The mandatory aspect of these laws creates a fertile ground for false accusations.

Once society is told that they must report any suspected child abuse incidents to the authorities---law enforcement--- or possibly be charged themselves, the entire situation becomes complex and muddied.

Take this scenario----The parents bring a young child into the physician's office with a case of poison ivy. While examining the lesions, the doctor notices several bruises on his legs and he asks the mother about them. The mother says that her young son and her husband----the child's father--- were wrestling in the floor and that is most likely how the bruises got there.

The physicians then asks the little boy about the bruises. The child says, "Daddy and me were wrestling. I think he got mad at me and kicked me."

The physician is fairly comfortable with that explanation, but he also does not want to be arrested for not reporting any possible child abuse, so he calls the police.

Now the police are involved.

Here comes the police. They file a police report which says "possible child abuse." They take pictures of the suspicious bruises in case the DA needs them for a criminal investigation.

The DA sees the report and decides to file charges against the perpetrator. Better be safe than sorry, and besides this is an election year. "If it saves one child, it is worth it," thinks the DA to himself.

The father is arrested, must come up with the money to make bail; there is an investigation and he risks getting a felony conviction for the bruises. The father borrowed the money to make bail and retained an attorney, which was expensive.

His name and picture is splattered all over the local evening news. The publicity became so intense that he was fired from his job. His reputation is ruined and now he has no source of income.

He may go to trial and lose because all the jury will see are the bruises and the kid can only say that this happened when he was roughhousing with Dad. And then there are the pictures. Yes, the pictures. They show a couple of real nasty bruises. The jury does not want to take the chance of acquitting a child abuser, so they vote to convict him.

Dad now has a felony conviction.

OR the prosecutor offers the father a plea deal. He tells the father that if he goes to trial, he will ask for the maximum penalty which is ten years imprisonment, but if he will plead guilty he will get probation.

So he enters a plea and the guilty plea follows him the rest of his life.

HOW DID ALL THIS HAPPEN? It happened because the government passed mandatory reporting laws. The government refused to allow the physician, who probably has seen much more child abuse than the police, to use HIS discretion that it was probably not child abuse.

The law gives no credence to those that know more about physical abuse than the police. The physician would not have normally reported a couple of bruises on a young child's leg, but he was forced to report it or risk getting into trouble himself.

Someone might say, "Well, even if charges were filed, they could never get a conviction with a couple of bruises as the only real evidence." Trust me, I am the last person in the world that you need to convince me of that.

There were bruises, the little boy could not really explain them, so the investigation was started.

Because of mandatory reporting laws, the government took the decision to report the bruises out of the hands of a qualified professional and instead forced him to report the bruises to the police even though he did not think any child abuse had occurred.

My friends, this is just a simple example of why many innocent men are convicted.

rewdiazepam

I'm not sure what experience you guys have with safety plans, so please if anyone has done one more recently than I have please chime in and correct me if I'm saying something wrong (free or brain it seems like from your posts you guys are going through that process now).

When I did a safety plan, it was pretty simple. Stay away from children, especially if by myself. If they come some place that I was, I was to just leave. The second part of the plan was to tell everyone in my sphere of influence what my crime was, all family and all close friends. This created a safety net and it made sure there was absolutely zero opportunity for more victims from that pool of family or close friends.

Now while I was on probation my therapist and my PO made sure I followed the plan. When they saw that I did they "graduated" me from therapy.

I believe that safety net to be absolutely essential in the management of people with contact crimes. We are always quoting RSOs have low reoffends rates, this is true and the statistics bear this out. A big reason why is that first time offenders of known victims either in family or close acquaintances when everyone knows in the family it drastically reduced the ability for any other opportunities to commit another crime. Everything I've read shows most people who commit contact crimes are not pedophiles, but that it's a crime of opportunity. Most of these first time offenders aren't serial molesters who will go find stranger children to abuse. As long as you reduce the pool of available victims you drastically reduce the chance of another contact crime.

If you do not have that safety net I think a safety plan isn't worth the paper it's written on. I don't know how you do that and at the same time keep anonymity. Maybe if you could morph this German program with CoSA you could find a good balance? But again I am not sure how that would fit together.

What you said thought:

"Do I think that treatment providers should report the crime? If we don't make them mandatory reporters, they can assess if a child is in continued risk of being harmed. But let's think about this for a minute. If someone goes to help help for their addiction, it's because they don't want to struggle with that addiction anymore. Therefore, I believe a child is at a lower risk of continually being abused. Maybe the family already knows about the abuse, and want to work together to prevent them from abusing again."

I have no problem if it is just an addiction to CP, or pedophillic thought with no action but I don't know how you make this work with actual contact crimes.

My first thought with a contact crime is what about therapy for the abused child in this situation? Do we ignore them? If you decide to give the child therapy and its outside the family (35% of child abuse is in family, 58% is acquaintance) do you tell the parents of the child? What if they want to go to the police? So getting therapy for the child most likely leads back to the justice system.

If you don't get the child therapy you are letting the child suffer knowing they could be in pain. What if the child commits suicide or harms them self? Or what is more common, that the abuse leads to them going on to abuse someone else?

"Do the treatment providers take their word for it? Maybe the treatment provider have the offender create a safety plan to prevent them from relapsing. I mean, how does a sex offender treatment provider know that the offender hasn't reoffended while in treatment? They can't always know, but they have rules and if those rules are broken, you are kicked out of treatment."

You are right that they can't always know. However, the management of sex offenders on probation or parole is three prong: PO, therapist, polygrapher. This provides for a decent chance to catch someone who is offending while still on probation or parole. Not to mention they are also registered sex offenders so they are on the radar of police too (which is why I would support a police only registry, another layer of protection with much less harm done to registrants over the public one).

This is a very complicated issue.

I don't believe someone being on a registry is doing anything to protect children.

It would be great to see exactly how Germany does this, but it makes sense. If someone seeking help will help them to stop and prevent abuse, I say we should do it.

As far as the children are concerned, they can seek help as well. Many don't report for years after the abuse occurred. My daughter would have much preferred hubby received help and stopped her abuse, than to see him incarcerated for the rest of his life. This didn't do anything but cause her more harm.

I met somebody recently who has a copy of the Dunkelfeld program. The Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse in Baltimore is also connected to Dunkelfeld. From what I have heard, the word is still out about the effectiveness of that project.

When you think about it, of course, it has to be that way. Dunkelfeld is primary prevention.

So, when you think about prevention, there are 3 levels.

Primary would be educating and providing support for people at risk before anything has occurred.

Secondary would be sex offender treatment and programs in the community.

Tertiary would be like incarceration. You know, lock 'em up, etc. Most legal "solutions" would be considered tertiary, meaning nothing happens until after the damage has been done.

One of the problems with primary prevention is that there is no way to prove its efficacy. You can't know that it worked because the desired outcome is basically nothing. In other words, if you have programs to prevent something from happening, you have no way to prove that your program worked because there is nothing to count. Nothing to do research on. Nothing happened, which is what you want.

Very few funding sources will pay money for "nothing" to happen, so primary prevention is generally not widely supported. That's why you see the big money going to programs where people have already been hurt. Because you can see results.

Dunkelfeld, apparently, is not too different from, say, a 12-step program. Its support. No one can prove that it works because the desired outcome is that nothing happens. In general, though, Germans are highly practical people. They see a problem and they create a solution. In order to get people to become part of the solution, they advertise. They are open about the issue (although the groups are held in private) so that they will reduce incidence of child sexual abuse. I'm not sure that they care so much about seeing "results."

We can't do that here in the States. We live in "sue-happy" times and people believe in "legal solutions". So you have to step lightly around any kind of prevention program because if it is proven that someone in your program offended and you didn't stop them, you can lose your shirt (and your savings account as well). Plus, as we have already said, to even admit you have a problem can severely damage your life.

I think primary prevention in this country is best carried out in anonymous ways. For example, there are numerous internet support groups, like virpeds.org or b4u-act.org. That has to be done by the person who recognizes that they have a problem.

What really needs to happen in this country is for people to open up to the idea that it is OK for a person who has a problem that may lead to sexual offending to seek help...without condemnation...without fear of "legal solutions." Nobody knows what that would look like yet.

These are highly complex moral issues.

I was listening to "Doctor Radio" on Syrius XM today and there was a guy on who's written a book about brain function and criminality. I just put it on my Kindle so I haven't read it yet. What little I heard him saying were things that we discuss on this forum, especially discussions like this.

I'm going to put this on a separate post, if anyone is interested.

Thought:

"As far as the children are concerned, they can seek help as well."

I know they can seek help, but in this scenario are you saying the program shouldn't get them help?

An example: John Doe is molesting his neighbors son who is 10. He reports it to this program and he starts a safety plan and starts intensive counseling. Let's say he is a perfect client and completes all therapy and truly wants to change and commits no other crimes going forward. Are you okay sitting back and not helping the 10 year old boy?

No, I'm not saying that at all. Ideally, I would prefer the whole family be involved in the process. If it was my family, I would prefer that all of us go to see a therapist to help us all deal and heal from hubby's actions. Daughter would have been happier for it. If she still wanted to have criminal charges filed, then I would have done so, just as I had before. However, I also understand how complicated that can be. Hubby didn't come to me for help, as he was afraid of losing his family. He couldn't seek help, as he would loose his family. He wasn't able to do it on his own, no matter how hard he tried.

I believe that the option should be available, but not mandatory.

Thank you Peek for that info. I think prevention can be measured though. If you see a decrease in reports of sexual abuse, let's say over a span of 10 years, you can see how the prevention program worked. If the reports of sexual abuse declined even by 10%, that's great! If we are all about "if it saves one child", then we should implement it. However, I believe that the number can be even higher. If it's advertised about this support group, and people seek help, there will be less children affected.

So in that scenario of the neighborhood kid being abused you tell the kids parents right? Wouldn't that lead to the justice system in most scenarios?

In that scenario, I would say that the abuser would not have to disclose the abuse to the neighbors. It's a fine line, I agree Independent. But I also know that many abuse victims can move on with their lives, even if the abuse isn't disclosed. IF that child did disclose, just like today, they have treatment available to them, and yes, it could lead to criminal charges.

In a perfect world, I wish that no child was abused, and that every person was able to seek help before they abused. But I also know that if someone stepped over the line once, realizes that what they did was wrong, and seeks help, they should be able to get that help, so the abuse doesn't continue.

Well, Thought, the truth of the matter is that reports of child sexual abuse have been declining significantly anyway. Its hard to know what all the factors are that contribute to that, but that is the fact. The information I got was from the Moore Center Symposium I went to a couple of weeks ago. Public health people are really the ones who perform those kinds of measurements and that is what they said. I understand your perspective, but it ts not always about what seems logical.

And what is it that we all want, anyway? We don't want any child to experience abuse . It really is about "saving children", but not only a select group (i.e., Lauren's Kids). And we don't want families to have to go through this. And we want pedophiles to get the support they need to live healthy, non-offending lives.

You know, I was thinking about the Dunkelfeld project, because what was described to me about how it is run did not sound so remarkable. What is remarkable about the project is that it happens at all!

The registry thing is fully entrenched in our culture. Its probably not going to go away in our lifetimes. But what can change is that it can be disempowered. Yes, some people use it for bad purposes. But mostly people use it because they are ignorant of other ways to be safe (plus not realizing that the registry really has nothing to do with being safe.)

That is why I suggest that truly anonymous forms of support are the way to go in this country. Look at us!

A Dunkelfeld like project online or on the phone is the only way to do that. But there is no way to measure behavior from that. But it would also would have given both our husbands an outlet for working this out besides the crash-landings we both experienced in our families.

My problem with not disclosing to the neighbor and get the neighbor child immediate help is you don't know how it is affecting him. Maybe he goes on and discloses later on and ended up okay. Maybe he had suicidal thoughts, what if he acted on them?? What if he went on to abuse someone else because he didn't get therapy? We know not everyone who is abused goes on to abuse others, but it seems it certainly increases the likelihood.

It doesn't pass the smell test to knowingly leave a victim like that in the lurch.

It's weird peek, crime has gone down across the board for quite some time but the fear has gone up. That's the if it bleeds it leads media in association with human psychology.

I agree Pek. I want to try anything that would give people like our husbands the help they need. I don't understand not giving them help until AFTER they offend. I also agree that an anonymous setting would be the best.

Independent, I understand where you are coming from. But you are assuming that every child will helf harm, or go on to abuse others because of the abuse they suffered. This isn't the case, and as it stands right now, unless it's disclosed a child doesn't get that help. Many go on with their lives normally.

Is it a perfect scenario - no.

Even if the program was to help those who haven't offended to seek help before they offend, I would be ok with that. But I also recognize that someone may not disclose they have offended, and lie to say they have thought about offending, so they can get help to avoid doing it again.

If you have a suggestion on how to make this program work and get legislators to agree to it, then by all means, I'm listening.