Sex
True Crime Sex Education: The Othered
Part II: No one wants to be the other.
Posted July 5, 2021 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
You're never going to meet Jesus Carvajal. After being arrested on the charge of having raped four women in Las Vegas in 2018, the 36-year old lost his home, his car, and his job, and then was abandoned by his girlfriend and most of his friends. His credit went down the drain. It didn't matter that two months after his arrest, police arrested the real assailant and the DA dropped all charges against Jesus. The news of his exoneration never caught up with the label he'd been tagged with, the job interviews that were canceled without reason, the looks people gave him. I'm never going to meet Jesus either. I just read his story this week in my local paper that after a years-long effort at getting his life back, Jesus gave up and committed suicide. He had been "othered" to death.
No one wants to be the other. This is true generally but it is especially true in every aspect of human sexuality. We don't want to be "guilty" of being the one who is in love with someone everyone around us despises. We don't want to be the only one who likes boys when all the guys around are liking girls (or at least saying they do). We don't want to be the one with the [fill in the blank] kink when no one else is owning anything remotely the same. We really don’t want to be the one accused of four counts of sexual assault, even in a system where we are “innocent until proven guilty.”
When writing up my first few dozen sex offender evaluations for the courts, this cultural burden weighed heavily on me. But the weight of the need to think like and be like everyone around me was indiscernible to me. It had always been there, like so many truths about myself that were long outside the scope of my self-awareness. In hindsight, I was a great deal like the people in Jesus Carvajal’s life who made a quick bee-line for the exits.
When I was writing these first few evaluations, what I lacked in self-awareness was made up by the crushing awareness of what others in the criminal justice system might think. And when it comes to sex crimes, even defense attorneys struggle with their own emotional combination of fear, revulsion, and the threat of contagion from being just that close to sex offenders. You can imagine the comments, "You defend sex offenders?" From the tone of the question, laden heavily with emotional heft, there is no right answer.
In part one of this true-crime sex-ed series of posts, I shared how, after reading police reports, victim statements, and all the rest, I started out with loathing. I couldn't wait to get away from the offenders. But after hearing the story of the man who'd been convicted of a sex crime and the story of the boy he'd once been, I was aware of a new narrative thread that explained just how he'd come to that place in his life where he ended up doing what he'd done.
But, no worries. I stuck to my guns and usually wrote a fairly scathing evaluation well-populated with words like "deviant," "perversion," and of course, everyone's favorite, "predator." My judgmental words were the attempt of a much younger man trying to be right about crime and failing. I now cringe at my own words. Not so much because those words were cruel and I am now soft. No, the problem with my former language is that my words were not presenting objective truth. No, words like "predator" are subjective and represent a highly emotional piling-on that makes a judge's job harder by muddying the disposition of public policy. It was the language and the way of thinking behind it that led to the tremendous pressures put on Jesus Carvajal’s decision to end his life.
To be the other in matters of sexuality, whether socially or professionally, is to take on tremendous risk. To see the other and try to explain it carries its own risk. Not so tremendous a risk as to put one in jail for years but certainly enough to destroy a reputation or a career. In my fear, I learned how to pass, to blend in, to be one of the team. I had mastered how to be one of the disapproving rather than one of the disapproved. Rather than approaching the public policy of how we might best manage those who commit sex crimes as a scientist, I realize now I'd become one of those searching the ground for stones to throw.
But the stories of the people I've interviewed have collectively wrecked everything about my neat view of sexual criminality and of even so-called "normal" sexuality. Stories of the little boys my clients were, years before they'd committed any crime, explained rationally how they'd come to make horrible choices. They weren't innocent (like Jesus Carvajal), they were often guilty. But I have learned that determining guilt is not particularly helpful in understanding criminal behavior and is not at all helpful in preventing future criminal behavior.
I don't expect anyone to share my feelings because, unless you've been there, you really can't—the social taboos are just too rigid. But going into prisons and jails for the last few decades has exposed me to so many of their stories and all of them are so similar. We'd all have to be as brain dead every minute of our lives to miss the broad-brush strokes of how we create the sex offenders around us. Yes. I said that. We create them.
Not on purpose of course. Like many offenders, we too can say, "I didn't mean to do anyone any harm." But, like them, we did do harm. How so? Not mostly by what we all did. Yes, there's some of that, but mostly our fault is about what we failed to do. And no, this is not some guilt trip that I'm inflicting on readers of this series. Nope. This is an objective review of what first responders call "a critical incident." In the debriefing for a critical incident (like a cop getting shot), a debrief is held to examine the facts. The goal of the debrief is to prevent similar events in the future from happening again. Of course, in life, there are no certainties, but we do what we can to learn, to process, to do better in the future. As best as we can.
We don't do this with sex crimes. Sure, in my true-crime podcast, Sex Crime Central (available on all platforms), we do a debrief but most of us who could learn to let go, relax, and genuinely understand criminal sexual behavior will never take part in such a debrief. Frankly, in doing so, you too would risk becoming the other.
For most of my life, I have loved opera. One evening at the opera, during the intermission, my wife watched as the woman on the other side of my seat asked, "So what do you do for a living?" When I told her that I counseled people convicted of sex crimes her face became pinched, "Well, I guess someone has to." Now rationally, trying to help someone who's committed an antisocial act avoid repetition of the behavior sounds like a good idea, right? But for my fellow lover of opera, just working with those labeled "sex offender" contaminated me to the point where she felt the need to move her seat at the end of the intermission. Cooties?
It is commonly said of sex offenders that, "They all should be put on an island somewhere," or "They should all be executed." This is a fear-based fantasy that protects us from the contagion of understanding. Join me and we will join Jesus Carvajal and become other together.
