To the editor:
I applaud Leigh Davis’s energetic attention to important issues in her first six months as our new Third District representative in the state House of Representatives. I look forward to her future work there.
But even as a person who was recruited at age 14 into unwelcome sexual contact with a 59-year-old counselor, I cannot support her proposed House Bill 1634 to raise from 16 to 18 the age of legal sexual consent for teenagers who become sexually involved with a supervisory adult.
I don’t in any way condone sexual relationships between adults and people under the age of 18 whom they supervise, but I think the current draft of Leigh’s bill is an inappropriately harsh response to the phenomenon of such sexual contact, and would be ineffective as a preventive measure.
In 2005 The Berkshire Eagle published an 800-word op-ed column that I wrote about my experience of what is often labeled sexual abuse.
I wrote:
“My experience of sexual abuse and its aftermath suggests that it is a complex social phenomenon, with layers of complicity and responsibility … that extend well beyond the perpetrator, the victim, and the immediate institutional aegis of the abuse, to family, elected officials, schools, and even the courts.”
“[R]esponsibility for sexual abuse cannot be neatly assigned solely to the offender. As a former victim, I think that protection of young people from sexual abuse is more likely to come from increased recognition of the wider layers of responsibility for it, than in locking up offenders for long terms.”
Since 2005, I have read a lot about pedophilia. That study has strengthened my sense of its complexity as a social phenomenon, and of the futility of rigid provisions for a mandatory ten-year prison sentence and severe restrictions on parole eligibility, like those Leigh has proposed in her bill.
If imprisonment can ever be appropriate in such cases, sentence lengths should be at the discretion of a judge. The exercise of good judgment attuned to the specifics of each case is what we select and pay judges for.
If we want a new state law that would throw the book at a teacher like Matthew Rutledge for his alleged activities at Miss Hall’s School, should we not also consider strong new legal penalties against administrators like those at Miss Hall’s reported to have been unresponsive for many years to complaints about his behavior with students?
John Breasted
Great Barrington
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