Crimes against children always tend to get the heaviest penalties, and for good reason. After all, there are quite a few things that go wrong with a child’s life if something traumatic ends up happening to them during their formative years where quite a bit of their personality develops, not to mention the fact that such things can prevent a child from understanding things such as social cues and can lead to severe behavioral disorders in the future. All in all, crimes against children are taken seriously because of the fact that they can have a terrible impact on society overall.
One of the most serious crimes that could possibly be committed in this category is the molestation of a child. Molestation is a crime of a sexual nature, so it is pretty clear that the penalties levied here are going to be very serious indeed to the point where they might supersede a lot of other penalties out there that are to be levied against crimes that are of a purportedly similar level of seriousness. Molestation can result in a jail sentence of anywhere between ten and thirty years depending on the severity of the crime, but the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of factors that influence whether or not a crime actually is molestation or whether it is something else entirely.
Essentially, molestation is when a child is touched in a manner that is sexual in nature. This usually involves the touching of genitalia or secondary sexual features such as a child’s chest. It is important to understand that if the perpetrator ends up having sex with the child in question, then the crime that they will be prosecuted for is no longer molestation, it is rape. This is because of the fact that this particular crime is a lot more serious than molestation, and carries with it even more significant consequences than molestation tends to cause.
Molestation is often a tough crime to prosecute someone for because of the fact that the victim in question is a child and children are usually unable to communicate to any serious degree of accuracy how they felt about a particular event that occurred during their lives. Moreover, the children that suffer from molestation will, quite naturally, be in a state of shock which means that it is probable that they are going to be in no condition at all to talk about what they went through in any way whatsoever.
Hence, the prosecution usually has to end up building a case that does not involve any kind of witness testimony whatsoever. However, most prosecutors tend to find a way around this because of the fact that it is such an entrenched part of the legal system by this point. There are a lot of other ways in which evidence can be acquired, something that helps prosecutors put the people that are responsible for these crimes behind bars.