With the City Council’s recent move to explore breaking up an apartment complex housing several registered sex offenders, Dan reaches back into his past work with offenders of all ages to explore the ways we treat and view them.

I cut my teeth as a social worker in a psychiatric hospital serving childhood sex offenders – kids as young as four (yes, that’s four years, pre-Kindergarten) who had committed an act or acts of sexual violation. I had an eight year old who’d raped a girl at knife point; he was a sweet, lovable kid 360 days out of the year and a psychotic monster for the other five. I had a nine year old girl who’d used a soda bottle to penetrate her younger sister, among other nightmarish offenses; again, this child had a generally winning personality – she was intelligent, sincerely polite to adults, and creative, not to mention cute as could be – but when left alone with other kids, she was usually outright deranged, and unlike the 8 year old boy I mentioned above, she didn’t hear voices or believe she was a robot, so a lack of reality testing could not excuse her.

Could anything? Perhaps her age? Or maybe the fact that even more horrible and unmentionable acts had been done to her – and to all the kids I tried to help? They’d been raped, beaten, exploited and molested in every imaginable way by adults and teenagers, including parents, teachers, police officers, priests, and even, in one case, a therapist. Can we forgive them for repeating these actions on other children? Can we understand that with the limited life experience, coping skills, and emotional and psychological resources they had, such actions were all but inevitable?

Most of us can. When a five year old is raped repeatedly, and then a year later touches another child inappropriately, most of us see that for what it is – reaction, impulse, a terrible and tragic but predictable outcome of victimization.

But then something happens.

Ask people if they’ll forgive the five year old, and most say yes. Ask them to forgive a 25 year old, and very few will – no matter what happened to him as a child. At what age, then, do we decide personal responsibility kicks in, and childhood trauma is no longer an excuse?

As the Long Beach City Council and countless concerned citizens consider how to create policy regarding sexual offender residences, this might seem like an important consideration. But actually, it’s not. Ultimately, such matters are interesting to philosophers, theologians and therapists, but shouldn’t distract citizens and politicians from our fundamental task. Public policy isn’t about forgiveness, and it’s not about condemnation either. In fact, emotion and moral judgment really shouldn’t come into the picture. Emotion clouds issues; judgment is God’s and God’s alone. And while I’d be the first to remind us all that the proclaimed Lord and Master of the majority of Americans admonished, “What you do to the least among you, you do to me,” I don’t think we are going to give adult sexual offenders – the least among us – the same privileges we’d give to Jesus if he were walking the Earth. Sexual offenders can be treated with a modicum respect we want to foster in society at large, but they have to be contained, they have to be treated as what they are – a danger to society. And that’s what public policy is about:  safety, solutions, and objectivity. It’s about what works – what is necessary to protect the public good. Letting children have second and third chances works; taking that kind of risk with adults is plainly insane.

As angry and disgusted we may be at the thought of these predators, we aren’t going to brutalize them, or murder them, or publicly humiliate and stone them to death. That’s not the culture we want to build, and it certainly isn’t Christian. It might stop one man from reoffending, but the consequences to our sense of justice and social dignity are too great; it doesn’t work. By the same token, no matter how compassionate one may feel for these tortured souls (and make no mistake – sexual offenders, as I can attest from my work as a therapist, are a miserable lot, driven by compulsion to prey on children and others, never happy, never at peace, full of self-loathing in almost every case, unable to give or receive love, destined to remain in a personal hell until death and, perhaps, beyond) we aren’t going to let them get away with their crimes – we are going to make it known that they must cease, must make retribution, must suffer as they have made others suffer, if only because we want to them to stop.

But of course, that won’t stop them, and it seems that almost nothing will. So what works? Recidivism among sex offenders is generally higher than for any other crime. Does this mean sex offenders are more evil than other criminals, or just more compulsive? I suppose that depends on your worldview. Either way, public policy must take that recidivism into account. A sexual offender can never work with children, no matter how many Bible study groups he or she leads, no matter how much therapy he or she has undergone. It’s a lifetime stigma, and unless and until we find a reliable cure for the sickness of sexual predation, should probably remain so. Even if we recognize how powerful and entangling sexual impulses are (just ask Eliot Spitzer), and thus find some compassion in our hearts (a rarity, I think) we cannot let that insight endanger society. We have to find a way to keep people safe from those who would violate us.

I realize this is obvious.

What to do – that is the only question. Let’s keep in mind some facts. There’s no evidence that living near a school makes reoffending more likely, and no evidence that living far from one makes it less so. In case you weren’t sure, sexual offenders can read maps, walk, use taxis, find kids at the mall, on the street, on the Internet. What the current rage over “clown houses” accomplishes is nothing but providing a bit of self-righteous satisfaction to two demented radio hosts and their reactionary fan club, and a big distraction to the city council, which really has better things to do. Sex offenders are out there, and whether there are three or three hundred in your zipcode, that isn’t going to change anytime soon. Unless we banish them to a colony in the desert (an idea worth considering, perhaps) staffed with psychologists or, at least, Madmax extras, they are going to live among us, and we are going to have to deal with that reality.

Condemnation changes nothing. Nimbyism changes nothing. Unfortunately, everything we try seems to change nothing. So how about this:

Remember the child inside the heart of every one of those men, buried so deeply. And consider what you value – self-righteous anger and symbolic acts, or solutions and safety. And then ask yourself – what has helped you overcome your compulsions? Don’t deny it; you have had some, and maybe you still do. Be it anger, gambling, alcohol, internet porn or Ben and Jerry’s, we’ve all spent a bit of our lives with a monkey on our back. Sure, none of these habits rises to the level of immorality and social destructiveness represented by child molestation or rape, but that’s just the point; how can we say what we would do with such despicable compulsions if we haven’t experienced them?

So I ask you to consider what has worked for you, or for your friends and loved ones, when they’ve wanted to quit smoking, go on a diet, get their anger under control, or stop visiting the Red Room on the way home from work. And then consider how we, as a society, can offer that kind of help to children and young adults who are headed towards a path of sexual predation, before they pass the point of no return. Did condemnation help you? Did isolation do it? Or was it loving kindness? Maybe it was a bit of both; maybe it was something else entirely.

Should sex offenders live clustered in groups in your neighborhood? I don’t know, and it’s besides the point. Does the seething rage of neighbors hold a promise of curing sexual violence? I doubt it. What is needed is a solution. That means getting our understandable judgments out of the way, and it means dropping our distractions, and truly holding out some hope that these so-called monsters can be men and women again, that these depraved souls can be made whole.  It means research, resources, and, on some level, a willingness eventually to do as that master teacher and healer commanded two thousand years ago – to forgive.

Let’s not confuse forgiveness with approval or compassion with stupidity. I am not suggesting anyone be allowed to continue committing acts of evil; I am suggesting we leave the judging to God, and do on Earth what works on Earth. So far, what we are doing – condemning, punishing, and humiliating – isn’t working. Isn’t it time to try something new?