There are people endorsing hysterically prudish attitudes by saying that many people get traumatized through sex.
That some people get traumatized through sex no more damns sex than that some people get traumatized through family damn family.
There are all sorts of ways in which people can get traumatized. People get traumatized in war. People get traumatized in bad upbringing. People get traumatized when their families get shot or their countries get destroyed. Sex is one of the many things that can go wrong. Sex abuse victims don’t own traumatization.
You want to trauma-dicksize? I will win. I had the whole world that I came from completely destroyed. I had a hideous home situation. I was taken to an alien country where people treated me like dirt regardless of how much effort I put into things. I had a woman whom I loved, whose stepmother manipulated her against me. I have been relentlessly and viciously persecuted for years on end by people accusing me of a crime I did not commit. In none of these cases did it have anything to do with sex.
So I had a friend tell me that we don’t rehabilitate sex offenders. Why on earth not? Socrates was a sex offender. He liked little boys. Mohammad was a sex offender. He had sex with a 9-year-old child. Thomas Jefferson was a sex offender. He had children by a teenage slave. If someone is guilty of a sex crime, he is just that: someone guilty of a crime. He is not an animal, he is not subhuman, and he is not damned for life.
I want to see these matters dealt with in a sane and humane manner. Clearly we cannot have people raping children or giving Rohypnol to college girls; but neither can we have witch hunts and demonization. Right now, we see some people so convinced of their goodness, yet they treat a section of the population as less than human. By taking that stance they become worse people themselves. When we treat someone as less than human that also dehumanizes us. That is even the case with people who are genuinely bad.
At the heart is not who sex offenders are as people. It is who we are as people. Are we the kind of people who run witch hunts? Are we the kind of people who dehumanize others? Are we the kind of people who relentlessly persecute people we do not know? Or are we – and our countries – better than that?
Do we let sex offenders off? Not at all. We prosecute sex crime like any other crime. However we don’t dehumanize these people. As for sex, it is important to correct hysterical thinking about it. Sex is just one of the many things that can be used for wrong ends. That does not make it bad in itself.