Consensual Consequences: A True Story of Life with a "Registered Sex Offender"
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CONSENSUAL CONSEQUENCES
is the gripping true story of how one woman fell in love with a registered sex offender. This captivating story profiles the life of an average American family who is living a not-so-average life. Lynn was an educated woman who found herself in a dead-end marriage, and after much soul searching she realized what she must do. Enter a new love, a good honest man living with the label of "registered sex offender." Why would an educated woman fall in love with someone with such a label? Could this unlikely companion be Lynn's knight in shining armor? What are the consequences of this unusual love affair? As America wages war on every sex offender in the U.S., no matter how minor the offense, how has this family coped with this scarlet letter and the restrictions placed on them? All of these questions are answered in this powerful story of true love and heartache while living in fear of vigilantism and simultaneously battling a system that punishes their whole family endlessly.About the Author:
Lynn Gilmore is a professional graphic designer and artist. Lynn is a married mother of three daughters, living with her husband and youngest daughter in a remote region of the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas.
Sex Offender Lives Here: The Perils of Wearing the 'Scarlet Letter' in an Instant-Access, Socially Networked World
Everyone agrees that citizens should be protected from convicted and dangerous sex felons. But who will protect sex felons (both convicted or alleged) from the community? A new literary thriller from author Harry Ramble, Sex Offender Lives Here (EbbPress.com), takes a sharp and insightful look at a hot-button issue that is disrupting communities across the nation--the registration and tracking of sex offenders--and places it in the context of a typical American family.
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$10,000 on Brendan Sokaluk's head.
Middletown, NJ (PRWEB) February 25, 2009
In 1994, when the first "Megan's Law" mandated the creation of a publicly accessible database for the tracking of convicted sex felons, the world was a very different place. There was no Google, no Facebook, no massive global interlinkage of RSS feeds and Twitter updates. In short, it wasn't possible to whip up an angry mob of tens or even hundreds of thousands of people in mere moments.Now all it takes is a few key taps. When an anonymous man was charged with setting wildfires that killed as many as 200 people in southern Australia, various media swiftly identified the alleged arson via his social-networking profile. Within hours, 4,000 people had joined a Facebook group named "Brendan Sokaluk, the Victorian Bushfires Arsonist, must burn in hell." Many thousands more posted threatening messages, while another group placed "$10,000 on Brendan Sokaluk's head." While his guilt or innocence, and his intentions, if any, are still to be determined, Sokaluk is being held by Australian authorities in a secret location, for his own safety.
Sex offenders are familiar with Sokaluk's plight. (Indeed, Sokaluk has also been charged with possessing child pornography.) Recently three teenage boys in Greensburg, PA were charged with possession of child pornography after friends of theirs, girls 14 and 15 years of age, sent them nude cellphone snapshots of themselves. This incident, part of a new phenomenon called "sexting," is greatly widening the scope and impact of current sex offender legislation. In this case, each teen faced the very real possibility of being branded sex offenders for life. Registered sex offender status has entirely predictable consequences on employability and quality of life, while incidents of stalking and vigilantism against registered sex felons have become increasingly commonplace in recent years.
It was exactly this highly charged atmosphere surrounding sex offender monitoring and punishment that intrigued Harry Ramble as he set out to write a different kind of sex offender thriller. That novel, Sex Offender Lives Here, now available from Ebb Press, has elicited strong--even angry--responses from readers.
"When people find out what Sex Offender Lives Here is about, usually the first thing they say is, well, who cares what happens to sex offenders? They've got it coming, right?" Ramble says. "People are conditioned to accept a single approach to the issue. For the most part, it's "Silence of the Lambs" stuff. Unspeakable evil. Sociopathic killing machines.
"Sometimes it seems there's a complete disconnect between the reality of who and what sex offenders are, and what we'd like them to be. We don't like to hear about shades of gray when it comes to something as viscerally disturbing as sex crimes. We want perpetrators to be irretrievably evil and we want to protect the children. We lock criminals up for a while and then we return them to society with big targets on their backs. Now don't get me wrong, some people should be targeted, identified, monitored. Some people are evil. But the system is so inflexible and one-size-fits-all."
Sex Offender Lives Here is a fictional account of a husband and father who is charged with a series of terrible crimes in the course of a hostile child custody case. Even as the father fights for possession of his son, his situation is publicized, resulting in unrest in his community. Soon activists, ideologues, and vigilantes on both sides of a cultural divide join the fray. With unnerving swiftness, the father finds himself at ground zero in a pitched battle between an agitated, frightened citizenry and a shadowy underground of deviants and criminals. Finally, the disappearance of a local 10-year-old girl triggers a final, deadly escalation of violence.
"The initial idea for Sex Offender Lives Here came from a story I read a few years ago," Harry Ramble says. "A 20-year-old dishwasher from Canada used the sex-registry system to track down and kill convicted felons in Maine. He killed two people. One was a 57-year-old man who had been convicted of assaulting and raping a child younger than 14 years old. The second was a 24-year-old man who had been convicted, when he was 19, of having sex with his girlfriend who, at the time, had been two weeks short of her 16th birthday. They were both sex offenders and they were both registered by name, address, and photo. The killer was found in possession of the addresses of 32 more sex offenders. You can talk all you want about who's got what coming, but this is the world we live in now. There's an inequity there.
"It's ironic," Ramble continues, "but there's a very peripheral character in the novel, a stereotypical sex fiend who exists outside the narrative and is kind of influencing public opinion around some of the main characters. And I can't tell you how many people say to me, why don't you write a book about that guy? Heck, they say, I'd read that. That fiend, a kind of supernatural fiend called the Balloon Man, represents how we like to think about sex felons."
Sex Offender Lives Here doesn't offer any solutions to the inequities in the sex offender registry system. Indeed, If anything, it represents a first tentative--and fictional--effort to arrive at a new way of speaking about the issues involved.
"I'm not an expert," Ramble says. "I'm a novelist. But it doesn't take an expert to recognize that we don't really have a coherent way of thinking or talking about sex offenses. I was listening to the radio the other day and the Attorney General of Connecticut was talking about sex offenders trolling social networks for kids. MySpace had just banned 90,000 registered sex offenders from its network.
"And the Attorney General said that for every identified sex offender, there could very well be hundreds of others out there right now, using fake names. And I'm thinking to myself, okay, say by 'hundreds' he means two hundred. That's 18 million sex offenders. And no one questioned this assertion. But I'm thinking, is that what he really means? If there are 18 million sex offenders out there, then what exactly is a sex offender?"
Interested readers can find more information at ebbpress.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other reputable booksellers.
Ceasefire! : Why Women and Men Must Join Forces To Achieve True Equality
The Austin American-Statesman
Austin American-Statesman (Texas)
Calling for a Cease-fire in the Gender War
The gender war is over. I've said that dozens of times in the past few years, usually to the applause of men and the hisses of women.
My argument has been that women and men today have equal opportunities, if not always equal outcomes, which often is more a function of will than way. My motivation has come from my wish for a level playing field for the boys, as well as the girls, in my life. My reasoning has been that in a gender war, no one wins.
The evidence for a cease-fire is explicit and pervasive. Yet, despite my selfless and, I daresay, noble attempts to convince readers, a 600-word essay doesn't permit space to adequately define such evidence. I can only offer a few random facts and anecdotes to suggest a worthy thought or two.
A book is what we need, I've always thought. A once-and-for-all volume to ex-plain how we got here; why feminism has splintered into factions that antagonize even its own constituents; why our culture, pulled in so many directions, has evolved into a Chilean landscape of lopsided opportunity and hostile gender re-lations.
Alas, I didn't write it, but Cathy Young -- fellow columnist, Cato Institute research associate and co-founder and vice president of the Women's Freedom Net-work -- did. Pithily titled "Ceasefire!" (Simon & Schuster, $25), Young's book is so good and so important that I'm temporarily shelving my writer's instinct -- defined by author Anne Lamott as the urgent wish that all other writers "stink" -- in order to provide this public service.
The book that we, the war-weary, have been waiting for has arrived.
Young's work is scrupulously researched, smoothly written and bears the im-primatur of truth. A self-proclaimed "dissident feminist" born in Russia, Young has no agenda nor ax to grind. Honesty underscores her evolution from a fledg-ling feminist -- who came to this country at 17, delighted by a culture that celebrated female independence and men pushing strollers -- to a mature adult driven by human rather than gender interests.
Young traces her faded idealism from her college years through the '80s when fringe feminism became mainstream and equality for women began to mean inequities for men. Like the many women and men for whom she speaks, Young became part of a new brand of feminism that stresses true equality. No more victims; no more demons.
We're just people, she says, as she neatly disproves the myths that have de-fined feminism in the '90s. In fact, she says:
* Girls are not ignored in classrooms;
* Medicine has not neglected women's health;
* Abuse by men is not the leading cause of injury to women.
The need for a cease-fire is all too clear to women who, in addition to hav-ing an instinct for fairness, like their husbands and love their sons. Young's formula for a fair future is a simple blend of Golden Rule and common sense: "Get over our obsession with gender differences," for instance, and "Stop apply-ing a presumption of sexism to every conflict involving a woman."
I couldn't have said it better, though, I confess, I wish I had. And, yes, I further confess that I'd be happier if Young had stayed in Russia, giving me a little more time to write this book myself. I am not, however, at all bothered that in writing an entire book about the gender wars, about which I've written extensively for, oh, about 10 years, Young managed to avoid mentioning me even once.
Cease-fires, after all, are about surrendering selfish interests to the greater good. In the spirit of which, I'm hauling out my white flag and plan to hoist it just as soon as my husband finishes ironing it.
Parker is a columnist with the Orlando Sentinel. You may contact her at kparker@kparker.com
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