Creating Monsters

The Orange County Register features a story on how sex offenders are getting younger and more violent:

Some psychologists blame the increase -- 40 percent over two decades -- on a society saturated with sex and violence and the fact that many of the accused were themselves victims of adult sexual predators. Others say there aren't more children committing such crimes, there is simply more awareness, better reporting and a general hysteria about sex offenders.

I don't think "more awareness" can deflate the statistical truth of a 40% increase.

No, it goes far beyond being explained by "more awareness" or "more laws." I've investigated enough sex crimes and been involved in enough investigations from my time in law enforcement to realize kids don't just come up with the kind of behavior we're seeing these days on their own:

Recent incidents range from two 13-year-old boys in Omaha, Neb. who were accused in January of videotaping their assault of two 5-year-old girls and a 3-year-old boy, to the 8-year-old Buffalo, N.Y. boy accused of assaulting a 6-year-old boy after he saw a prison rape scene in an R-rated movie.

Or this:

Maloney represents the family of a 6-year-old boy raped by a fellow kindergartner. In an interview with a police officer, amid discussions about Pokemon, the boy revealed that a classmate attacked him in the bathroom and raped the boy.

Usually, the child who commits sex crimes has been victimized himself, or has been exposed to sexual media, or both.

When you couple the kind of stuff some kids are exposed to in the home, with the fact that they are without any kind of moral support in the public school system, it's little wonder you have this kind of horrible behavior.

Children are taught in school that faith and the moral code that comes with it is to be marginalized if not ridiculed (why else would such a potentially important area of life be completely sanitized from public view, were it not a marginal or silly subject?), and we wonder why they commit immoral acts.

Children are taught that we are just highly evolved animals, with no moral accountability to a higher authority, and we wonder why they act like nothing they do really matters?

Human beings will never act with complete moral responsibility; it just isn't in our nature, given that we have been fallen beings since the time of Adam and Eve. But when we teach children, either directly or indirectly, that there is no moral accountability, we lose any hope we might have had at a healthy, ordered society.