Research on sex offender laws and their effects on people and society
Key Findings
Some of the key findings of the research conducted for this website are:
- Juvenile sex offenders. An estimated 19,000 people are on US sex offender registries for behavior when they were children or adolescents — some younger than eleven years old — many of them for innocently “playing doctor” or for normal, consensual, teenage love affairs. See Criminalizing Child’s Play.
- Innocuous “offenses.” Sex offenders include people whose only crime was breastfeeding their baby or urinating behind a dumpster. See Look Who’s a Sex Offender Now!
- Growing underclass. As of 2007, one out of every 220 adult men in the United States was a registered sex offender. See Counting and Over-Counting Sex Offenders.
- Sex worse than violence. The federal sentence for photographing a 17-year-old boy with an erection is about twice as severe as for attempting to kill him — and about four times as severe as for beating him up so badly that he accidentally dies. See Throwing Away the Key.
This page posted on January 29, 2009, updated February 1, 2009, June 29, 2009.
|