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News & Noteworthy © ---
Special Report: 3-5-06 |
The Policy of Youthful Behaviors:
Ninth to Twelfth grade behaviors that may label juveniles a sex offender under today's laws!
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. Over the past few years lawmakers have been proposing legislation to "get tough on sex offenders," a hot topic, with several laws affecting juvenile offenders. Lawmakers have not had an overwhelming amount of data to guide their proposals concerning juvenile sexual behaviors. Occasionally a caring parent may testify about the impact of legislation on their child, and mention that the conduct was consensual or that the other party lied about their age. We also hear about Romeo and Juliet cases although how many are unknown but they do exist. The impact of recent laws have been a tragedy to the lives of young offenders and their families, often for the rest of their lives.
Today we have assembled data into a single chart that will allow lawmakers to see the juvenile population already engaging in sexual behaviors. I wonder what lawmakers would do if they realized their proposed laws could affect 50% of the juvenile population in schools today? Would they look closer, would they make other suggestions, rather than simply criminalize all such juvenile conduct? There are other ways to handle youthful behaviors. The benchmark should not be laws that make sex offenders and predators out of school children. The policy surrounding youthful behaviors appears to have emanated from the frenzy affixed to the broad term, sex offenders.
The Center for Disease Control (CDC), in 1991, developed the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) to monitor six categories of priority health-risk behaviors among youth. These categories contribute significantly to the leading causes of death, disability, and social problems among youth and adults in the United States. The CDC focused on the health of youth. Through a survey the CDC gathered facts and compiled them into the YRBSS report. Within that survey are questions related to the sexual behaviors of youths. That data is relevant to lawmakers today and we have compiled it into a chart.
Today our chart, "The Policy of Youthful Behaviors: Ninth to Twelfth grade behaviors that may label juveniles a sex offender under today's laws!" extrapolates all the questions and data related to sexual behaviors of youths from the YRBSS survey. Given the 2003 YRBSS is representative of a smaller juvenile population of the nation, but a significant one, we have matched the YRBSS results to the 2004 U.S. Census Bureau numbers for School Enrollment, 9-12th Grades. The resulting numbers of youths should stagger lawmakers. Almost FIFTY PERCENT! The youths engaged in sexual behaviors number in the millions. These youths are the future of our society today.
Given that juveniles had self-reported their behaviors we wondered about the accuracy of the survey. The survey began in 1991 and is biennial, the CDC asked each sexual behavior questions in all surveys, so we averaged the male and female response percentages over the seven surveys (see chart right-most column). Certainly the juveniles answering the first surveys had cycled out of later surveys, and what we found is, percentages over the seven surveys are level and virtually the same as the most recent survey. To us that meant the trends represented by the questions were actually happening and reasonably reported.
The CDC has chronicled millions of students engaging in sexual behaviors. Are these all to be tomorrow's registered predatory sex offenders?
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