Monday, March 28, 2005 | 11:16 a.m.
The accused rapist was unruly. He banged on the window of his holding cell and yelled.
To placate him, detention staffers gave him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a half-pint carton of milk.
The alleged sex offender was just 8 years old. Detained earlier this month, he was the youngest child in 30 years to be held at Clark County's juvenile detention center.
While the child's case is an extraordinary one, officials say it highlights the troubling problem of juvenile sex offenders, whose numbers, they say, are growing.
"I think the general public would be very, very surprised at the number of juvenile sex offenders we have, and also shocked and dismayed at the nature of the sex offenses," said Chief Deputy District Attorney Teresa Lowry, the county's lead prosecutor for cases in which defendants are juveniles.
When Lowry, a former investigator of child abuse and neglect cases, began prosecuting juveniles, she assumed most of the sex offenses would be teenagers accused of date rape, "but that is the smallest percentage of cases," she said.
"A very large percentage is teenage boys -- 13, 14, 15, 16 -- abusing much younger children -- 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8," Lowry said.
And the accusations, Lowry said, typically are not mere inappropriate touching or I'll-show-you-mine-you-show-me-yours.
"Think of every sex act you can think of -- kids do all of those," she said.
The 8-year-old boy was unusually young, but in other ways, his case was typical. Like many juvenile sex offenders, the child was himself a victim of sexual abuse. And like most such offenders, his alleged sexual assault victim was a younger family member, authorities said.
The numbers of juvenile sex offenders have been increasing, according to the county's Department of Juvenile Justice Services.
In 1999, there were 169 juvenile sex offenders in the department's probation caseload; as of Monday, there were 336, a near-doubling.
These youths are not monsters, said John Pacult, a licensed clinical social worker who treats many Clark County juvenile sex offenders in his Las Vegas private practice.
Very few are pathological sexual abusers along the lines of adult pedophiles, who have an incurable condition, Pacult said. Juvenile sexual misbehavior may stem from mere sexual curiosity and naivete, from power and control issues, from anger or from any number of other sources -- as opposed to a deviant predilection for molesting children.
The juvenile offenders can be treated, and once they are treated and understand their behavior, most will not do it again, Pacult said.
According to the juvenile probation unit, only 2 percent of juvenile sex offenders in the program will reoffend, versus an estimated 30 to 40 percent of non-sexual offenders.
The offenders typically do not have other types of juvenile delinquency charges on their records, Lowry said. They typically are confused about sexuality and have trouble with social situations -- "but that's the definition of being a teenager, isn't it?" she said.
"Some of these kids come from really good families," she said. "I've seen Eagle Scouts. I've seen kids who were responsible and got good grades."
The cases are complicated and difficult to handle. They involve tangled, troubled families and require intensive treatment and supervision. Often, to protect the victim, the offender must be taken out of the home and placed in foster care, splitting up the family.
In addition, the law requires juvenile sex offenders to be monitored by probation officers for longer periods of time than other delinquent youth -- at least three years and sometimes, depending on the severity of the offense, until age 21. Juveniles who commit non-sexual offenses are not supervised by juvenile probation past age 18.
That's a headache for the overburdened juvenile parole and probation department, whose caseloads are almost twice the national average.
The average time of supervision for a juvenile sex offender is three years, as opposed to six months to a year for other types of offenses, Juvenile Probation Manager Beth Marek said.
"That has a huge impact on our caseload," she said.
Sex offenders make up about 15 percent of the juvenile probation caseload, Marek estimated.
Prosecutors declined to pursue a criminal case against the 8-year-old accused of rape, who was instead sent to the Desert Willow Treatment Center, a juvenile psychiatric facility, for treatment.
Under state law, 8 is the minimum age of criminal culpability. Nevada and Arizona are the only states in which children younger than 10 can be guilty of crimes.
To juvenile public defender Susan Roske, prosecutors too readily treat juvenile sex offenders as criminals rather than troubled youth in need of healing. Roske said she has seen the district attorney's office pursue cases unnecessarily against youths who were getting therapy and family support to change their behavior.
"Definitely a lot of these behaviors are harmful and need to be addressed," Roske said. "But do they need to be addressed in the court system? If the family is dealing with it and taking the child to therapy, what's the purpose of prosecution?"
Roske blamed mandatory reporting laws that require a variety of authority figures -- including therapists, teachers, attorneys and parole officers -- to report child abuse, including sexual abuse, to police. While the requirement is well-intentioned, she said, it leads to charges being filed against youths who need help, not handcuffs.
"Rather than delinquent behavior, it's an emotional and psychological problem that needs to be addressed," Roske said.
Prosecutors say perpetrators of sex crimes must be held accountable.
But Pacult, the social worker, agreed with the public defender that the mandatory reporting laws are misguided.
The laws discourage people from coming forward to seek help, and sexual abuse is most traumatic when it is covered up and hidden, causing shame and a lack of understanding for both perpetrator and victim, Pacult said.
"The authorities need to be involved, don't get me wrong," he said. But a graduated system, or one in which sex abuse cases that occur within the family aren't prosecuted until therapy fails, would allow people to seek help without incriminating themselves or their children, he suggested.
Therapists, prosecutors and defenders alike blame the continuing increase in juvenile sex offenders partly on unsupervised children with practically unlimited access to pornography thanks to the Internet.
"Ten or 15 years ago, the most that kids would see was Playboy or Penthouse," Pacult said. "Now they can click on the Internet and see bestiality or bondage -- really deviant stuff."
Lowry, the prosecutor, advised parents not to allow children to have computers in their bedrooms and to carefully monitor children's online activities.
Those involved with the issue also point to what they say is a hypocritical culture that simultaneously sexualizes youth and makes talk about sex taboo, increasing children's confusion as they traverse the jungle of puberty.
Pacult pointed specifically to the Clark County School District's "abstinence-based" sex education philosophy, which limits discussion of condoms and birth control.
Those who work with juveniles also said an increasing awareness of sexual misbehavior and the traumas it can cause probably have led to more reporting of incidents that a decade or two ago might have been hidden within the family, swept under the rug out of shame, embarrassment, or ignorance.
Any increase in reporting of sex offenses is a positive development, because therapy can prevent both perpetrator and victim from carrying lifelong scars, Pacult said. "If you talk to a sexual abuse survivor of 20 years ago, when it wasn't discussed, it affected them the rest of their lives," he said.
But while more such offenses are being disclosed today, Pacult said he believes they are still vastly underreported, as are all sex crimes.
"They say one in 10 rapes are reported," he said. "It's probably similar for this (juvenile sex offenses) -- or less."
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