Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Excessive Judgement

It is, without doubt, a transgression of a high moral order that represents what Denise (Dee) Harvey of Florida did to complicate her life and that of the 16-year-old boy whom she had sexual relations with. Herself a mother of a boy the same age who was a friend of the boy she had sex with on a number of occasions, this woman exercised extremely poor judgement.

That her marriage and her relationship with her son, let alone that with her husband, was not completely destroyed is a testament to their forgiveness of her absurdly unforgivable folly. Why on Earth would the mother of a 16-year-old boy succumb to the temptation (itself inexplicable) to have sex with a friend of her son, to begin with?

Obviously what we might consider to be normal inhibitions, a repugnance toward the very thought of something so morally wrong, did not constrain this woman. There can be little doubt that the people living in the community of Vero Beach, Florida, would not have thought very highly of this woman.

She was convicted by a Florida court in 2008 of the offence of having sex repeatedly with a minor. A personal shame and a public disgrace. Difficult for both families involved to live with. Her sentence was an egregious over-reaction, however. She was given the maximum penalty for the offence; 30 years in prison.

She chose to flee the sentence, as who might not? Compounding her original social offence. She and her family fled to a small town in Saskatchewan, and a cross-border hunt was mounted for the convicted sex offender. In the interim, the family lived for a year in Pike Lake, Saskatchewan. Where they seemed like any other compact little family.

It is not a crime in Canada for a 45-year-old woman to sleep with a 16-year-old boy, unless she was abusing a position of trust. This woman lived with her family in a bungalow next to the local Anglican Church, where she was a volunteer. People liked her, as a friendly neighbour. And, when she was arrested by the RCMP last week, they rallied to her support.

Her bizarre sentence was an over-reaction, the punishment did not fit the crime. A similar case that occurred in West Virgina where the age of consent is 16 and the boy involved was 15, ended with the woman who was the sexual predator being given a 30-day sentence. Quite a difference between a 30-day prison sentence, and a 30-year sentence.

In either case, the women involved were guilty of high stupidity and of disgracing themselves through offending the social compact, let alone the moral turpitude of older women preying on young boys for sexual adventures. When men do such things they are considered to be completely debauched, threats to society, detested pedophiles.

But the sentence handed out to this woman in this particular case offends reason and the equability of justice.

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