What’s the most common age of sex-offenders?

It’s not a trick question, but unless you follow this stuff closely you’ll almost certainly answer wrong.

In fact, most people are shocked to learn that the most common age of people charged with a sex offense isn’t a creepy 39, or 51.

It’s 14.

That’s right. As the US Bureau of Justice reports: “The single age with the greatest number of offenders from the perspective of law enforcement was age 14.”

Why so young? Because people tend to have sex with people around their own age, which means young people tend to have sex with other young people. And much under-age sex is illegal.

So we keep throwing kids on the registry and labeling them sex offenders, as if they’re incorrigible monsters. But in Britain, a study recently commissioned by Parliament has recommended a totally different course: Trying to understand, treat and refrain from labeling the kids, since children often “make mistakes as they start to understand their sexuality and experiment with it.”

What happens when we turn teens and even tweens into sex offenders?

The punishment and stigma can follow them for years, even decades. A study by Human Rights Watch gave the example of Jacob, a boy found guilty of inappropriately touching his sister when he was 11.

Because this got him placed on the sex offender registry, he was not allowed to live near other children, including siblings. So he was sent to live in a juvenile home, and eventually placed with foster parents.

Now 26, Jacob is still on the sex-offender registry, still unable to live near a school, playground or park.

(Even though study after study has shown these residency restrictions do not make the public any safer.)

Meantime, he has had a hard time finding work, because who wants to hire a sex offender?

And so, concluded Human Rights Watch, “his life continues to be defined by an offense he committed at age 11” — an offense that most likely didn’t indicate anything other than a young man in need of guidance.

Here’s another story I haven’t been able to forget since I heard about it a few years back. In 2008, two 14-year-old New Jersey boys pulled down their pants and sat on the faces of two 12-year-old boys. As one of the 14-year-olds later explained to the judge: “I thought it was funny, and I was trying to get my friends to laugh.”

Well that was pretty stupid, right? It sounds like disgusting horseplay. The boys surely needed some disciplining. But since the case involved “criminal sexual contact” with intent to “humiliate or degrade,” it fell under Megan’s Law. And under Megan’s Law, offenders as young as 13 have to register.

For life.

An appellate court upheld the sentence in 2011, so both young men will be on the sex-offender registry until they die. As 40-year-olds, heck, as 80-year-olds, they’ll be treated as perennial perverts for something they did in junior high.

This is not only horrifying, it flies in the face of what we have learned about sex offenders (and not just the young ones), which is that contrary to public perception, the vast majority of people on the registry never offend again.

Over in Britain, where they’re just as concerned about sexual violence as we are — but perhaps ready to rethink whether the punishments are fitting the crimes — the parliamentary report concluded that while public safety is of course paramount, young offenders should be “treated as children first and offenders second.”

This sounds so much better than the draconian approach we’ve been taking in America, under which a quarter of all the people convicted of sex offenses are juveniles.

With over 800,000 people on the list, that means literally hundreds of thousands of people under 18 were labeled monsters.

If safety is really our goal, let’s start considering the safety of young people who play doctor, experiment with their sexuality or roughhouse without realizing that they are putting their entire future in danger, even at age 14.

In fact, especially at age 14.

Lenore Skenazy, author of the book and blog Free-Range Kids, is a contributor at Reason.com.

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