An American Travesty: Legal Responses to Adolescent Sexual Offending Tapa dura - 2004

This chapter presents three case studies illustrating the extraordinary recent history of legal responses to problematic sexual activities of children and teens in the United States.

An American Travesty is the first scholarly book in half a century to analyze the justice system's response to sexual misconduct by children and adolescents in the United States. Writing with a refreshing dose of common sense, Franklin E. Zimring discusses the "American travesty" noted in title--our society's failure to consider the developmental status of adolescent sex offenders. Too often, he argues, the American legal system ignores age and developmental status when adjudicating young sexual offenders, in many cases responding as they would to an adult.

This book is a summary of what we know about adolescent sex offenders, and a much-needed indictment of the legal system's ability to make appropriate decisions concerning young sexual offenders, and a call for specific reforms. Zimring shows that current policy toward young sex offenders is rarely based on facts and is often the result of and false judgements. Assumptions about juvenile sex offenders in current legislation and debate are often based only on the motives and inclinations of adult offenders. But seventy-five years' worth of empirical data show that such assumptions are wrong. After surveying the facts and outlining the additional information needed for rational policy, this book proposes a series of reforms in juvenile and criminal courts as well as sex offender registration laws. As such, An American Travesty's compelling argument will inform policymakers, lawyers, criminologists, psychologist, psychiatrists, social workers, and others trying to address the problem of the young sexual offender.