Research on sex offender laws and their effects on people and society
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Work Needed
by Marshall Burns, Ph.D. 

The following is a list of further research needed on sex offender laws and their effects on people and society.

  • Footnotes:
    • Footnotes needing work by me:
    • Footnotes needing revisions in the RSOL pages: All done.

  • Reports

  • Longer-term projects
    • (Formerly Note U-2) Consider where to incorporate the following relevant references:
      • Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking (SMART), the agency of the US Justice Department responsible for the national SO registry
      • Sex Offenses and Offenders: An Analysis of Data on Rape and Sexual Assault, Bureau of Justice Statistics (US DoJ), February 1997 (Description) — Why have these data not been updated in ten years?
      • Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement: Victim, Incident, and Offender Characteristics by Howard N. Snyder, National Center for Juvenile Justice (US DoJ), July 2000 (Description)
      • Criminal Victimization, 2006, Bureau of Justice Statistics (US DoJ), December 2007 (Description and links for other years) — Table 2 shows that rape/sexual assault accounted for 4.5% of total violent crimes in 2006 (272k out of 6.1M). "Violent crimes" meant rape/sexual assault, robbery, or assault. The HRW report cited the analogous 3.7% from the 2005 edition of this document.
      • Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Rape Victimization: Findings From the National Violence Against Women Survey, National Institute of Justice (US DoJ), January 2006 (Reporting results of survey conducted in 1995-96 (Why published ten years later?)) — Rather startling statistic that only 19% of rapes of adult females and 13% of rapes of adult males were reported to police. "Rape" meant actual or attempted oral, vaginal, or anal penetration by penis or object using force or threat. Oral penetration included male perpetrator putting penis into victim's mouth or any perpetrator "penetrating" victim's vagina or anus with mouth or tongue. The fact that more completed than attempted rapes were indicated suggests most of these acts would fall into the category that the Criminal Victimization study would call "rape," not "sexual assault" (i.e., they were not just unwanted touching, but actual or attempted penetration by force or threat). The authors extrapolate their results to estimate that 300k women and 93k men were raped in the previous year (Exhibit 1). These numbers would outstrip the total number of rapes and sexual assaults reported in Criminal Victimization for 2006.
        A question this raises is what proportion of non-rape sexual assaults and what proportion of nonsexual violent crimes went unreported. For example, if most robberies and physical assaults are reported and most sexual assaults are not, then sexual crimes represent a greater proportion of violent crimes than indicated by Criminal Victimization. On the other hand, if 80% of all violent crimes go unreported (not infeasible since most reported violent crimes are "simple" assaults, meaning a deadly weapon was not used and there was no serious injury), then the proportion of sexual crimes is as indicated in Criminal Victimization, but the total violence in our society is much greater than reported there.
      • Sexual Victimization of College Women, Bureau of Justice Statistics (US DoJ), 2000 (Description)
      • Sexual Violence Reported by Correctional Authorities, 2006, Bureau of Justice Statistics (US DoJ), August 2007 (Description and links for other years) — Prison rape

    • Distinguishing violent from peaceful sexual offenses (further to Discerning Use of Force in Sexual Offenses)
      • In Juvenile Offenders and Victims: 2006 National Report by Howard N. Snyder and Melissa Sickmund, National Center for Juvenile Justice (US DoJ), March 2006 (Linked at Publications. Previous editions also at Publications page.), five tables in Chapter 6 break down juvenile court cases by most serious offense type. The categories include rape, other violent sex offense, and nonviolent sex offense. The sources cited are "Stahl et al.’s Juvenile Court Statistics 2001–2002" (pg 157, 172) and "National Center for Juvenile Justice’s National Juvenile Court Data Archive: Juvenile Court Case Records 1985–2002 [machine-readable data file]" (p 160, 162, 174). I want to check those sources and see if their distinctions between violent and nonviolent sex offenses were based on NIBRS data or something else.

      • In Juvenile Offenders and Victims: 2006 National Report by Howard N. Snyder and Melissa Sickmund, National Center for Juvenile Justice (US DoJ), March 2006 (Linked at Publications. Previous editions also at Publications page.), p 37 indicates that only 18% of statutory rape offenders of females were juveniles. (Corresponding statistics were not given for male victims.) The 1999 edition of the report showed 24..43% of sexual assault offenders being juveniles (for different victim age groups). Since the former are supposed to be consensual and the latter are supposed to be violent, this would suggest that coersion was used more by juveniles than by adults. That would be interesting and deserves greater analysis. But the difference may just as well be evidence of the corruption of the NIBRS data due to the crime definitions, as discussed above. (Could there be a political reason for the emphasis on "few ... juvenile offenders" in the headline of that page after the 1999 report showed a significant number of juvenile sex offenders? Is somebody trying to pretend that there are not a lot of juveniles on the SO registries?)

    • (Formerly part of Note U-1) I want to give an overview of the panoply of victim-named laws, such as Megan's law, Jessica's law, etc., and what the common features are of laws with these names in the various states. One useful reference: History: Violent sex attacks lead to tough laws, GateHouse News Service, August 20, 2007.

    • History of Sexual Repression (Formerly Note U-1)

           I want to write a report giving the historical context of all this madness. Some accounts I've read trace it back to the CAPTA Act of 1974. A book on the sexual revolution (reference needed) referred to the sexual oppression raised by the Nazis when they came to power in the 1930s. (He didn't talk about this, but the pink triangle armband was analogous to today's public notification.) I think it goes back much farther than that. I have some references in notes of other research about the treatment of masturbation in the 1800s, which seems analogous to how we treat juvenile sex offenders today. Also, I've heard that the witch hunts in New England in the 1700s were largely targeted at lesbians. One can go much farther back and blame it all on the Bible, but actually, it seems that much of the last two thousand years may have been more sexually liberated than the last few hundred. So I want to look into that and see if I can find the real roots of this thing.

           Some resources identified on the more recent aspects of this are

 
This page posted on January 17, 2008, updated January 24, 2008, September 7, 2008, January 28, 2009, May 31, 2009.
This page copyright © 2007–2009, Marshall Burns. All rights reserved.
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