Maybe you saw the Associated Press story yesterday about an alleged increase in the number of juvenile sex offenders. The reporter, Kim Curtis, noted that the number of juvenile sex offenses has increased– 40 percent over two decades. Moreover, the offenders are getting younger and more violent.

Some attribute the increase to a society saturated with sex and violence. Others attribute the supposed increase to more awareness, better reporting and general hysteria over sex offenders.

I have represented several juvenile sex offenders. Once you meet these kids, you’ll understand that the headlines don’t show the whole person.

For example, I represented a 14 year old girl who had been terribly, sexually abused since a young age. At age 14, she was at a “party” with about four high school students. One of them, a 15 year old boy, invited her to engage in sex with him. My client looked for guidance from the older girl who had brought her to the party. The older girl smiled, which my client took as approval. So, she went upstairs and had sex with the boy. By the time they came to my office, both the boy and the girl were convicted of statutory rape.

In another case, I represented a boy who served as the lookout for his friend. His friend had persuaded a girl to give him oral sex under the stairs at school. She later claimed she had been coerced, even though she had walked with the perpetrator in front of the school office and past the security personnel. My client was convicted as an accomplice and listed on the sexual offender registry, even though he never engaged in the sexual activity itself.

These are just two examples of the many ways young people find themselves branded for life as sexual offenders. Perhaps somewhere some teens truly engage in predatory, violent sexual acts. However, my clients have been kids who get caught up in a system that wasn’t designed for their situation. Eventually, they become a statistic in the alleged growth of sexual offenses.

The Connecticut state senate voted last week to restore juvenile status to 16 and 17 year old offenders. Currently, teens in this age group are charged in criminal court as adults.

If the Connecticut House passes the law, only New York and North Carolina will automatically charge 16 and 17 year olds as adults. Other states provide mechanisms to waive juveniles to adult status.

Kansas allows children as young as ten to be charged as adults. Teens over thirteen are presumed to be tried as adults for serious offenses. Missouri may prosecute children as young as twelve in adult court for felonies.

The Connecticut bill reflects recent research proving that juvenile brains remain physiologically underdeveloped. During their teen years, children are still developing the capacity to think ahead and make sound judgments. Additionally, they lack the wisdom gained from experience.

Juvenile offenders placed in adult jails are more likely to reoffend, according to data released last month by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Nearly two thirds of juveniles tried as adults are dealing with personal trauma, such as rape, assault, death of a loved one, or suicidal tendencies.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. This video provides instruction about mental health issues in children and adolescents. Although the production quality is not great, it contains some information that might help a child and a family. It addresses:

• Understanding Of Mental Health

• Causes
• Families Assisting
• What To Look For

Impoverished children who experienced high quality child care incurred less depression as young adults than their peers. These findings were reported in the May/June 2007 issue of the journal Child Development by researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Washington at Seattle.

Research shows a connection between childhood poverty and later mental health issues. Providing impoverished children with high quality child care protects them when they become teens and adults.

Many of our cases involve mental health issues. However, the cases appears under the guise of child custody disputes, juvenile law and special education.

The real issue remains the failure to diagnose or treat mental illness. Since no one recognizes the mental health issue, though, courts try to resolve these cases under traditional concepts of child custody or juvenile law. Sometimes it seems like mental illness is the elephant in the courtroom that everyone pretends to ignore.

Last Wednesday was National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day. To mark the occasion, Katie Couric from CBS news posted this one minute video about ignoring mental health issues in children. She cites that two thirds of children with mental health issues do not get treatment. She uses the perspective of the tragedy of Virgina Tech to show the importance of addressing the mental health needs of children and adolescents.

These past three weeks I received numerous calls from parents of kids who have made threats at their schools. The number of cases seems to have increased since the tragedy at Virginia Tech. The threats usually involve fantasies of mass killings or threats against specific individuals. In no case were the threats anything close to actual plans, but they alarm nonetheless.

• In one of my cases, a student wrote a threat on the bathroom wall about a mass shooting. I filed his appeal to the school’s manifestation determination to try to prevent him from being expelled from school.

• In another case the teen posted threatening comments against a teacher on his MySpace. He also brought knives to school. He is charged in juvenile court with criminal threat and possession of illegal weapons.
• At a teen meeting last week, some of the students told me their school had been placed on lock down after a student threatened his ex girlfriend and brought a gun to school.

My Kansas juvenile practice is not just anecdotal. Kids are emptying schools around the country by making alarming threats. Incidents have been reported in Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Colorado, to name a few.

A juvenile in upstate New York was sentenced to 18 months in juvenile prison for making threats to a high school security guard. In California, students skipped school by the hundreds after a student posted a threat on MySpace.

Child abuse inflicts an incalculable human cost on its victims and their families. It also costs money.

Child abuse costs the nation $94 billion annually according to a 2001 study by Prevent Child Abuse America.

The good news is that prevention not only saves lives, it even saves money.

A RAND Corp. study found that for every $1 spent on working early with poor families in parenting classes, getting them help with health care and providing other social supports, about $4 will be saved in foster care, juvenile delinquency, drug abuse treatment and mental health costs.

Two recent cases dragged postings from MySpace into Juvenile Court. In one instance, an Indiana Court of Appeals reversed the juvenile conviction of a teen who posted comments on MySpace. Her comments criticized her school principal’s policy on body piercings.

The teen had created a web page under her principal’s identity on MySpace. She cussed out her principal in saying that he could not control her anymore. She said that she would wear her body piercings anyway.

Her principal found the entry on MySpace and reported her to the police. The juvenile court convicted her of harassment, identity deception and identity theft. The Court of Appeals reversed the judgment, saying that the juvenile court had violated her right to free speech.

In a second case, on Wednesday students in Hartselle, Alabama left their high school after authorities discovered a post on MySpace threatening a mass homicide there. That student has been charged in juvenile court with making a terrorist threat.

This week I spoke with two groups about teens with mental illness in juvenile court.

On Monday, I shared with the Wyandotte County, Kansas chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Last night, I was privileged to speak with about seventy parents and teens in the after care program at the Adolescent Center for Treatment of Johnson County Mental Health in Olathe, Kansas.

At both settings, we lamented the large number of teens in the juvenile system who suffer from mental health disorders. About seventy percent of all teens in juvenile justice suffer from mental health disorders, according to the National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice. Twenty five percent experience severe disorders.

For many of these teens and their families, juvenile court becomes the only way for them to access mental health services. Some families relinquish custody of their children just to get help. In juvenile court, mentally ill teens might be removed involuntarily from their parents’ home.

I appreciate the invitations from NAMI and the Johnson County Mental Health Center to speak at their forums. However, the views in this post are my personal opinions, and may or may not represent the views of NAMI or the Johnson County Mental Health Center. I welcome comments from anyone who has experienced this system first hand. I also encourage any suggestions for change.

A Sacramento attorney filed a lawsuit against Alameda County, California. alleging that its juvenile detential officers illegally strip searched the teens in their custody. The teens had not been arrested for possession of drugs or weapons, and there was no reasonable suspicion that the strip search would discover anything illegal.

The juvenile detention center where I practice juvenile law in Johnson County, Kansas routinely strip searches every child who enters the facility. The teens are forced to bend over and open their buttocks so that a staff member may check the anus for contraband. Juvenile justice jurisdiction in Kansas begins at age ten.

I suspect that these searches rarely find anything worth the trauma to the child. Most of the youth in juvenile detention suffer from mental illness. Some already have been sexually traumatized.

The “searches” are inflicted immediately upon entering the facility as a traumatic rite of initiation. They intentionallly dehumanize the child.

Strip searches serve the same function as rape and torture. In each instance, the perpetrator inflicts sexual trauma to demonstrate the abuser’s power and dehumanize the victim.

I’m not accusing our juvenile detention center of rape or torture. Fortunately, our juvenile detention center has a great staff. They do everything they can to minimize the trauma. The searchers must be the same gender as the victim, and the search must be wintessed by another person of that same gender.

Nonetheless, the many juveniles I have represented over the years have understood all too well the dehumanizing meaning of this horrific hazing. I’m complaining about the process, not the personnel. Strip searches intentionally traumatize the victim to establish authority. They should stop.