Oppose bill concerning youth convicted of sexual offenses
There is a bill currently before the Maryland legislature that will prohibit all children and youth adjudicated or convicted of crimes of a sexual nature from attending in-person classes. It has already passed the Senate and will soon be heard in the House. A law preventing any child from in-person instruction would typically be met with understandable resistance, but this bill is gaining traction because it is based on misinformation regarding safety risks. This bill must be opposed. Let me explain why.
First, all survivors should receive evidenced-based interventions shown to prevent or ameliorate harmful effects of abuse and be treated with care, concern and compassion by institutions — including schools — in which they are embedded. Maryland law already requires that a child or youth who has sexually abused another student must transfer to a different school from his or her victim. This is a sensible approach to safety. Senate
Bill 1145 goes a lot further by seeking to bar children and youth adjudicated or convicted of sexual offenses from attending any regular in-person K-12 schools. Such an exclusionary discipline policy is discriminatory and not based on science. It will not improve the safety of other students, and it will reduce the safety of and increase harm to the disciplined children.
Youth who commit sexual offenses can safely attend school
Children and youth under age 18 account for half or more of all hands-on and online sexual offenses against other children, according to national surveys of survivors. In Maryland, felony-level sex crimes by youth dropped nearly 22% between 2020 and 2023, so we are on the right track. We absolutely must continue to address this issue with evidenced-based interventions that prevent initial offenses, reduce reoffending and improve other youth outcomes. This bill will not do that.
Children and youth who engage in harmful sexual behavior come in all shapes and sizes. Some kids are ignorant of sexual concepts, norms and laws; others are dealing with immaturity and impulsivity, or inadequate adult supervision or are traumatized by their own sexual victimization and reacting inappropriately.
Some of the harmful behavior comes from sexual curiosity and experimentation gone awry, or other aggressive or delinquent behavior. Some kids are imitating what they’ve been exposed to on the internet or in social media or what is normative in their own families; others are misinterpreting what they believed was mutual interest. Some socially isolated youth turn to younger children as substitutes for agemates; some have serious mental illness, are responding to peer pressure, are under the influence of drugs or alcohol or have nascent sexual problems.
Despite this diversity, decades of
research clearly and incontrovertibly document that children and youth adjudicated or convicted of sex crimes are unlikely to reoffend, are amenable to community-based treatment and are harmed by sex crime-specific policies. Adolescent sexual misconduct does not reflect stable internal traits but emerges from developmental issues and temporary situational factors. The most extensive review found 97% of youth who had an initial sexual offense did not offend again, even in the long term.
These youth are also remarkably responsive to treatment services, with the strongest evidence for home-based, family-focused treatment programs including “Multisystemic Therapy for Problem Sexual Behavior” and “Problem Sexual Behavior Cognitive Behavioral Therapy,” two programs that are offered in Maryland. These treatment programs reduce the (already low) likelihood of sexual and violent reoffending and improve youth educational, social, and family outcomes. Both programs also save states more money than they cost, via averted crimes.
There is strong evidence that sex-crime-specific policies targeting children and youth, like juvenile sex crime registration, are associated with harrowing collateral consequences, including increased risk of new charges, mental health problems, problems with peers, lower academic achievement and increased risk for suicidality and suicide attempts, and for sexual assault victimization. That is, these policies designed to protect children end up hurting children.
Children and youth barred from attending
in-person school will likely experience similarly awful outcomes. They will spend more time out of school and unsupervised, increasing their risk for additional delinquent behaviors, placing them at risk of abuse and assault from older teens and adults, and likely diminishing their academic achievement, which will diminish their future employability and earnings.
Sex crime-specific policies applied to children and youth adjudicated or convicted of sex crimes do not reduce or prevent future sex crimes. Without exception, the published research fails to find any public-safety-enhancing effects of policies such as juvenile sex crime registration. We can expect the same poor outcomes for S.B. 1145, because it is based on the same misconceptions: that youth who offend sexually represent a homogenous and irredeemably dangerous group of once-and-future predators. This is simply untrue.
Children and youth thrive in in-person educational settings, and the vast majority of those who have offended sexually can be safely taught in public schools without posing any threat to others. We urge Maryland lawmakers not to support this measure.