Basu: Compassion for Sexual Predators Is Misguided

By Rekha Basu
Des Moines Register
September 17, 2013

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20130918/BASU/309180076/1024/buddyholly/?odyssey=nav%7Chead

Two years ago, a youth minister at the Pentecostal Victory Fellowship Church in Council Bluffs pleaded guilty to sexually abusing four young men while he was a church elder. He did it under the pretext of helping rid them of any homosexual thoughts they might have.

Brent Girouex admitted having sexual relations with at least four young men before 2009, though as many as eight have claimed abuse by him. One was 14 when it began. In emotional statements at sentencing, he and the others talked of how the man had gained their trust and manipulated them.

Girouex’s idea of what some describe as “praying away the gay” involved having his subjects lie down while he touched their genitals and made them ejaculate, and sometimes oral sex. Girouex is said to have told detectives that would rid them of evil thoughts.

His arrest was reported in Des Moines media at the time. But a recent flurry of national online media outlets have revived the story, some wrongly reporting that the sentencing had just taken place.

At the urging of some readers, I took a closer look and was appalled at the upshot of the case. What began with 89 counts of sexual abuse and 60 counts of sexual exploitation against Girouex ended with a smaller confession to felony sex abuse with a minor, and an Alford plea to two counts of sexual exploitation by a counselor or therapist, which concedes there is enough evidence to convict him.

For that, he got probation.

That’s despite a Department of Correctional Services assessment that he fit the profile of a child molester. Even Girouex’s wife sided with victims in saying probation wasn’t enough.

Calling it one of the most difficult cases for a judge, District Judge Greg Steensland suspended the 17-year-sentence he could have enforced and gave the 32-year-old Girouex lifetime probation in a ruling lacking conviction. “I mean there’s times when I sit up here and I wonder why in the world am I the one who makes this decision? Why?” Steensland asked rhetorically at sentencing. “Well because I asked for the job and I got it. That’s why.”

According to the transcript, he likened prison to a warehouse and said it doesn’t “provide the maximum opportunity for protection of society.” He ordered Girouex to spend six months at a residential treatment center for sex abuse instead.

“No Time for ‘Rape Away the Gay’ Pastor” said one headline.

The judge, who won a retention election last year, is a University of Iowa graduate with a law degree from Drake University who got a 98 percent rating from the Iowa Bar Association in 2006. As a lawyer, he defended the sexually abused Tracey Dyess, who set a fatal fire to her home in 2005, and Dixie Shanahan Duty, a battered wife who shot her husband in 2002 and left his corpse in a bed.

Steensland’s compassion for troubled offenders is admirable, but not if he minimizes the severity of the offenses. Girouex took advantage of his role in the church to groom his victims and exploit their fears of homosexuality. Noting only 10 percent of sex abuse cases get reported, Assistant Pottawattamie County Attorney Dan McGinn said to not send Girouex to prison sent a message to these and future victims not to bother.

At sentencing, Girouex’s youngest victim recalled thinking that though “everything in me said that this is wrong ... maybe this is just a weird way that people pray.” When he eventually came to understand how he’d been used and controlled for four years, he said, “I really broke down on the inside.”

McGinn noted that profilers said Girouex continued to blame his victims, even after treatment. The defense strategy insidiously implied that anti-gay beliefs were somehow involved in the prosecution of his client. “Homosexuality is not a crime, nor is it a dysfunction,” said Joseph Hrvol, hinting that the victims were all gay, which they were not, and acted consensually. His claim relied on all being above 16 when it happened and Girouex not being a counselor.

One victim, who had known Girouex for eight years before it happened, said, “I have never been more lost in life than I have been in the past year. Realizing this ‘best friend’ and almost brother I opened my heart to and trusted him with my life appeared to be using my fear, my morals and most importantly my faith, the very thing I base my life on, to exploit me for his own sexual pleasure.”

Let’s be clear. The prosecution’s case was not against gays; it was against the sexually predatory behavior of a trusted church elder and the emotional and physical exploitation of impressionable and vulnerable young men.

“This wasn’t a case about homosexuality. This was a case about a pedophile,” said Lonnie Parton, the senior pastor.

Yet the church’s rejection of homosexuality and campaigning against the retention of Supreme Court justices who ruled in favor of same-sex marriage also plays a role. Institutions need to be careful about the rhetoric they use, and the fear, self-loathing and even victimization it can cause. Had the perpetrator not been able to prey on and exploit victims’ fears of homosexuality it would have been much harder, if not impossible, to worm his way into their lives.