The people who get treated the worst in our society are the sex offenders. They get treated as not even human. This is wrong even in case they have committed a crime.

I believe in proportional punishments. Being daily buggered and beaten in jail is an inappropriate punishment even for rape. And what is also inappropriate is these people being treated as less than human.

About half the people I know have been victims of rape or incest. The worst situations were the hardest to prosecute, as the perpetrator was protected within the family unit. Everyone howls for the blood of a pedophile who rapes other people’s children; but incest, which carries worse effects than pedophilia, is hidden by family and community loyalties and is very difficult to prosecute.

Do we then allow sex crime? By no means. But we need to do away with demonization of sex offenders. A person guilty of a sex crime is just that: a person guilty of a crime. He is not subhuman, he is not incurably evil, and he is not a fiend.

Being ugly to anything or anyone makes us worse people. This is even the case with people who are genuinely bad. Whether or not the offender is a bad human being, we are made worse human beings by treating him like he has cooties. And we need to hold ourselves to a higher standard of conduct than is practiced by the perpetrator and be better people doing better things.

At the heart of the matter is not what the offender is as a person. At the heart of the matter is what kind of people are we. Are we people who run witch hunts? Are we people who demonize people and treat as less than human? Or are we better than that?

The attitudes of dealing with sex crime should be reworked. Sex offenders are not demons, they are people who have done something wrong. By all means hold perpetrators accountable, but do not treat them as less than human. Honor their humanity and in so doing affirm your own.