I actually wrote this on Sunday, and realized today, Thursday, that I never published, probably expecting to do more...
Today is game day. I really can't help wishing the Packers will lose. Sorry, locals. I know some of you have invested thousands of dollars for a few tickets to the game. And it means a lot to you, and it pumps up the economy and all that. But for me, it's just one unending annoyance. If you want to measure the level of distraction, see our local news. With the national news devoted almost entirely to the who's-gonna-win predictions and strategies of the primary contests, it would be nice if the local news could administer at least the small amount of news they usually give, but Packers coverage has crowded out all but a few minutes of every broadcast. They've even be telling me what today's weather would be many times over all week, at the expense of knowing the weather day immediately ahead of those broadcasts.
One of the few stories to peep through on Friday was that of yet another sex offender, although this one has so far been convicted only in the media and is as a legal matter still technically innocent. Among the charges per Channel 4 was "pornography," which, so far as I am aware, is still protected by the Constitution and not a crime. This points I think to two things: first, the reporter was not awake, and the editor did not care, because they had 40 seconds or so to report the story and then get on to their real interest: a local family telling us their superstitious rituals to help Green Bay win, and which shirts are lucky and which shoes are not. Second, right under the surface, there is an understanding that these laws are not just about (or at least the coverage is not about) protecting potential victims, but is really focused on the sex thing. Get some sex into the newscast, while posing as anti-sex.
This struck me particularly because last week's Law and Order SVU just a day or two before this was about a little kid who became a serial rapist and his defense was the internet did it to him with its pervasive porn. What was strange was that no one in the show (so far as I saw, although I missed the beginning) made what I thought would be an obvious point: the really violent rape porn that the boy described is anything but ubiquitous. I think I have a reasonable familiarity with online pornography, but I have never personally encountered what this child described. I haven't had any personal or professional reason to look for it, but I would hazard that the general quantity of porn must be thousands or tens of thousands of times greater, maybe millions of times greater than that of viscerally violent porn. For a show that's usually pretty smart about knowing the difference between sex and rape, this was a bizarre omission.
I think these two events underscore a weakness in our public approach to sex crimes, which is, treating the sexual element as their defining characteristic, and obscuring the significance of violence and real harm (and indeed all details of the offense). I represented a teen whose crime of having sex with his underage future wife carried a far worse sentence than he could have gotten for just beating her (which was also alleged, but why try to prove it when you can just show the teens were hooking up before they were wed?). I have another case where it's clear that the only protection the law provided was not to potential victims, but to the public's irrational fears and the "yuck factor" concerning some things they'd rather not think of. (The law deals with what kinds of busineseses a registered sex offender can own or operate.) In these cases, it looks like sex panic has trumped prevention of actual harm. (Although oddly, as a consequence of the same motivations and lack of legislative precision, it can also happen that a crime will be considered a sex offense by definition even when it has no sexual aspect.)
UPDATE: Packers lost. Our locals appeared to be good sports about it. The news has returned to its normal state, which is poor, but better than it was when it was all Packers all the time.
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