The Depression of Injustice
May 30th, 2008 by zania
Sometimes something happens which makes us realise that, however much our depression is affecting us, there are people out there who have much more reason to be depressed than we do.
And that isn’t a slight on anyone who suffers from depression and feels bad right now. Neither am I saying “buck up, because there are people much worse off than you,” because I know that depression doesn’t work like that. You cannot ‘pull yourself together’, however much you try.
Nevertheless, I am still making this post because one thing that makes many of us depressed - even those who do not suffer from depression - is injustice. And the person I am going to write about here has, I feel, been very unjustly treated by ‘the forces of law and order’. I’ll tell you about him now.
Ricky is just 19 years old. When he was 16, he met a girl in a teen club. She told him she was nearly 16 and they began to date. In time they had sex, as teenagers tend to do. Soon after this, the girl confessed that she was younger than she had said. In fact she had been 13 when they had sex.
To cut a long story short (and it is written much better on the website and by Ricky’s Mom - you can find her plea at Ethical Treatment for All Youth ), despite the fact that the girl’s parents didn’t want to press charges, the DA did. Ricky was brought to trial and, because of changes in the law the very day he was sentenced, ended up registered as a life time sex offender.
Ricky’s life has been devastated, as has that of his family. Owing to strict laws on sex offenders in the US, his social life and his future career prospects have been destroyed.
Reading about Ricky and his Mom’s battle to get ethical and fair treatment for her son, brought me to tears.
Any humane person hates the thought of rapists and paedophiles harming innocents and any humane person wants to see justice served against people like this.
But Ricky is not one of these people. He is still a teenager. When he carried out his so-termed ‘offence’ he was 16 years old, a child himself.
Yes, in the eyes of the law, Ricky committed an offence. Even before the girl told him her age, she had still told him she was ‘nearly 16′.
But, are there many people out there who can honestly say that they didn’t have sex at that age? Are there many men out there who can honestly say that they would not have been fooled, at the age of 16, when a girl told them she was almost the same age too, or that (thinking she would be 16 very soon) they would have waited until she turned 16 when she was ready to have sex with them right there and then?
Or maybe I’ve got it wrong. Maybe everyone has led a ‘clean and unsullied life’ when they were in their teens?
Let me repeat. Harming children is wrong. Any harmful treatment to a child is wrong and the full force of the law should be brought to bear on anyone who harms a child.
But when the law victimises people like Ricky, who was still a child himself at the time of ‘the offence’, then the law is an ass and it needs to be changed, so that the police and justice authorities can be left free to go after the real offenders - the rapists and paedophiles - not teenage boys having sex with teenage girls who have lied to them about their age.
Serious changes need to be made, before more lives are hurt.
