Over the last fifty years, there has been very little change in the approach to protect children from child sexual predators, which is either to lock them up or treat them and hope they become cured.

Neither approach works.

As I have mentioned in previous articles, during the 1970s and 80s, I was the Chief Investigator of the Illinois Legislative Investigating Commission. Starting in the mid-’70s, we conducted an eight-year investigation into the sexual exploitation of children. Our investigation seemed to indicate that locking them up would work.

But you had to catch them first.

That was the hard part. Most child predators never get caught. Less than two percent of child sexual predators are ever convicted. Their victims know who they are, but very few victims ever tell anyone about what happened to them.

Even if they do, it is a coin toss whether the perpetrator will be prosecuted, much less convicted.

More than 40 years ago, we developed an undercover approach to overcome this deficiency to smoke out the predators and build air-tight cases against them. A variation of our technique has even been used commercially on the television program “To Catch a Predator.”

One of the problems with using the approach today is that most of the efforts by law enforcement seem to be directed at rounding up predators who are soliciting teen girls. We first used the approach to catch those who were targeting pre-teens, both boys and girls. Very few agencies today are aggressively going after the predators interested in pre-teen children.

Very few agencies anywhere are aggressively going after child predators at all.

Who’s going to do it? Police in every agency are overwhelmed with reported crimes to investigate and develop prosecutable cases. There are almost no investigative assets available to pursue strategic investigations, that is, to collect intelligence on hidden criminal activities, to create a plan to neutralize those activities, to expose those activities, and then to round up and prosecute the criminals involved.

On top of all this, forty-five years ago, we thought there were a lot fewer predators than there were, not to mention that the growing sexualization of our culture is producing more child predators every year, everywhere.

Trying to solve the problem of child sexual abuse by locking up the child predators doesn’t work because we can’t lock them up faster than they are being created. When we do, we can’t keep them locked up long enough.

Therapy doesn’t work to reduce the number because, well, therapy doesn’t work on them. They can’t be cured or won’t be cured. God could heal them, but in my whole life investigating these predators, I have not seen a single case where a pedophile has changed, other than getting worse.

Gene Abel, a psychiatrist who has devoted his life to the prevention of child sexual abuse, decided years ago that the only way to protect children is to keep predators away from them. We can’t effectively treat them or arrest our way out of the problem.

One thing that might help is to permanently separate people who are caught sexually abusing a child from ever being free in public again. That’s what Father Gerald Fitzgerald thought, who was the founder of the Servants of the Paraclete.

Fitzgerald characterized the offending priests as “devils” and “vipers” who could not be cured. He urged the Catholic church to laicize immediately any priest caught abusing a child.

Additionally, he wanted the church to isolate them on an island somewhere for the rest of their lives. He even proposed the island of Grenada for that purpose, but later said that he did not think Grenada was large enough to hold them all.

Sadly, we can’t seem to develop the resolve to lock them all away forever. Even if we could, it would not solve the problem. The real issue is with our culture.

Father Fitzgerald was on the right track. He wanted the church to address the issue, at least to the extent that the problem existed within the Catholic Church. The most effective approach would be for the whole church to address the issue.

The real issue.

The culture.

The moral deterioration of our culture over the last several decades is the direct result of our church’s disengagement. Today’s church is more concerned with “social justice” than with virtue, more concerned with social equity than with right and wrong.

Recently, my pastor talked about how early Christians used to rescue unwanted babies who had been left outside to die of exposure or be eaten by animals, which was one way abortion was manifested in that time. He pointed out that today, there are over 300,000 foster children in need of homes and that there are about the same number of churches in the United States.

If only one family in each church took a child, there would be no child without a family.

He showed how easily this problem could be resolved if only the church would act. I hope his message inspired some young couples to seek foster care opportunities.

Many issues plaguing our culture are like the shortage of foster parents. People are not aware of them, or if they are, they don’t see how they could help.

Today, we don’t leave babies out in the woods to get rid of them. It’s illegal, for one thing. However, there are more modern solutions people have developed to eliminate unwanted or inconvenient babies.

Abortion, for one. Thankfully, most churches think that’s wrong.

(Surprisingly, some churches believe it’s just fine. I don’t know how they arrive at that conclusion since it seems like heresy to me.)

Illinois is one of the few states that allows abortions up to the birth of the child. We also are one of the states that enables children to get an abortion without parental consent or notification. A total of 15 states—Alaska, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada (though parental notification will be required starting April 30, 2025), New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Washington—and the District of Columbia have laws that allow this.

Until 2013, children in Illinois were required to secure parental consent to obtain an abortion. After that, a child only had to provide 48-hour notification to their parents to get an abortion. That law was passed in 1995, but implementation was delayed by court actions until 2013.

In 2021, HB 370 was introduced to remove the notification requirement that minors had to give to their parents before getting an abortion. Twenty Democrats sponsored it. Every Republican in the House and Senate voted against the bill, while a Democrat cast every yes vote. Five Democrats in the House and five Democrats in the Senate did not vote.

The bill was passed and signed by Governor Pritzker in December 2021. It became law in June 2022, almost three years ago.

This is what the bill did. It allows a minor, any child under the age of 18, to get an abortion without requiring parental notification. So, let’s say a child, ten years old, gets pregnant. That child can walk into a Planned Parenthood clinic and get an abortion.

By definition, that child is the victim of rape. Any child under seventeen in Illinois who gets pregnant is legally a rape victim. They cannot give consent. That does not mean sexual encounters were unwanted by the child. Most children who fall victim to adult sexual predators engage in sexual activity willingly.

Slick predators even manipulate the child into thinking the sexual encounter was the child’s idea.

This is one reason so many child victims never tell anyone. They blame themselves.

This law should never have been passed. The law passed in 1995 and implemented in 2013 that removed parental consent for an abortion in Illinois should not have been passed. These laws give predators a free pass.

Even if you are in favor of abortion, how can anyone be ok with a child predator getting away with getting a child pregnant?

Abortion and child sexual abuse go hand in glove.

Children are taught in Illinois schools that there are two requirements to have sex. The first is consent, and the second is to use protection. They are encouraged by what they are taught in various sex ed classes, in the literature they are encouraged to read, in the websites that are made available to them, in the TV shows and movies that are freely available, to experiment sexually.

Children are being pushed to grant consent, to experiment. It’s no big deal.

Many of the children are getting pregnant by predators close to their age. It’s not just adults who are a threat to children.

Regarding what children are being taught about sex, there is much the church could do to push back against the cultural decline. But I want to stick to one point—children being allowed to get an abortion without any consent or notification of their parents.

How many of you knew anything about HB370? Did you know that children of any age could get an abortion without any parental involvement or even knowledge in this state? If you knew anything about it, how many of you heard the bill condemned from the pulpit of your church?

I know only one person who heard about this bill from his pastor.

Why didn’t every church condemn this bill? Even if you believe that abortion is ok, do you believe a child going through that experience alone is acceptable? Do you think it’s just fine that a predator gets away with raping a child?

This is not a political question, even though the bill was passed along partisan lines. This is a right and wrong issue. This is a moral issue. Where is the church’s guidance and direction?

Ever since the Didache was published in the first or early second century, abortion for Christians was explicitly condemned:

“You shall not procure an abortion nor destroy a newborn child.”

And the problem is not just about abortion. It involves an opportunity to stop predators as well.

On average, child sexual predators exploit 150 children in their lifetime. The earlier we catch them, the better. Most of them never get caught. We must seize every opportunity to catch them and disrupt their predatory patterns.

Maybe someday we will elect a set of legislators who will allow them to be locked up for life.

It is good when the church points out opportunities to help those in need, like the poor who need food and the children who need foster or adoptive parents. But the church also needs to get more assertive about clarifying right and wrong, about calling out these misguided legislators who are introducing and passing depraved laws.

I don’t understand why our pastors today are so reluctant to attack the cultural decline and criticize the laws and lawmakers facilitating the decay.

If our pastors in the 1770s, who provided the justification and inspiration to rebel against England, were as timid as our pastors are today, we would still be part of the British empire.

“Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness,
but rather expose them.” ~Ephesians 5:11