The Economist magazine has just released an important feature article entitled, “Sex Laws: Unjust and Ineffective.” In an indirect way, the article makes a point that I have been trying to get across in my work on this issue: If you want to keep your kids safe from real sex offenders, we need to scrap our current sex offender registries and completely rethink the way we define and punish sex offenses in this country. That’s because, currently, a significant percentage of those people listed in sex offender registries pose almost no threat to children, making it difficult for us to know who really does pose a threat to our kids and what we should do about them.
Simply stated, we’ve dumbed-down the notion of “sex crimes” in this country. As a nation, we have foolishly come to equate almost all sex offenses equally. While sex offender registry laws vary from state to state, many basically say that that two teens caught engaging in consensual oral sex in high school belong on the same list alongside child rapists. That is insanity. And it leaves many in the public, especially parents, thinking that the whole world is full of predators lurking on every corner just waiting to snatch, rape, and kill their children. [For the actual facts, see the appendix I have included down below: "Is America Suffering from a National Child Abduction Epidemic"?] In reality, as The Economist feature story points out, the truth is quite different:
Every American state keeps a register of sex offenders. California has had one since 1947, but most states started theirs in the 1990s. Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers. Because so many offences require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded. As of December last year, there were 674,000 of them, according to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. If they were all crammed into a single state, it would be more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota. As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders. America’s registers keep swelling, not least because in 17 states, registration is for life.
Georgia has more than 17,000 registered sex offenders. Some are highly dangerous. But many are not. And it is fiendishly hard for anyone browsing the registry to tell the one from the other. The Georgia Sex Offender Registration Review Board, an official body, assessed a sample of offenders on the registry last year and concluded that 65% of them posed little threat. Another 30% were potentially threatening, and 5% were clearly dangerous. The board recommended that the first group be allowed to live and work wherever they liked. The second group could reasonably be barred from living or working in certain places, said the board, and the third group should be subject to tight restrictions and a lifetime of monitoring. A very small number “just over 100” are classified as “predators”, which means they have a compulsion to commit sex offences. When not in jail, predators must wear ankle bracelets that track where they are.
Let’s repeat a few key numbers here: 674,000 registered offenders, “more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota.” Those are the kind of numbers that send sensationalistic media outlets and average parents alike into a tizzy. Rarely does anyone stop to ask what those numbers mean or who these people are on the sex offender registries. But, as The Economist notes, when you dig below the surface and start taking a serious look at who these people are and what they have done to land on the list, a very different story emerges. We’re polluting these lists with petty offenders (flashers and streakers) and people who should have been dealt with in different ways (like teens who were caught in the act).
What about the real bad guys? As the Georgia Review Board found, only 5% of those on their sex offender registry were “clearly dangerous” and “should be subject to tight restrictions and a lifetime of monitoring.” These would be your true scum of the Earth; the sick fiends who really have preyed on children or raped repeatedly. Here’s a question I want answered about these scum: Why do we need a sex offender registry for them at all? Why are they not behind bars for life? Why don’t we cut off their privates! I am deadly serious here. If anyone raped one of my children, I would go after him and snip his manhood myself… slowly… with a dull, rusty blade. Any yet we release these people to re-offend. And then we put them on a list. A list that had teens on it who made a stupid mistake in high school in the back of car and got caught. DOES THIS MAKE ANY DAMN SENSE??? (And yes, I am shouting when I use all caps! Because I am sick and tired of this nonsense.)
Here is the sobering fact to consider: a 2003 Department of Justice study reported that the average sentence for child molesters was approximately seven years and, on average, they were released after serving just three of those seven years. That is an extremely troubling statistic. If you have young children in your home, it is even more upsetting. When our government is putting people who viciously hurt innocent children behind bars for just seven years and then letting them out after only three, then our government has failed us at a very fundamental level.
Worse yet, policymakers then point fingers at everyone else and scold Internet companies and ISPs for not doing enough to protect children from predators, all the while conveniently ignoring the government’s own failed policies that allow those predators to be on the streets and behind keyboards in the first place! It is not “market failure” at work when child predators are lurking online; it is government failure in the extreme. We are never going to solve this problem until we hunt down the real bad guys and lock them up for a long, long time.
In the meantime, however, as Lenore Skenazy argues, parents might want to just “burn your sex offender maps” because they instill a sense of dread and panic in us about the world around us based simply on the large number of people on them — even though they tell you little about who is an actual threat to your child. I have parents in my neighborhood who tell me they won’t let their kids ride their bike down the sidewalks in our very safe and fairly affluent neighborhood in McLean, Virgina because they have heard there are sex offenders in the area. I ask them if they have ever examined those “offenders” to see what they are on the list for. They haven’t bothered. I have. Not one of the sex offenders in my area had anything to with sex crimes against children. Strangely, most of the sex offenders in my area are listed as just being convicted of “sodomy.” I always wonder, was that consensual sodomy that occurred when it was still a crime in Virginia? (That is, before the Supreme Court struck down such laws in the 2003 case of Lawrence v. Texas). If so, that’s not a crime in my book and those people do not belong on any sex offender list. Of course, if it was actual rape, that’s a very serious crime and it deserves conviction. Either way, these are not sex crimes against children even though that’s the impression many parents have when parents see or hear about these sex offender registries. So, when only a small percentage of those on the lists are the ones we truly need to fear (the child molesters and rapists), isn’t there a better solution? Like: LOCK THEM UP AND THROW AWAY THE KEY! Or, if we are not going to do that, at least create a separate registry for these more serious offenders. Call it the “Scum of the Earth List” and make these people were bright neon monitoring bracelets and anklets so we can see them.
At a minimum, we need follow the advice Human Rights Watch has set forth, as The Economist summarizes:
Human Rights Watch urges America to scale back its sex-offender registries. Those convicted of minor, non-violent offences should not be required to register, says Ms Tofte. Nor should juveniles. Sex offenders should be individually assessed, and only those judged likely to rape someone or abuse a child should be registered. Such decisions should be regularly reviewed and offenders who are rehabilitated (or who grow too old to reoffend) should be removed from the registry. The information on sex-offender registries should be held by the police, not published online, says Ms Tofte, and released “on a need-to-know basis”. Blanket bans on all sex offenders living and working in certain areas should be abolished. Instead, it makes sense for the most dangerous offenders sometimes to face tailored restrictions as a condition of parole.
To clarify my own views: I think lists of serious sex offenders (again, if we aren’t locking them up for longer periods) should be made public, but the lesser offenses (like cases of consensual teen sex in high school) should be kept private so it doesn’t stigmatize those people for life and drive the average public batty in the meantime.
We need to bring some sanity back to America’s sex laws. And we need to do if for the children. Our kids are not going to be safer (or saner) by artificially inflating sex offender rolls with people who don’t belong on the list in the first place. That just leads to fear, confusion, and a misplaced sense of justice. We need to punish the true scum more aggressively, and then find more sensible approaches to deal with others. And let’s get out of the business of putting teenagers on these lists altogether. That’s just nuts.
A final reason I care deeply about setting things right on this front is because concerns about online child safety — and overblown fears about child predators in particular — are leading to many calls for increased Internet regulation. Down below, I have pasted in an excerpt from my “Parental Controls & Online Child Protection” report in which I explain why this “technopanic” mentality about kids and the Internet is unwarranted.
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