By Seamus McGraw
The Unforgiven
A ten-year-old kid plays doctor with his kid sister. A senior in high school has consensual sex with his sophomore girlfriend. Dangerous sex offenders? Yes, say the nation's toughest sex laws. And some states' punishments include posting the juveile offenders' pictures on websites for the rest of their lives. Have we gone too far? SPIN, September 2001
He's sitting in the front yard of a tiny clapboard cottage, hunched over in a rusting lawnchair that was left behind by the previous tenants.
"Do me a favor, wouldja?" he says, as I ease my rental car into the dirt driveway alongside the house. "Park behind the pickup. My dad's gonna have to get the big truck in there when he gets home."
I drop the grey Metro behind the old man's Ranger, turn off the AM radio that offered only traditional black gospel music as company along the backroads of South Carolina's coastal lowlands, and step out to greet the boy.
"You're Lucas?"
"Yep," he says, trying hard to act as if he's mastered the deep-fried diffidence that defines Southern men. Skinny, with a mop of curly red hair, freckles, and a pair of ears everyone hopes he'll someday grow into, he looks a little younger than he sounded on the phone. "I guess we should go inside," he says.
He pushes aside a newspaper and purposely plants himself on the old paisley couch in the living room, where hell stay for most of the next two hours.
I had planned to take Lucas, his stepmom, Rebecca, and maybe even his dad, out for a ride. I wanted them to show me the library and the Winn-Dixie and the massive Baptist and Assembly of God churches that draw all but a handful from this hard-shell community each and every Sunday morning. I wanted Lucas to give me a tour of his school, the neighborhood where his girlfriend lives, all the places in town that define home for a teenage boy.
But Lucas and his family would have none of it. Those places were risky now. One careless word, one question asked a little too loudly, even being seen in this tight-knit neighborhood in the presence of a stranger with a pen and a tape recorder, and there was a danger that Lucas' secret might slip out. No, if we were going to talk, it was going to be in the cozy living room with the couch, the 19-inch color television, and the plywood door with a fist-sized hole in it (another souvenir from the last tenants, says Rebecca). Or in his bedroom, with the oversize Mickey Mouse watch on the wall and the second-hand dresser where he keeps the mouthpiece from the tuba he plays in the eighth grade school band.
The bedroom is Lucas' refuge, he says, and later that day, he'll retreat to it for a while. He'll tear a piece of looseleaf paper from a school notebook, sprawl on his bed alongside the Harry Potter books that he's read at least five times each, and, in handwriting that seems a little tentative and childish for a boy who's nearly 15, he'll write a letter to a little girl that he misses very much, a letter he says he's long been forbidden to write...
Dear Elly,
I'm writing to tell you I'm sorry. I know what I did was wrong and Sorry will probably never be enough. And no matter what anybody says you'r (sic) never going to forget it. But all I really want to say is I'm sorry for what I did and I don't want you to be mad. But I guess in a way you always will be. But do me a favor and don't take it out on anybody. Just sit down with mom and talk about how you feel ... just don't take it out on anybody alright. I'm sorry.
Love, Lucas
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Sit down in front of a computer anywhere in the world, log on to South Carolina's Internet registry of sex offenders, and listed there among the adult pedophiles, sexual predators, serial rapists, and the kiddie pornographers, you'll find Lucas Tanner II. He ended up on the list eight months ago when the state of South Carolina learned that he had pleaded guilty to criminal sexual contact after a neighbor had spotted him dry humping his little sister in a concrete culvert behind his mother's house.
That was back in Alabama; he was 12 years old when it happened. He's 14 now, an eighth-grader who's trying very hard to keep a secret. And he's got plenty of company. At last count, there were 68 kids, all under the age of 18, on the state of South Carolina's Internet registry (there are hundreds more in nine other states that currently post Internet registries and, when you factor in the kids who are listed on sex offender registries in states that have not yet gone digital, that number swells into the thousands.)
This, says Gail Ryan, a nationally recognized expert in the treatment of juvenile sex offenders, is the new world when it comes to dealing with young offenders. Ryan, who runs a treatment program at the Colorado School of Medicine's Kemp Center, puts it this way: As a communuity, were afraid of these kids. Maybe it was the school shootings at Columbine and Paducha and elsewhere that did it, she says. Maybe it was the seemingly endless stream of federal reports that showed juveniles flooding the nation's courts year after year. Maybe it was simply the fact that when confronted with isolated incidents of horrific crime, Americans just didn't know what else to do.
But over the past decade state after state has moved to treat young offenders with the same iron-fisted sanctions that they apply to adults.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the move to apply the nation's tough sex crime statutes to juvenile offenders.
Dubbed "Megan's Law" after seven-year-old Megan Kanka, a New Jersey girl who was raped and murdered by an adult pedophile, the measure (there is now a federal version of the law) was originally intended to keep dangerous sexual predators at bay. It requires convicted sex offenders to register with local police and when an offender is deemed sufficiently dangerous, a general alarm is sounded, and lawmen warn entire communities that a predator is among them. In Texas, for example, a judge recently ordered convicted sex offenders to post signs on their front lawns alerting neighbor to their presence.
The law has been widely embraced by the public and by lawmakers who see it as a major weapon in the war on crime. But there is a mounting chorus of critics who say Megan's Law has been prone to abuse and error. The methods used to sort dangerous offenders from those most likely to turn their lives around are unreliable, they say, and in many cases no distinction at all is drawn between those who commit comparatively minor offenses and those who have committed the most heinous crimes. All are exposed to the harsh glare of publicity. Men who have abused their own children have had their names and home addresses listed on registries, with the unexpected result that their young victims have been exposed along with the abusers.
There have been cases of mistaken identity. Innocent people have been mislabeled as dangerous predators, exposed to harassment and, in some cases, violence, while others who actually are dangerous offenders have given bogus addresses and hidden in anonymity in somebody elses neighborhood, critics say.
But nothing troubles the critics as much as the move to apply Megans Law to juvenile offenders. Twenty-eight states now require juvenile offenders to register with local authorities, in many cases even for comparatively minor crimes.
There are stories about 17-year-old boys who will spend their rest of their lives labeled as rapists because they had what otherwise would have been consensual sex with girls who had not yet reached their 16th birthdays. In some cases, the "victims" were just weeks shy of the age of consent.
There have been cases where children who have been victims of sexual abuse have copied that behavior and have ended up on sexual offender registries while the adult who set the whole grim process in motion escaped -- at least for a while -- punishment.
In a New Jersey case that could have far-reaching ramifications on the way Megan's Law is applied to kids, a mentally disabled 14-year-old has taken his case to the state Supreme Court after the state decided to warn some two dozen schools and day care centers and community groups about his presence. His crime? He may have molested a young female relative, but they're not really sure, says Craig Hubert, the kid's attorney. The boy speaks little English, Hubert says, and there's reason to believe that he thought "kissing" meant "sex" when he admitted to the charges.
Among other things, Hubert has been trying to persuade the court that the law and its requirements amount to cruel and unusual punishment for children and that, in the long run the whole process may do more harm than good.
The court is still mulling that question, but in the meantime, the tally continues to mount.
Several more states are considering plans to add juveniles to their sex offender registries and several, including New Jersey, are considering plans to post the names of juvenile sex offenders on the Internet, as South Carolina did with Lucas.
That concept --electronic registration -- was not even considered when Megans Law was first adopted. And it raises a host of nightmarish possibilities, says Wayne Bowers, a recovering sex offender who has become a prominent figure in the drive to raise awareness of sexual abuse, not the least of which is the idea that the registries could be one-stop shopping for pedophiles searching for sexually precocious prey.
More to the point, there is growing concern that the whole idea of using Megans Law to label teens may very well backfire.
Mark Chaffin, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Oklahoma's health sciences center and an expert in juvenile sex offenders, puts it this way: "Unlike adult sex offenders, who must admit that they are predators and adopt a 'sex offender identity' as a first step in their treatment, teens and pre-teens are still works in progress." In only the rarest of cases have they developed the fetishes and fantasies - arousal patterns, the therapists call it - that mark adult sex offenders. Teenagers are still finding themselves and their sense of their own identity is still pliable. Telling these kids that they're criminals or predators, labeling them as sex offenders, may actually be harmful, and ironically may encourage them to become the very thing we fear them to be, Chaffin says. "And in the end, we may be shooting ourselves in the foot."
Seamus: When you met with the DA in South Carolina, he never mentioned that your son's face and crime were going to be posted on the Internet?
Lucas Tanner Senior: No sir.
Seamus: You knew nothing about it until I called and told you?
Lucas Tanner Sr.: Not till you called.
Seamus: Well, if folks around here don't know about this, why are you so concerned?
Dad: Because if somebody around here does find out, they could probably cause him and us a lot of trouble.
It had taken just fifteen minutes to find Lucas Tanner on the Internet. But it was going to take a lot more to find out how he got there: a trail of broken families and broken promises that stretches across three Southern states and through at least three generations of a dysfunctional American family. You have to wade through a boxload of teddy bears in a little boy's room, and into the sparkling blue eyes of a little girl who has only recently stopped having nightmares about her brother.
You have to listen for the words that another little girl - Lucas' other sister, Sandra - can't yet bring herself to say, the words that will explain how she feels about all that has happened.
You have to talk to grownups who admit that they made some mistakes, but still can't own up to others.
You have to meet Lucas' biological mom, Jessica, a 39-year-old out-of-work electronics technician, who according to her own mother, was herself sexually abused all through her pre-teen years by a brutal stepfather. You have to look at Lucas' dad, a guy who, by all accounts, has spent his life relying on a tough-guy demeanor to barrel his way through tough times, and expected Lucas to do the same.
The couple had always had a stormy relationship, and after after years of breakups and reconciliations, lost jobs and missed opportunities that pushed the family from rental home to trailer park to rental home, from South Carolina to North Carolina to Alabama, they finally divorced.
Lucas, who was 10 at the time, still sees that divorce as his own personal failure.
"I felt like it was because of me - most of their fights were about me," he says.
Lucas says his early childhood was dominated by one simple fact: The boy never really settled in at home. His father, when he worked, spent long periods of time on the road. The old man says he regrets that now. "There are times I wish I could go back to the time he was born and change my way of doing things," Lucas Senior says. "I could have been there more for him."
Lucas says he never felt he really belonged with his mother and his two sisters, Sandra, who was four years his junior, and Elly, who was two years younger than her..
Though Jessica denies it, Lucas insists: "My mom never really liked me much. Not really."
Those who know him - even those who love him - admit that Lucas can sometimes be a hard kid to like. In a lot of ways,"he's very young for his age," his grandmother says,and he always was. Until he was 10 years old - well past the age when most boys turn to action figures and toy guns - Lucas still slept surrounded by stuffed animals and teddy bears.
"He had a big collection of them," his mom says, and he prized them above almost everything, except perhaps his precious oversize Mickey Mouse watch, which, wherever the family moved, would soon be stuck up on the wall in his tiny bedroom. It's funny. He doesn't even really remember now where he got it. It's just always been there.
In spite of his immaturity, or maybe because of it, Lucas' grandmother says he was always a handful. When they were very young, both he and Sandra, who shares his unruly red hair and his bright blue eyes, were diagnosed with Attention Deficit and Hyperactive Disorder.
He lied about little things, like the time when he was 12, and staying with her, and she found a non-stick skillet left on the stove, a deep scratch in its coating. The boy had been forbidden to cook while she was out at work, but he had gone ahead and fixed himself some eggs anyway. When she asked him about the skillet and the scratch, he denied any knowledge of it.
"I said, 'Lucas. We're the only ones here.'"
Sometimes, she says, the boy would pocket change from a cup had left out on the counter of the business she ran. "He was a thief," says Maureen Shaugnessy, the grandmother who, now in her mid-50s, continues to take an active role in the lives of her daughter and grandchildren.
But there were other things things that troubled Jessica more than Lucas' lack of scholastic aptitude. As a victim of sexual abuse herself, she says, she recognized the warning signs.
"I had this old couch out in the garage, and I went out one day, and I saw Sandra lying down, and Lucas leaning over her. They were both fully dressed, but they jumped when I came in."
Jessica confronted the boy and his sister. "I talked to him; I yelled at him," she says. "I even took him down to the juvenile hall, stood outside, and told him, 'that's where you're gonna end up if you keep doing that.'"
Lucas denied that anything had happened. So did Sandra. In fact, to this day, the girl still denies that anything ever went on between Lucas and she. "Her therapists say she just won't admit it," Jessica says.
But Lucas, after months of therapy, has finally come clean about what happened that day in the garage. At least partially. "We was exploring," he says. "Touching," is how his stepmother, Rebecca Tanner, describes it.
By the time Lucas was 12, Jessica was ready to throw up her hands.
She and Lucas' dad had been divorced for about two years. Lucas Senior had drifted back to South Carolina, where he met and married Rebecca. From time to time, Lucas and his sisters would visit him there. When Lucas was nearly 12, his father moved back to Alabama. Lucas' mom, in the meantime, had found herself a new boyfriend, Anton, a man who had just gone through a messy divorce himself. Anton had moved in with Jessica and her three children and his two children, Gwen and Michael, were frequent visitors.
The relationship between Lucas and his two all-but-step siblings was not always smooth, Jessica says, and Lucas, ever loyal to his father, was suspicious of his mother's new beau. And Lucas Senior, a tough disciplinarian, insists that his ex-wife was permissive and did little to curb the boy's natural rambunctiousness. "His mamma never, you know, never really worked with him. Never encouraged him to do stuff," the old man says.
Lucas says he often felt like the odd man out, as if his mother favored his sisters over him. Jessica denies that, but she admits that as Lucas edged closer to adolescence, she realized that perhaps she was ill-equipped to handle the boy. Lucas needed such a stern hand and full-time attention. "He seems to do better when he's an only child," she says. Jessica decided to ship Lucas off to stay with his father.
"I said, 'Maybe you can see if you can handle him,' "Jessica recalls. She swears she was only thinking of the boy's best interest. But Lucas sees it differently.
"She just sort of dropped me off on the doorstep," he says.
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Seamus: You don't have to answer this question if you don't want to, but have you given any thought to whatever it was that actually happened with you and your sister back there in Alabama? Do you think what you did was a crime?
Lucas: In a way yes. And in a way no.
Seamus: You wanna elaborate on that, or no?
Lucas: Well, in a way it's a crime because I was old enough to know better. But I was still young enough where I was experimenting with things...and...the way I was brought up, I really didn't know much about it. I didn't know that it was wrong. Or that you'd get in trouble for doing it.
It was June of 1999, and Lucas, who was living with his father in Huntsville, was spending a weekend with his mother and sisters when his troubles really began. Even now, two years later, it's still difficult to piece together exactly what happened that day.
The only people who have a birds-eye view of the event are the investigators from the state's child protective services agency who interviewed the kids, and compiled a confidential report that they have not shared with Lucas' parents. The law doesn't permit it. But this much is clear: It was the day that Lucas Tanner became a criminal in the eyes of the world.
There was an old concrete ditch, a culvert where a stream would sometimes run, cutting across the back of the development where Jessica and the children lived, and it was, Jessica says, a favorite gathering spot for neighborhood kids.
"All the kids used to play down there," but it was a dangerous spot, and "Lucas and Sandra and Elly were forbidden to," Jessica says. But on this particular day, there were a lot of kids in the culvert, and the Tanner kids defied their mother and went anyway. The kids were laughing and playing and at some point, a neighbor whose identity remains a mystery, at least to the principals in the story, spotted Lucas, lying down on top of his younger sister, rubbing himself against her. It was, Lucas insists, an isolated incident.
The neighbor phoned the police. The police phoned the child protective services agency, and for Lucas and Elly and Sandra and the grownups, the whole world was about to change.
It wasn't until October that Lucas and his family learned about the existance of investigation, one of those secretive, behind-the-scenes and strictly confidential probes that child protective service agencies all over the country have honed to a fine art.
The investigators had studied the complaint, gathered information whereever they could find it about Lucas and his sisters and about their homelife. Then, without letting their parents know what was being discussed, the investigators talked quietly with the children.
Finally, the investigators called Lucas' mom and told her that they had proof that her son was a molestor and that Elly had been his victim. In fact, Jessica and Lucas Senior later learned, the proof had come from Elly and Lucas themselves. They had admitted it.
The case was going to be presented to the district attorney in Huntsville, the child protective services people said.
In the world of juvenile justice, Alabama is a reasonably enlightened state. The overriding philosophy there is that kids can usually be rehabilitated and should always be given the chance. So their approach with Lucas was hardly confrontational. The prosecutors brought the skinny little boy into a conference room, a quiet and comfortable place, where they spoke softly to him, he says.
They promised him and his parents that it would all remain hush-hush, that he'd serve two years probation, and that, for the time being, his case file would be kept strictly confidential. If he successfully completed a treatment program, and "if he had no further problems up till the time he was 18," then it would remain that way. His records would be permanently sealed.
That, say counselors, is exactly what should have happened in a case like Lucas'. With no juvenile record -- he had never been in trouble with the law before -- no history of abusing or sexually harassing children other than his sisters, and a family history marked by disruptions and chaos, he would seem to be an ideal candidate for rehabilitation, and deserved the chance to change without being exposed to ridicule and worse. Publicly label a kid like Lucas a monster or a pervert, they say, isolate him and cheat him of the opportunity to build solid social skills, and you risk making him worse.
But Huntsville, a city of just under 100,000 is, in many ways, a small town A tiny, sunbaked city that juts up from the flatlands, it's the kind of place where people love to stop and chat. Like people in most places, nothing is more delectable to the good folks of Huntsville than a juicy piece of gossip. It didn't take long for Lucas' secret to slip out.
It's not really clear how it happened. Lucas blames his mom. "She's a mouth," he says.
Mom contends that a neighborhood girl somehow found out about the whole sordid incident "and she told everybody at school....It didn't help much that the day after his arrest, Lucas brought his (police documents) to school with him. I don't know why he did that."
Maybe it was just another bad choice by Lucas, an awkward and socially inept kid who sometimes irritated kids as much as he ticked off adults, his grandmother says. Whatever the genesis, Lucas soon found that he had become a pariah.
He remembers pushing though the glass doorways at school only to be confronted with the relentless jeers of other kids.
"Hi, rapist," one boy screeched at him. "How you doing, child molestor?" echoed another.
Over the next several months, things got worse. Before and after gym class, when the coach was out of sight, older kids harassed and attacked Lucas on several occasions. "We'd be changing and kids would come up, they'd shove me into the locker, and start calling me all kinds of names."
Lucas likes to think of himself as a tough guy like his father, but he admits that the abuse frightened him. "Some of these kids were really big...some of them were about 15, 16."
His father had given him this advice: "If they do that to you, then you beat the crap out of them."
But when push came to shove, Lucas, it seems, didn't really have it in him to be all that tough. "It's kind of hard when you've got these big kids, these older kids who can really pound your face in."
For months he endured the taunting and the jeers, and his schoolwork, never his strong suit to begin with, suffered even further. More importantly, Lucas, who had always been a lonely kid, felt more isolated than ever. "It made me feel that nobody wanted to be around me, that people hated me."
He tried to keep quiet about the ordeal around school. "I tried to keep it to myself," he says. Finally, he turned to the grownups for help. Guidance counselors, Teachers. But they turned out to be impotent against the overwhelming capacity for cruelty that is the hallmark of pre-adolescence.
They tried," Lucas said. "They'd call the students into the office and we'd talk about it . And they'd say 'Alright, I won't do that.' The next day, they're back at it again."
"There's really nothing people can do."
By January of this year, Lucas' father decided that enough was enough. He had come to realize, Lucas Senior says, that no matter how tough the boy got, he'd never be strong enough to fend off all the bullies in Huntsville. Maybe the boy needed a fresh start, the old man thought. Maybe they all did. So, when a job opened up back in South Carolina that would allow the old man to spend less time on the road and more time at home, the family packed up their belongings, the pots and pans, the television, Lucas' oversize Mickey Mouse watch (he had finally, at long last given up the teddy bears a few years earlier) and they moved.
They had no idea what they were walking into.
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They hadn't even had a chance to find a place of their own -- they were still living out of suitcases and cardboard boxes in Lucas' grandfather's house -- when Lucas Sr. received a summons to appear at the county sheriff's office. He was to bring Lucas with him.
They were greeted at the front desk by a brusque and burly middle-age detective in a suit, Lucas recalls. Back in Alabama, the authorities had been gentle with him. But, not in South Carolina. There, the big detective immediately whisked Lucas away from his parents and led him back into the bowels of the county jail. He left the boy alone on a hard wooden bench, just outside a cell block where the hard-core criminals of South Carolina's coastal lowlands were locked up. As Lucas sat there, he could see the inmates down the hall, he could hear them shouting,and he believed they were shouting to him.
For what seemed like an eternity, this freckle-faced, red-haired kid sat frightened and alone on the bench, trying not to make a sound.
"I was like, 'Are they gonna lock me up or something?'"
Then, a pair of uniformed officers rousted Lucas, led the boy to the fingerprinting table -- the one that was intended to be used for adult criminals -- and wordlessly rolled his fingers, one by one in ink. They stood him up against the wall and took a mug shot.
And then they told him that he wasn't in Alabama anymore. His two-year probation was now indefinite probation. And they also told him that each year, for the rest of his life, he would have to come down to the sheriff's office and register as a sex offender.
But, said Lucas, no one ever told him that his name would be placed on the Internet where anyone might find it.
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Seamus: So, do you have a girlfriend?
Lucas: In the process.
Seamus: What's she like?
Lucas: Well, she's about my height.
Seamus: What's that? Five-foot-five or five-foot-eight?
Lucas: About like that. Somewhere around that. I'm five-foot-eight at school and five-foot-five at home.
Seamus: She in band?
Lucas: No sir.
Seamus: So you met her in school I'm guessing then. You guys haven't gone out yet or anything?
Lucas: Well, we went to the prom.
Seamus: Oh yeah? What prom? There's like an eighth grade prom?
Lucas: Yes.
Seamus: Oh, that's cool. But she doesn't know anything about this registration and you being on the Internet?
Lucas: Got no clue.
Seamus: What do you think would happen if she found out about this?
Lucas: Oooh... Down the drain.
There aren't a lot of folks who can afford home computers in this hardluck spit of sand and dirt along the Carolina coast whereLucas and his family live. There's a couple of aging PCs over at the local library, a few more in the middle school that Lucas attends, and a few more in the high school where he'll go this fall.
But out here, where swayback horses nibble the brown grass that grows around magnolia trees, where ancient tractors, held together with baling wire and prayers, rattle across the open fields, the age of technology has not yet quite arrived.
To Lucas and his family, that's a blessing.
It means that at least for the moment, Lucas' secret is safe. It means that he can go to band practice, and puff away on his tuba and his sousaphone without fear of ridicule. It means that he can change for gym without being thrown into lockers, that he can walk to class without being taunted. It means that he can go to the party that Suzanne, the girl he's smitten with, is throwing in her basement to celebrate the end of middle school and the beginning of high school. It means that he can revel in her long brown hair, tinged with just a hint of gold at the bangs, without fear that somebody will accuse him of being a rapist.
But Lucas doesn't expect that his peace will last for very much longer.
There are some morning now that Lucas wakes up, eats his breakfast, and stands outside waiting for the school bus, wondering, is today the day that someone will find out.
"I'm kinda scared," he says. "When I go to school, it's 'what's gonna happen today?' Is it gonna be the same thing that happened in Alabama, or is it gonna be that nobody's gonna go on that Web site?"
"Sooner or later," he says, someone he knows is going to stumble across his name on the Internet.
And when they do, he says, there is no doubt in his mind that the same ugly scenario he lived through in Huntsville will play out again in South Carolina.
"It could, like, ruin my life," he says. "I couldn't walk into Winn-Dixie or something. Going to Walmart, you get laughed at, or picked on. It could ruin my parents' life, too. People nowadays, they'd probably come and trash the house or something when we're not here."
The good, God-fearing people of South Carolina, the ones that cram the churches each and every Sunday morning, are not likely to tolerate having a sex offender among them, Lucas' stepmom says.
"There are a lot of churches around here," she says. "There's also a lot of hypocrites."
A few days before my visit, curiosity got the best of Lucas. He wandered over to the library and stared for a while at the old computers. He considered logging on, navigating his way to the South Carolina Sex Offender's Registry to see if everything that I had told him was true. But then, he says, he realized "the computers are all out in the open, so I couldn't look without people seeing."
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Lucas: "My mom, she just wants my sisters to forget about it. This thing in my old group, you were supposed to write an "I'm Sorry" letter, and send it to them. I told my mom about it, and she said no. She just wants them to forget it ever happened."
Seamus: What would it say?
Lucas: It'd say, "I'm sorry, and I know that it would never be enough, no matter what I do."
Seamus: Why don't you go write it now? I'll try and put in my story.
Sexual abuse of any kind is a life-shattering experience, the therapists say. Victims are often haunted by nightmares, and worse, often for the rest of their lives. They need time to heal. To recover their strength. But in the end, it is often beneficial for the victim and the offender to face each other. The offender needs to really understand -- not just intellectually but emotionally -- the full impact of his deeds , they say. And the victim needs to win back the sense of themselves that was taken from them. That's especially true when the victim and perpetrator are brother and sister. Despite the pain, they share a special bond. They are often the only ones in the world who really, truly understand each other, the counselors say.
But the law rarely takes that into consideration, the therapists say. Just as with adult offenders, kids who commit sex offenses are often barred from having any significant personal contact with their victims.
That's what happened with Lucas and Elly.
It's been more than six months since Lucas moved to South Carolina, and in all that time, he hasn't spoken to his sisters, or his mother for that matter. He tried to call a couple of times, hoping to find out how Elly and Sandra were doing, Jessica says, "but I was out." Jessica couldn't return the calls, she says. She's been out of work since last October and can't afford both long-distance service for her phone and food for her kids. Besides, she says, she doesn't know the number.
For what it's worth, they're surviving.
Sandra still adores Lucas, despite everything, Jessica says, though she's been having a tough time of it. She had to repeat fifth grade last year, her mother says. And the little girl, now almost 11, didn't fare very well in her therapy, which ended last December when the money from the state dried up. To this day, Sandra still denies that anything happened in the garage that day, six years ago. "She never admitted to anything," Jessica says.
But Elly is doing much better. She's excelling in school. And she's no longer haunted by nightmares about her brother stalking her in her sleep, Jessica says. Lately, the little girl has even started to ask about her brother from time to time. "She doesn't talk it about much," Jessica says."But every now and then she'll say, 'I miss Daddy, and Rebecca, and Lucas."
"That makes me feel pretty good," Lucas says.
There's one last matter to deal with. The letter. The one that Lucas' counselors in Alabama had urged him to write to his sister.
Jessica insists that she never heard about the letter until I mentioned it to her on the phone. But she admits that in those first few months after she learned that Lucas had violated Elly, she "was very angry. I hated what he had done."
I tell her I will read it to her over the phone if she likes.
When I'm finished, there's silence on the other end of the phone, and then a sound. A sob? A sigh? It's hard to tell.
"That's the first time I really heard him say he was sorry," Jessica says after a long pause. "I guess he really wants to be forgiven."
"Can he be?" I ask.
"I think he already has been."
"By whom?"
She says softly: "By Elly."