A Platform of Justice.The American Justice Foundation condemns abuse in any form. It is a false premise that harsh and very severe anti-sex offender laws protect children and increase public safety. Sound, scientific rehabilitation theory has found that punishment to be most effective needs to be proportional and progressive. If one has a dog that is misbehaving, teaching it to behave properly by severely beating it does not work. It only serves to make the dog angry, vicious, and more dangerous.

Teaching a child to not hit another child by beating the child when the child hits someone only supresses the unwanted behavior while you are watching the child. Studies show that a "bounce back phenomenon" occurs and the child becomes even more likely to hit someone when you are not watching.

Similarly, using overly harsh laws and publicly humiliating sex offenders will not help to rehabilitate them, and it will not make us safer. Abusing abusers is not sound public policy. Despite what most people think, it does nothing to protect us from them.

Contrary to popular opinion and to our current justice system's operation, the interests of victims and offenders are truly not adversarial.

Those of us who care about justice need to work together to build a justice system that will protect us all. The rights of all people need to be respected. The current system has been built on hysteria and fear and uses extreme punishment and humiliation to attempt to protect us. This does not work well.

If we can imagine how we would build a system to address sexual abuse if the victim was our daughter and the offender was our son then we will be closer to the right response.