“If you’re saying that he should have done jail time, I won’t disagree with that either.”
That is exactly what I’m saying. He should also be put on the sex offender registry.
Too young for that.
That's ridiculous. Young teens that do that may be troubled but most do NOT grow up and become pedophiles.
You keep acting like an expert on the topic but you're not:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-01-07/child-sex-abuse/52431616/1
Basic data about child-on-child sex abuse is detailed in an authoritative, Justice Department-sponsored analysis of crime data from 29 states. Conducted by three prominent researchers, the 2009 analysis found that juveniles accounted for 35.6% of the people identified by police as having committed sex offenses against minors.
Of these young offenders, 93% were male, and the peak ages for offending were 12 through 14, the researchers found. Of the victims, 59% were younger than 12 and 75% were female.
The report referred to a popular misconception that juvenile sex offenders are likely to reoffend, and said numerous studies over the years have shown the opposite — that 85 to 95% of offending youth are never again arrested for sex crimes.
University of Oklahoma pediatrics professor Mark Chaffin, a co-author of the 2009 report, says efforts to deal constructively with juvenile sex offenders are complicated by the tendency of some legislators and others to lump them together with adult sexual predators.
"That used to be the message — that we should apply the template from what we know about adult pedophilia," Chaffin said. "Now that the data has shown most of those assumptions were wrong, it's difficult to undo those messages that people in the advocacy and treatment fields were putting out a generation ago."
Experts say the young offenders differ from adult sex offenders not only in their lower recidivism rates, but in the diversity of their motives and abusive behavior. While some youths commit violent, premeditated acts of sexual assault and rape, others get in trouble for behavior arising from curiosity, naivete, peer pressure, momentary irresponsibility, misinterpretation of what they believed was mutual interest, and a host of other reasons. Some cases involve sibling incest; sometimes the offenders have autism or other developmental disorders that lessen their ability to self-police inappropriate conduct.
"There needs to be a highly discriminative response system," said sociologist David Finkelhor, director of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center. "It needs to differentiate between the kids we should stigmatize as little as possible, who are probably going to be fine with some kind of education, and others who need a lot of intervention, including maybe incarceration, because they pose a tremendous risk."
"We run a big risk if we get it wrong," he added. "We fail to protect the public on one hand, or we ruin the lives of young people who might otherwise be headed in a healthy direction."
In most cases of child-on-child sex abuse, the public never hears about it. Experts say many incidents are never reported in the first place, due to the shame or embarrassment of victims and their parents, and most of the cases that are reported are handled confidentially through the juvenile justice system.