Sex Offender Paranoia Kills Child
Sex Offender Paranoia - How We’ve Gone Too Far
Skip down to number 8. A 2 year old girl wandered away from her pre-school. She is seen by a man driving down the road. The man thinks he should do something but is afraid that he’ll be accused of trying to abduct her.
The girl is later found downed to death in a pond.
In that same article is the story of Thomas Pauli and man convicted of second degree criminal sexual conduct, who froze to death because he was denied access to a homeless shelter because he was on “the list”. He couldn’t stay in the homeless shelters because they were to close to a school. The article makes no comment about whether he had ever hurt a child, and given that his crime doesn’t include the word minor, it seems likely that he never did.
In this article Stephen Marshall kills two sex offenders. One of his victims committed the crime of having consensual sex with his girlfriend three weeks before the age of consent. Marshall got their home addresses from the registry of sexual offenders along with 34 other potential victims and murdered two men in one day. I assume he will have murdered more if given more time.
Given that 83% of sexual assaults are committed by someone known to the victim and that the recitvism rate among sex offenders is 2/3rd that of released prisoners in general and of those that reoffend only 5.3% are re-arrested for a sex crime, it seems clear that sex offender paranoia does more harm than good. [source]
I’m not sure what society thinks will happen when they release people from prison who can’t get a job, get a place to live or have any friends, it seems to me the intended effect of the sex offender registries is that more people (children or otherwise) get hurt.