During Major League Baseball’s All-Star Week that was recently celebrated here in Cleveland, undercover police officials conducted a sting operation that netted close to 40 men. The creeps were lured to a house in a Cleveland suburb by cops who pretended online to be 14- and 15-year-old girls that were willing to have sex with the adult men.
When the men arrived at the residence, many of them no doubt giddy with sexual anticipation, they got the surprise of their lives when the door was opened not by a vulnerable teenager, but by a big burly cop. Some of the perverts probably were in need of a change of underwear right on the spot. If they were looking for a thrill, they got one — just not the kind they expected.
Normally I’m opposed to sting operations of this type since they smack of entrapment. Would the men have engaged in this kind of behavior, absent being enticed? But on the other hand, once the individual they were corresponding with online informed the men they were underage, the conversation should have ceased immediately. Their failure to do so makes them guilty as hell.
In their twisted little minds they saw nothing wrong with having sex with a female under the age of consent, because, similar to hundreds of thousands — indeed, maybe millions — of other males, they view the laws governing when a female is mature enough to give consent as wrong. If the cops want to set up the sting again they will, in spite of the publicity surrounding the recent arrests, net a similar number of men and they know they could replicate this week in and week out. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that once a man is arrested for attempting to engage in this kind of behavior, they will modify their thinking — or behavior.
The sick notion that once a female begins to have a menstrual cycle she is old enough to have sex goes back eons in the history of humankind, and in many less enlightened countries, law and custom still allow men to engage in sex with females as soon as they reach puberty, even if that occurs when they are 11 or 12. The overpowering desire on the part of many men in these cultures to be “first” — to be the male that deflowers a virgin — causes women to lose the right to have control over their own bodies.
These same men, for the most part, wouldn’t dare sexually touch a female that hasn’t entered puberty, but the same men think they have the right to determine when it’s appropriate to have sex with a female once she begins to menstruate, state laws by damned. The state might say that 18 is the age of consent (younger in some southern U.S. states) but in their minds state law is wrong, so they don’t view their actions as breaking the law.
This is the kind of thinking that creates monsters like Jeffery Epstein, who feels that as long as he financially compensated the girls he took advantage of, what’s the problem, what’s the big deal?
While the creeps who were caught in the sting here in Cleveland don’t possess great wealth and will no doubt feel the full brunt of the law, if we are now really serious about protecting females, our criminal justice system has to prove that it’s up to the task of prosecuting a billionaire like Jeffery Epstein and his accomplices to the fullest extent of the law. There can be no exemptions to the law for the wealthy or famous. None.
From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.