Maybe the piece you cited is complete garbage?
If it is, prove it.
It's a long accepted study that I not only posted the results of, but a link to the study, how it was conducted, etc. Maybe your lack of citation of a peer reviewed study to refute what I said makes your argument complete garbage.
Look, I'm all for nailing reoffenders to the wall. But lets nail actual reoffenders, not a group with a very small reoffense rate.
Laws like this just work to garner votes, they don't actually DO anything. There has not been a single study to even show how sex offender registries help anyone. In fact, studies have shown that they HURT families, because a lot of sex offenders have families, wives, kids, and all it does is serve as a means to shame the entire family. Not to mention many have been victims of violence including wives and children of sex offenders being killed. Not a single iota of evidence has shown it's beneficial. Kinda funny, isn't it? Almost 800,000 people on a list and nobody can tell you why. What a waste of resources when those same police put in charge of this "list" could be going after real criminals like ones who reoffend numerous times with drugs, like fentanyl. For example.
I'm all for a list like that for police use. But the public isn't responsible enough to have that information. That's obvious. I mean if it was REALLY about public safety, how come a murderer can get out, move next door to a school, and not have to notify anyone? A drug offender? An arsonist? An armed robber? A carjacker? A drunk driver? All of these people can be released from prison and only the police know where they are (and only sometimes, at that.) Why is that?
I know its politically expedient to "go after sex offenders" because, well, everyone hates them, right? It's a guaranteed win. That's fine. But if your goal is to make society safer, why not actually take steps to do that? Someone can murder someone and get 25 years to life, paroled after 25. Someone downloads child porn and gets 20 or even longer. So someone who clicks a computer mouse should be in prison as long as a murderer? REALLY? Is this REALLY the best use of our resources? Is the mouse clicker really as big of a threat to society as someone who has murdered someone else?
Another reason I'm not in favor of this is because sex offenses are the only offenses where you are guilty until proven innocent. Little Brittney says you touched her tushy. Prove you didn't. How the **** are you going to do that? No lawyer is going to advise you to go to trial, where they will put little Brittney on the stand to give her coaxed testimony that you touched her. You're done. You're labeled for the rest of your life. Even though you did nothing. You can be labeled a sex offender for being 19 as a senior in HS and dating your 17yo sophomore gf. No, the problem I have is that what "crimes" get you labeled a sex offender make no sense at all in some cases. Some sex offenders live, and have babies with, their "victims." How can that be?
If mean if you rape a kid, sure, bury your ass under the jail. The problem is, not all sex offenders raped kids, not all of them are even ATTRACTED to kids. The label of "sex offender", if you ask most people, they say means they molested a child. That couldn't be further from the truth. Some are accused of rape by a woman scorned. Some are labeled rapists because a jury decided that a woman drank too much one night at a bar and couldn't consent, even though that night she very much wanted it, just later regretted it. Some got drunk and peed in public. Bam. Sex offender. The examples are long and numerous of people who are no threat to society being labeled as such. I read somewhere that of the 800,000 people labeled as "sex offender" less than a quarter of them pose any true risk to society.
A great study out of Australia that lists NUMEROUS misperceptions about sex offenders. I guess to some here, since it doesn't say what they want it to say, then it's bullshit too.
Although sexual offending against children is a highly emotive issue, it is important that the empirical literature on this topic underpins any public policy response to child sex offenders (eg risk assessment, treatment, investigative and court processes, sentencing, child protection policies) in order to ensure the implementation of approaches that are best placed to enhance public safety and protect children from sexual abuse.
Imagine that. Exactly what I've been saying all along. Imagine wanting to ensure that whatever laws are implemented to protect children and enhance public safety actually do so.
