Expanding the Definition of Sexual Crimes

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA is the most legalistic country in the history of the world, and the most internally contentious, especially with regard to property, in the land of the almighty sacred right to property. You name it, and we argue about it in court. One third of the world's lawyers are American. The mere fact that everyone - all minorities, including women, people of color and homosexuals want equality in a society which does not willingly grant it only serves to exacerbate the legalistic contentiousness of America. The struggle for equality creates new laws, new crimes, and new victims. Consider the women's rights movement. Like all struggels for equality, it has been ongoing for well over a century, but, like all the others, has come to a boiling point in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. The women's movement, militant feminism, and the sexual revolution, which are all either the same thing or very closely related, amount to the same thing; the struggle for gender equality. It also amounts to an enhanced awareness of, magnification of, and litigation of, crimes and alleged crimes relating to sexual behavior. Bear in mind that in America, anyone may accuse anyone of anything, at anytime, and have a day in court. This is, of course, to the great advantage of the trial lawyering industry.Court filings involving accusations of rape have proliferated astronomically over the past few decades, as women no longer feel the social stigma attached to coming forward. This has resulted in a new legal industry predicated on the very definition of "rape". It is estimated that a great many accusations of rape, and a fair number of convictions, are cases in which the sex was actually consensual, but the woman, emboldened by the new social climate, makes the decison to press a claim after the fact, having made the decison not during, or immediately after, but long after the alleged episode. Domestic violence, which once confined itself to simple assault and battery, is now treading into the murky area in which no claim of actual physical violence is alleged. Domestic violence is now often seen as verbal, or emotional. Similarly, an entirely new litigative industry has sprung up around the definition of "sexual harassment", which was once upon a time clearly understood to be blatant, unwanted sexual aggressiveness, in situations where the vicitm had made it indisputably clear that no such aggression was wanted or welcome. A person can be charged with sexual harassment for flirting, for making a casual lewd, or perceived lewd remark, or any disagreeable comment about sexual morality. By the same token, child abuse was once considered a crime of physical injury; now it can be emotional neglect, ineffective home schooling, or even the withholding of affection or a child's allowance. Our current crime of the month is "bullying", which is undoubtedly as severe a problem as we are led to believe; but so far very inadequately and vaguely defined, legally. Criticizing the gay rights agenda in the presence of a an openly gay adolescent has been defined as child abuse in some courtrooms. Differences in belief or opinion, expressed with excessive conviction, can result in an accusation of bullying. We remember that in Stalinist Russia, the definition of "mental illness" came to include a failure to believe in communism. The equal rights movement has not yet produced any ostensible American gulags or concentrations camps, but the expansion of the definitions of sexual oriented crimes has filled court dockets in every corner of the country, and the prisons are filling up with criminals convicted of sexual crimes which, in bygone days, would never have been considered inappropiate behavior, let alone crimes. Let the sexual criminals and the drug offenders out of prison, which is sometimes but not always a good idea, and what is left is a prison system with far fewer, less than half the number of currently incarcerated "criminals". The United States has no gulags or concentration camps. But it does have the highest percentage of its citizens in prison of any country in the world, and considering this, it is time to reconsider waht we have decided to define as "criminal behavior". Otherwise, the gulags and concentration camps may not be far in the future..