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Q & A about Sex Offender Laws
by Marshall Burns, Ph.D. 

Click on a question number to be taken to the answer.

Effects on our society
     41. What kinds of harm do we need to be concerned about protecting children from?
     42. Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry? Aren’t we better off if we just make sure that children and men are never alone together?
     43. Do mandatory reporting laws discourage people in need of counseling for sexual problems from seeking out professional help?
     44. What is the harm in ostracizing people who have done bad things, and keeping them away from everyone else?
     45. If what you say about all this is true, why aren’t human rights advocates protesting it?
     46. Do legislators and government officials know what’s going on? If these laws are such a problem, why aren’t they fixing them?

 

Effects on our society

41. What kinds of harm do we need to be concerned about protecting children from?

  Image of child physical abuse from Time magazine
Image of child physical abuse from Time

Children are the most vulnerable members of any society. Prone to harm, they are largely defined by their need to be protected. Children can be harmed in many ways: by accidents, by disease, by unfulfillment of basic needs, by animal attacks, or by the actions of other chldren or adults. It is one of the most important roles of a society to ensure that its children are nurtured and protected from harm where possible. This is why many governments take on the responsibility for education and vaccination of children, for rearing of orphans and other children without suitable guardians, and for punishing people who use children for sexual gratification or harm them in other ways.

Protection of children does not always work. See the SOLR report, How Children are Harmed, for a look at three types of harm that befall children: harm at the hands of other individuals, failure of society to look after those whose parents can’t, and, ironically, harm at the hands of their own governments.
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Note posted on August 24, 2007, updated January 16, 2008, major revision on September 7, 2008, updated January 28, 2009.

42. Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry? Aren’t we better off if we just make sure that children and men are never alone together?

Two cases exemplify the horrific results when children and adults learn to be afraid of each other:

  • An eleven-year-old Boy Scout nearly starved to death when he was lost in the woods for four days because he avoided contact with the very people who were out searching for him! His mother explained, “We’ve … told him don’t talk to strangers. … When an ATV or horse came by, he got off the trail. … When they left, he got back on the trail. … His biggest fear, he told me, was someone would steal him.”
  • A two-year-old girl wandered off and later drowned in a pond not far from her home. A man who saw the tot from his car thought about stopping to help her, but later said, “One of the reasons I did not go back is because I thought someone would see me and think I was trying to abduct her.” (More on this case)

Reverberations of this fear arise repeatedly in the press:

One result of these fears is a precipitous decline in men working as teachers. A male preschool teacher interviewed by ABC News spoke of the hurtful reactions he often gets from parents the first time they see him with young kids. “I know they're thinking, ‘He must be a predator or something. He must be some type of pedophile.’”


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Note posted on August 24, 2007, updated September 20, 2007, January 10, 2008, January 28, 2009.

43. Do mandatory reporting laws discourage people in need of counseling for sexual problems from seeking out professional help?

A number of professional organizations and publications have expressed this concern, such as:

We fear that such a [mandatory reporting] provision will discourage minors from obtaining vital health care out of fear that conversation with a healthcare provider or counselor will no longer be held in confidence.

From Memorandum in Opposition: S.1069 – Saland, New York State Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers

Absent confidentiality, individuals might not disclose information, which would diminish the ability to provide appropriate services.

From Legislative Memo: Child Abuse Reporting, New York Civil Liberties Union, 2004

The bill will … discourage young people from obtaining needed health care out of fear that conversations with doctors and nurses will no longer be confidential. … Upon learning that their conversations with health care providers may no longer be confidential, young people will be far less likely to seek or obtain necessary health care. … The risk of a police report will discourage young people from confiding in adults about sexual issues when doing so could bring the police to their door and send their girlfriend or boyfriend to jail.

From The Mandatory Reporting of Child Abuse Under the Child Welfare Act, Health Law Journal, 1999 (Linked at Health Law Institute)

An example of the kind of thing people would be afraid of is given by the following:

Kevin’s mom walked in on him performing a sex act on another child, who was under the age of ten. His mother was concerned and took Kevin to a therapist. The girl was also counseled. “Next thing I know, I have my son registered as a sex offender because I took him in for counseling.”

From Kids as Young as 12 are Being Put on the Kansas Sex Offender Website, KAKE-TV (Wichita, Kansas), November 16, 2005.


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Note posted on January 10, 2008, updated January 17, 2008.

44. What is the harm in ostracizing people who have done bad things, and keeping them away from everyone else?

The destructive impact on society of demonization of its individuals has been a recurrent theme of a number of eminent social scientists. For example:

Decivilizing and demonization form a structural-cum-discursive couplet in which each element reinforces the other and both serve in tandem to legitimize the state policy of urban abandonment and punitive containment responsible for the parlous state of the contemporary ghetto.

From Decivilizing and Demonizing: Remaking the Black American Ghetto by Loïc Wacquant, Department of Sociology, University of California at Berkeley, 2004 (Linked at Wacquant's Web page)

I have also investigated the psychological processes involved in dehumanizing other human beings, in thinking about them as less than human, and then labeling them as “the enemy.” Doing so enables average people to behave like “brute beasts” in their hostility and violence toward those they consider to be dangerous, or insignificant animal-like creatures. The psychological process of dehumanization is a central destructive force in prejudice, discrimination, stigmatization and genocide.

From Liberation Psychology in a Time of Terror by Philip G. Zimbardo, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, October 5, 2005 (Linked at Stanford Prison Experiment)


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Note posted on January 10, 2008, updated January 17, 2008.

45. If what you say about all this is true, why aren’t human rights advocates protesting it?

They are, but red flags raised about these issues attract little attention. The applause given to harsh treatment of sex offenders easily drowns out voices calling for more fair and effective ways of dealing with the problems of sexual violence. A good number of organizations and people have been warning about the rising tide of sex offender laws and their consequences for quite some time. Some examples:


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Note posted on January 10, 2008, updated February 1, 2008, February 2, 2008, February 28, 2008, January 28, 2009.

46. Do legislators and government officials know what’s going on? If these laws are such a problem, why aren’t they fixing them?

Almost no politician, whether liberal or conservative, dares oppose any measure against sex offenders, no matter how extreme.

Here are some quotes from articles that discuss the pressure politicians feel to pass ever-tougher laws against sex offenders:

“The biggest thing is they’re politically easy,” law Professor Corey Rayburn Yung said of the offenders. “Until very recently, (laws) were automatically passed without any debate. They allow you to be hard on crime on the least defensible groups of society ….” Yung … said standing up against the laws exposes politicians to opponents who accuse them of being soft on those who would hurt innocent children. “I think a lot of the laws were drafted early on without much thought. … They were painted with broad brushes by political winners and often driven by particularly sensational crime.” But the laws vary so much in severity and can be so absurd, Yung said.
          …
          When you have an election coming, everyone’s fearful of that postcard coming in the mail a week before the election … “Rep X voted against the strongest child safety measure ever enacted.”

From Political Pressure: Legislators quick to target sex offenders, GateHouse News Service, August 27, 2007.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver … said last week that the retroactive nature of the Senate bill was “a clear flaw.” But today Mr. Silver said he had decided to support the bill anyway and would let the courts determine its constitutionality. With the Assembly Democrats feeling vulnerable on crime issues, particularly after [Republican governor] Pataki’s victory last November, Mr. Silver clearly faced intense political pressure not to oppose the bill.

From Bill to Track Sex Offenders Nears Passage, New York Times, June 27, 1995.

In many states, politicians are eager to pass such legislation, which is enthusiastically supported by the public. Indeed, ask citizens what they think and you’re likely to hear that they support laws to “get rid of perverts” who, in the eyes of many people, “deserve what they get.”

From The new American witch hunt: Opinion — It makes little sense to demonize sex offenders rather than treat their problems. — by Richard B. Krueger, professor of psychiatry, Columbia University, Los Angeles Times, March 11, 2007.

The effects of such pressure can be seen in the vote tallies for such laws. The PROTECT Act of 2003 was passed in the US Senate by 98 to zero and in the House of Representatives by 400 to 25. Three years later, Congress avoided identifying how its members voted on the Adam Walsh Act of 2006 by passing it in both the House and Senate by a voice vote. However, in consideration of the final form of the bill, 20 senators spoke in support and none in opposition. In the House of Representatives, 17 members spoke in support and one lone voice rose in opposition.

An example at the state level is Senate Bill 2161 (1996) in California, which redefined the English word, “violent” (see Q&A # 36) and passed without opposition in both the State Assembly and Senate. Ten years later, California showed that its politicians are following strong public sentiment when its “Jessica’s Law” passed by 70 percent in a public referendum.

That sentiment was expressed in two Gallup polls of US adults. In February 2005, out of a list of potential concerns, the one that more Americans reported being “very concerned” about was sexual molestation of children — 66 percent versus the near tie of 65 percent for the use or sale of hard drugs, but only 52 percent for violent crime and 36 percent for terrorism.1 Later that year, 94 percent said they are in favor of sex offenders’ names and addresses being on a public registry.2
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1. Sex Offenders — A majority of Americans are concerned about child molestation happening in their communities, and have checked their local registry of child sex offenders. — Gallup, Inc., June 9, 2005 (Video report). The responses to that question in the February poll are given in this video report about the poll conducted in June.

2. Sex Offender Registries Are Underutilized by the Public — Two-thirds think it's likely they live by a convicted child molester, but only 23% have checked — Gallup, Inc., June 9, 2005
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Note posted on January 10, 2008, updated January 15, 2008, January 24, 2008, February 2, 2008.

 
This page posted on January 28, 2009.
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