Yesterday, I published a commentary concerning the mental illness which surrounds the attempted normalcy associated with transgenderism. But, that same normalcy is being applied by some to the crime of pedophilia.
It was recently reported that a married former New Jersey middle school teacher had sex with her student and then continued to carry out six years of “grooming, manipulation and abuse” starting when the boy was just twelve, a prosecutor argued during a bail hearing Wednesday.
Her purported victim, now an adult, alleged the pair had a sexual relationship while he was her pupil. But she is not the first.
Mary Kay Letourneau, an American teacher who pleaded guilty in 1997 to second-degree rape of a child. Her case gained massive national attention because she was in her 30s, the mother of four, and engaged in a sexual relationship with a twelve-year-old student, bearing his children, and finally marrying him.
A public school teacher in Florida is also in trouble with the law. The forty-one year-old man is accused in Seminole County of having a sexual relationship with a thirteen-year-old student and the child’s mother. He taught his student Morse code in order to secretly message her without her mother’s knowledge.
A forty-six year-old man wiho used to coach and teach at two Minneapolis charter schools was already serving twelve years in prison for sexually assaulting four boys, was additionally sentenced to life in prison on twelve additional charges of criminal sexual conduct.
Numerous Catholic dioceses in the US, and throughout the world, have filed for bankruptcy due to sexual abuse lawsuits, leading to comprehensive, high-value settlement funds for survivors. The abuse of both boys and girls was widespread, and often went unreported for years, as bishops transferred the accused priests rather than report their crimes to police.
Legal restrictions on minors entering contracts protect them from their own lack of experience, judgment, and maturity. Because minors are legally deemed to lack the capacity to fully understand contractual rights and obligations, they can generally disaffirm (void) most contracts, making them unenforceable against them. These protections prevent exploitation, though they allow contracts for essentials, like food and shelter.
For these same reasons, statutory rape laws are on the books, so that adults are unable to take advantage of innocent minors. And pedophilia has been treated as a crime.
In addition, "look-back laws" are state-enacted, temporary, or permanent legislative changes that reopen the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse (CSA) lawsuits, allowing survivors to sue even if their claims were previously time-barred. Since 2019, over thirty states have enacted such laws, often prompting thousands of claims against institutions.
Laws have been designed to protect children from sexual abuse, exploitation, and the long-term psychological and physical harm caused by such acts.
It is time to recognize pedophilia as a crime, and not to give those who practice it a sense of "victim-hood" for suffering from a mental illness. That is equally a crime.
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