising from curiosity, naivete, peer pressure, momentary irresponsibility, misinterpretation of what they believed was mutual interest, and a host of other reasons.
Josh Duggar clearly belongs in the latter group. He has not offended again, he long ago apologized to his girl victims and they forgave him, but the Duggar-haters (and there are many) cannot possibly let it rest at that.
When I was a child, sexual molestation of children was a hush-hush thing—denied and not talked about. Child victims really were frightened to speak about it, thinking that they had done something to bring it on and feeling tremendous shame. Now the table has turned and we take it far more seriously as a society (unless, of course, it’s committed by a famous movie director such as Roman Polanski, whose sexual predation of the underage as an adult has been winked at by many in Hollywood). Child victims are still sometimes reluctant to come forward as well as afraid, but much less so than before, and the perpetrators face more serious consequences most of the time. But it seems to me that some sort of re-calibration for child perpetrators of the “curiosity” type, whose offenses are limited to fondling and who appear to have learned their lessons, is in order.
As for the charge of hypocrisy of the Duggars—children are sexually curious, and all families (including, of course, those who like the Duggars limit the sexuality of their adolescents very vigorously) have to deal with the raging hormones of their growing children as they mature. With nineteen children, it’s not at all surprising that there would be some problems of this nature. It seems to have been dealt with effectively and nipped in the bud.
Christians have a belief in the power of forgiveness. Leftists not so much, unless the wrongdoers are on the left.
[ADDENDUM: A commenter brought up the Lena Dunham sibling abuse case, which reminded me that I’d written on that subject, too, and my position was consistent with what I’ve written here. You might be interested in reading my earlier post about Dunham (whom I can’t stand). In that post I went into considerably more detail about what we know about the phenomenon of intersibling abuse.]
