Free Best Sex Writing 2009 by Rachel Kramer Bussel Page B

mind, the male penis was a diseased, disgusting thing. A year later I ended up in counseling for severe anxiety and depres- sion.There was a box on a questionnaire asking if I’d ever been the victim of sexual abuse, and that opened the door.
    A couple of weeks ago, I threw the babysitter’s name into a na- tional sexual-offender registry.A match came up, but the photo was a guy from Texas who happened to have the same name. I doubt the babysitter went on to become a habitual child molester—sta- tistics suggest that he didn’t. I think it was a case of a sexually con- fused teen who made a bad decision.
    In nine out of ten sexual assaults, the victim knows the perpetra- tor. In roughly 35 to 40 percent of those cases, it’s a relative. And if it’s not a relative, it’s Mom’s new boyfriend (one of the more com- mon victim-offender relationships) or, as in my case, a babysitter.
    “The mythology of the dirty old man in the trench coat with the candy lurking around kids at a school yard is misplaced,” says San Diego County Public Defender Marian Gaston.“The vast ma- jority of sex offenders, they don’t look like that…It’s not this easily identifiable group of outsiders who can then be cast away. It’s your sister’s new boyfriend; it’s your stepdad.”
    The term sex offender conjures the kind of monolithic im- age Gaston refers to—one that’s reinforced by the news media and tough-on-crime politicians, despite evidence to the contrary.
    Misperception and fear, rather than good empirical research, seem to be what drives sex-offender laws.
    A case in point is a new law that takes effect this week in San Diego.
    The “Child Protection” ordinance, passed unanimously by the City Council in March, is a spin-off of California’s Jessica’s Law, ap- proved by voters in 2006.Among other things, Jessica’s Law created mandatory sentences for sex offenders, requires that certain sex of- fenders be outfitted with Global Positioning System (GPS) devices for life, and expanded the list of what constitutes a sexual offense. Most controversial are the two-thousand-foot-radius “predator- free zones” the law established around schools and parks in which sex offenders who are paroled after November 7, 2006, are forbid- den to live.
    The law was named after Jessica Lunsford, a nine-year-old Flor- ida girl who was abducted from her home, raped, and killed in 2005 by John Couey, a registered sex offender who lived about one hun- dred yards from the Lunsfords. Couey abducted Jessica by entering the home at night through an unlocked door.
    Four unnamed plaintiffs—two from San Diego County—are challenging Jessica’s Law before the state Supreme Court, argu- ing that the law’s residency restrictions are too broad. None of the four’s crimes involved children.
    Despite the court challenge, San Diego went ahead and added more locations to the list of safe zones: city libraries, city parks, amusement parks (SeaWorld, the zoo), video arcades, licensed day- care facilities, and businesses that cater to children, like Chuck E. Cheese.
    Additionally, the San Diego law creates “presence” restrictions that forbid registered sex offenders from being within three hun- dred feet of any of the above locations. While the city’s enhanced
    residence restrictions apply only to people who commit a sexual offense after the law takes effect, the three-hundred-foot restriction applies to all registered sex offenders.
    Sgt. Mark Sullivan, who supervises the San Diego Police De- partment’s Sex Offender Registration Unit, said enforcement of the presence restriction would likely be complaint-driven.
    “We used to get complaints from mothers that would take their kids to the park and say, ‘There’s a weird guy staring at my kids,’ and they’d call the police, the police would show up [and] realize they’re talking to a sex offender,” Sullivan said, “but there was no law that would allow an officer to tell him to