Who cares about a bunch of sex offenders? And if we can keep children safer by destroying molesters’ lives, what’s the problem?
That’s the thinking behind Megan’s Law (1994), the Adam Walsh Act (2006), efforts to require special Sex Offender license plates, and dozens of other laws to restrict the movement, residence, employment, privacy, and every other right of convicted sex offenders.
Megan’s Law was sponsored by New Jersey congressman Dick Zimmer, who recently died at age 81. Signed by then-president Clinton, the federal law required states and municipalities to set up websites listing the local addresses of convicted sex offenders who had completed their sentences.
The supposed reason for this is the familiar chant of every moral panic: “Helping families make informed decisions for themselves and their children.” Decisions about what? “Honey, don’t wear that mini-skirt outside, there’s a molester living across the street.” “Quick, change lanes, we don’t want to drive behind a molester.”
Predictably, these registries are used by vigilante groups attempting to drive registrants out of their community. Cities across America also require offenders to surrender their civil rights on Halloween–despite no evidence whatsoever of an uptick in offender activity. Laws regulate where registrants are allowed to live—requirements so stringent that they often end up under freeway overpasses, homeless camps, or in the desert. If they weren’t poor, sick, and hopeless before release, they are soon after.
Unfortunately, federal and university studies now show that these laws do NOT make American children safer—in fact, they divert resources and attention away from actually protecting kids.
1) Most sexual exploitation of children is done by a known person, not a stranger who can be avoided by studying a map. The CDC states that about 90% of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone known and trusted by the child or family.
2) Same-offense recidivism for sex offending is lower than it is for other serious crimes like arson. Indeed, registry populations are rarely the source of new child victimizations or repeated offenses.
3) Demonizing registrants teaches kids the wrong self-protection strategies. “Stranger danger”—long promoted by disaster entrepreneurs like the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children—instills fear and undermines kids’ confidence and resilience.
4) Isolating registrants and making their lives impossible incentivizes them to acts of desperation, without the moderating effects of community. Rather than making everyone else safer, this makes them more dangerous.
5) The collateral consequences on the families of registrants include employment problems, housing disruption and homelessness, harassment, and stigma affecting registrants’ children. Undermining these innocent peoples’ ability to create a decent future weakens public safety.
6) Sex offender registration and segregation programs cost billions—and they divert money from programs that do make us safer, such as treatment and rehabilitation of offenders; supervision to mainstream them after release; and giving all children comprehensive school sex education (which has been shown to promote physical and mental well-being wherever it has been implemented).
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Perhaps the worst thing about laws like these is that they reinforce the public’s terror and rage: terror about their ever-increasing sense of vulnerability. Rage about their dreadful sense of powerlessness. Result: a bloodthirsty desire to punish someone, someplace, for destroying the pleasures of parenthood. Logic that would promote actual child safety is quickly overwhelmed by this raw emotion.
I’m quite sympathetic about how people are desperate to feel like they’re doing something to make themselves and their families safer. Given the constant reminders that the world is now too treacherous to let kids out of the house–courtesy of Fox “News,” Law & Order, Amber Alert, and the NRA–every reasonable American is scrambling to feel empowered. How can someone feel they’ve accomplished “I’m not gonna take it anymore”? Mess with the lives of hapless molesters.
There’s no data showing that any of these registration and segregation programs actually make our kids and communities safer. They certainly don’t make anyone feel safer—in fact, just the opposite. But they make people feel they’re doing something. These laws invariably pass without any research to show that they will benefit anyone besides the companies that administer these programs (creating and selling the special license plates, monitoring devices, etc.). Try a pilot program and evaluate after a year? Who has time for such thoughtfulness–we’re in a crisis!
Today, any public policy that helps people feel less powerless is perceived as good–even if it has no impact, or makes a problem worse (for example, abstinence-only sex ed). And that makes frightening the public a smart political move for cynical people who want power.
Why not simplify the problem and just execute sex offenders?
Actually, the Texas House of Representatives has passed that law. Yes, really.
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