Alaska's sex crime victims mainly are young — just children, really. They most often are targeted in someone's home. And they usually know their attacker.
A new state report provides a detailed and disturbing snapshot of serious sex crimes in Alaska. It's the second year the state Department of Public Safety has produced an analysis of felony sex offenses, an effort that took many more years to bring together, according to Walt Monegan, public safety commissioner.
Reports of felony sex offenses – which include rape, sex abuse of children, child pornography and sex with incapacitated individuals — rose 14 percent from 2015 to 2016, the new document says. The data is based on initial reports to law enforcement.
Here were the other findings of the report:
- More than half of the victims – 54 percent – are Alaska Native, far bigger than the overall 20 percent share of the population that is Alaska Native.
— Alaska Native girls and women are the most at risk of being sexually assaulted or abused in almost every part of Alaska. Only in Southcentral with Anchorage excluded – an area that includes the Kenai Peninsula and the Matanuska-Susitna Borough — are white people the most often victimized.
— The problem of sex assault and abuse is magnified in Western Alaska, including the Aleutian Islands, Bethel, Kotzebue, Nome, Dillingham and surrounding villages. The rate of sexual offenses in that region is 446 incidents per 100,000 people compared to 262 per 100,000 in Anchorage and 66 in Southcentral, the report said.
— While the most common victim is a 14-year-old girl, the most common suspect is a 19-year-old male. But in the cases of the youngest victims, from infants up to 10-year-olds, suspects are young too, most often just 14 years old, the report said. For victims age 18 on up, the suspects are older too, most commonly 31.
— When the victim is male, it's most often a young boy just 5 years old, the report said.
— Some 47 percent of suspects are Alaska Native. About one-third are white. Some 97 percent are male. Suspects and victims tend to be the same race, except for black suspects, whose victims most often are white, the analysis found.
— Almost all the victims and suspects knew each other. Just 4 percent of the attackers were strangers, and for the youngest children, only 1 percent were targeted by someone unknown, the analysis found. Most suspects were acquaintances. Some were relatives. A few were boyfriends or girlfriends. In five instances, the suspect was the baby sitter.
— Almost three-quarters of reported sex offenses happened in a residence, the report said. Others occurred on tribal lands and in woods, in motels or at school and college, in bars and alleys, jails and parks. One was reported in a grocery store and one in a church.
— Some 15 percent of sex offenses involved weapons, mainly fists and feet. Guns and knives were reported in just seven incidents.
Alaska is a beautiful place to live by almost any standard, but we have a deep vein of ugliness that runs through our state, and sadly it just seems to get uglier all of the time.
Politicians promise to do something, but nothing ever seems to change.
When we elected our first female governor I allowed myself to imagine that things like sexual abuse and pedophilia would surely be one of her foremost concerns, after all wouldn't a woman be far more sensitive to those victims than a man?
But sadly she actually may have done the very least to address this problem, and it's a problem that seems to have no end in sight.
Source http://ift.tt/2AVLFMN
