Obstacles to sex offender law reforms Part 1

Found this from Glenn Sacks:

In the fall of 2007, when Damon Hadley was 17, he had sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend. School authorities caught them cutting school and called their parents. The girl's father then drove to the school, where he saw Hadley in the parking lot.

"So I hit him," said Gilberto Soto, the girl's father. "Do I regret what I did? No. Would I do it differently? Yes, I would, I would." And what would he do differently? "Now? Take that kid, stick him in the car, tie a rope around his neck and go as fast as I could up and down the highways, every single highway there is," he said.

Soto's daughter told him Hadley had raped her, but she later told the police that Hadley didn't force her and that she made up a false report because she was scared.

"[Having sex is] something that she brought up before I did, so I thought it was something she wanted to do," said Hadley.

In New Hampshire, the age of consent is 16, and Hadley received a three-month suspended sentence. That means if he gets into trouble before the end of this year, he may have to serve that three-month sentence.

Soto got a one-year suspended sentence, and he's angry that Hadley didn't go to jail. "He should've done at least a year," he said.

Men like this are a major part of the reason why getting common sense reformation of the sex offender laws is so hard. He can't even see that his own daughter committed a far more serious moral offense in claiming that she had been raped--a charge that if taken seriously would have fundamentally altered every aspect of the charges against her boyfriend from mundane to deadly serious. No doubt that's why the courts gave her the more serious probation, since in her case it showed a serious lack of character that she wasn't capable of admitting to the truth. Granted, if her father is as generally violent as he seems to be based on that quote, it wouldn't be too terribly surprising that she would have a hard time confessing.

While it is commendable for fathers to have a desire to protect their daughters from sexual predators, it is equally important for them to recognize that their daughters are just as sexual as their male peers. They need to exercise discernment and realize that their "baby girl" may have been a party or even the instigator in cases such as this, and be able to demand better behavior from their own daughter. All men like Soto end up accomplishing is preventing their daughters from becoming women of character by not holding them to the same moral standard as they would hold their sons. She probably learned her irresponsibility from the behavior that was expected of her from her father.