Let me propose a very sinister scenario for your consideration. I propose it only because I don’t know exactly what to conclude from it but it raises a lot of very interesting ideas.
The scenario: There’s a 25 year old man; a man who you know to be a nice guy, who is studious, who is playful and just generally a fun guy. He is a foreigner and speaks with a somewhat funny Indoasian accent. He goes to university and he likes to tell jokes. He is respectfully religious but not over-the-top with rituals. He even volunteers in a community youth group. One day this guy is joking around, playing with a boy who is 11 years old. In the spirit of the moment he makes a penis joke and makes a move towards the child’s genitals. The child pulls away, pushes him, and the day proceeds. One day this man is accused (by a third party) of indecent sexual dealings with a minor because of this particular incident.
Now, all of which I described above actually happened, the actions are exactly as I described. You can picture the man, you can picture the child, you can picture that they were having a laugh and engaging in the physical play which all children enjoy. Even the man in question clearly admits the incident occurred as described. However, the only things we don’t know are the thoughts and intentions of the 25 year old man. The matter went to court and the man was ordered to have no further unsupervised dealings with children, especially not in institutional settings like in his university studies. He was sentenced to 12 months probation and nothing else. Now, most people’s responses to this story are either 1) ‘the pedophile got away with it!’, or 2) ‘I know that guy and he’s totally a nice guy. It is such a shame that he has had his name tarnished with such a terrible accusation’.
Further from this, let’s consider one possibility. In the case it was alledged that the man meant no ill-harm because when the child pushed him away and said ‘no’, he obeyed. It follows from this that the man was acknowledging that this contact was against the child’s wishes. They added this to his character references from people who knew the man prior to this incident to conclude that he was a good man who was innocently playing with a child, joking, and incidentally happened to have made a move towards the child’s sex organs while in the course of a non-sexually intended activity. Makes sense, right? Good guy made bad move.
But imagine for a second that he wasn’t a good guy; propose he is a big bad pedophile. What would a pedophile do in the same situation? He would play a non-sexually-seeming game with the child to “groom” him, to teach him increasingly more sexually-explicit acts that the child will not associate with “bad” (or sexual) things. In the way of this grooming he will “accidently” touch the child’s genitals or allow the child to accidently touch his. The child thinks ‘we’re playing!’, meanwhile the pedophile just scored sexual contact. As I mentioned, the “play” will become increasingly more explicitly sexual, but the grooming for the pedophile involves a bit of trial and error. Sometimes he overestimates his steps; sometimes the child is more docile than first imagined. If the child were to become uncomfortable in a situation, he knows he has to slow down – because a comfortable child is much easier to take advantage of! Can you see where I’m going with this? If the child in the scenario had not pushed the man away, what would have happened? The man would could either have just been playful with the child and possibly never meant to even touch him (like a ‘normal’ person); or he could have sexually fondled the child to his own sexual gratification (like a pedophile). So therein lies my problem with judging the man either guilty or not-guilty of a sexual crime against a child: the fact that he withdrew his attempt does not prove his actions either way.
The second question this case raises for me is which is better? When this case went to court there were four possible outcomes that could have come from a verdict of either guilty or not guilty: 1) an innocent man walks free, 2) an innocent man is punished, 3) a pedophile receives deserved punishment, and 4) a pedophile goes free. All of these outcomes have an equal probability of happening. I would hate to have been a judge in this case and have to make that very hard decision. Ideally the evidence of the case helps you make the right decision (options 1 or 3 above), but as we saw in this case, judging intention is something that maybe only God can do. So now the judge has to make an even harder decision, which is the least unjust finding: set a guilty man free or convict an innocent one? Of course, the case we are considering here is not just any case, but an accusation of pedophilia. And in fact, that is what the judge based his decision on in setting the man free. He reasoned that if the man is innocent because he didn’t actually “do anything” to the child then he hasn’t been unfairly deprived of his freedom. Yet if he is guilty then his punishment will be that his name will be always be known and associated with ‘that guy that tried to touch that kid’.
Of course, to the general population this may not seem be enough (punishment to a presumed offender). After all, don’t the courts and governments also have a duty to protect the public from exposure to harm (e.g. pedophiles and other villains)? Yes, it’s in the constitution of most countries’ governments. But before I consider this last point, you have to excuse me as I recede back a step.
The man in the scenario we discussed in the beginning in fact pleaded guilty to the actions of that day as they happened (and conceded the possibility that they could be deemed to be pedophilic in nature – thought he never said that it what he intended). So the judge never even had to make the judgement of labelling the man “guilty” or “not guilty”, he just had to decide on the punishment for the man’s actions. So in a way you could say that a guilty man walked free based on the judge’s reasoning as was discussed earlier. And maybe that is what we need to focus our attentions on: setting adequate penalties for crimes against children. I know the frustration of victims and of police officers who strive to find the bad guys only to have them go to court and receive a sentence that seems to be but a mere formality and without any intention to actually punish offenders, to rehabilitate them, or even to protect the public.
(P.S. I hope the guy whose story I based my scenario on can forgive me for using his example to illustrate my point. Only God can judge you.)
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