Be Neighborly: Get to Know Your Local Sex Offenders

Where I live, it is against the law to create a flyer and distribute it to your neighbors. We did have a sex offender in our neighborhood and a flyer was delivered by the local police. It only gets distributed to a certain area within where the sex offender has made residence. If it is not that way everywhere, it should be. As far as parents are concerned, if they do not let their children alone with any adults and teens except for family members that they can trust, they will do themselves and their children a big favor. When I was a child, my father did not allow me to go to anyone's house unless my parents were friends with them, and of course, trusted them. I thank my father for being strict today, because when I became an adult (about 24), I found that there was a man in the neighborhood who used to invite all the little girls to his house for candy. I wonder how many of them were caught in his web. What a flashback. I always used to go home alone while all the other girls went into his house, thinking, boy I never get to do anything. I feel blessed that I was not one of the children who did go in that house. I guess the moral of the story is to make sure you give your children the rules and guidelines that they should be following for their safety. What a simple way to avoid these pitfalls.

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I completely agree with this article. I hardly think that a teenager who has consentual sex with another teen needs to have the title of sex offender hanging over their heads for the next eighty or ninety years--same goes for public urination. Sex offenders ought to just be limited to rapists and pedophiles. Anything less than that should be given a different title, or at least have a time limit that they are registered as a sex offender. I realize that many people register as such to avoid jail time, but attorneys ought to be able to come up with better solutions than this. Great article Lenore!

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People like Bundy were very social and likeable and appeared to be nice; and wow, he was also attending college to be a lawyer. This is a very pretty picture. I think Bundy did everything in his power to let people think he was a wonderful guy. But the facts still remain that he did terrible wrongs. And these people seem to be coming out of the woodwork all the time. I would never entertain going into a spiders web and hope that he won't get me while I was there.
Saying hi from a distance, especially when you have kids, would be the safest thing to do. Anyone who does wrong is hoping for people to befriend them and trust them. Wouldn't you?
There is a big difference is being decent and greeting your neighbor with a nice hello when you see them. But, becoming friends would be out of the question, especially when you know of their past sins. What difference is it if someone sexually assault a child, teenager or an adult? I don't think there is a difference. The sex offenders very well could have been in prison with very hard core criminals. Do you think they got any better being in that position and remember, they put themselves in this position. They made life harder for themselves and they have to prove themselves to people; unfortunately, these crimes are abhorable.
I think what we all have to remember on either side of the fence, is that whatever you do in this life, whether right or wrong, it will follow you the rest of your life, even if you think you have eluded or outrun it. Like they say, it catches up to you. So don't get involved in something that will ruin your life forever when you are young.

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As usual Lenore you hit the nail on the head the Registry is so watered down with people that are no danger to anyone. There is not one single documented case that even suggests this registry has prevented a crime.


There are 700,000 people on these registries now and if the hype from the politicians and the media were true we would not have situations like the Dugard case and that girl in Maryland.

Government cannot get a single thing right no matter how simple yet people somehow feel it is a good idea to trust them with their children's safety?

If even 2% of that 700,000 were like Ted Bundy would we not be ankle deep in child murders on a daily basis?? Do the math people and get educated.

Victims in over 90% of all abuse cases know the "purp" it is most often a family member or close friend of the family not someone on any list yet we pour BILLIONS of dollars into this useless registry system.

The results are now in and for all that money we get hundreds of thousands of people on the list that are no threat to anyone and it becomes so watered down that every 2-3 months we get another child murder or abduction from someone hiding on the registry.

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What a shame a child with a child being labeled a sex offender.
This makes me wonder who is behind this?Who is trying to
distroy this law.Chuldren should be protected from adults
not other children.

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Not only are those on the registry not very likely to ever commit another sex crime, but when those that do re-offend are arrested, nearly 70% of the time they discover that the person was not current with their registration information. Look at the next article that you read hyping the fact that "a sex offender did it again", and see if somewhere in the article it doesn't say that they are also charging the person for failure to register or FTR.

Often those who won't make the effort to change their lives and continue to re-offend also won't bother to register or keep their registration information current when they move.

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I completely agree, and most of the sex offenders that made stupid childhood mistakes would agree, that having underage sex is something that can have major consequences later, e.i. pregnancy, STD's, Legal charges etc. However, I don't think that it is ok for the law to punish 1 partner and not the other, or to even take it into their own hands to punish a childhood mistake! If you set and think about all of the mistakes that you made as a kid, teen, young adult. And then think about what your life would be like if you then had to go to jail for those mistakes and register on a registry and have people look at you like you were a monster for the rest of your life due to 1 mistake. Added to that, how are we going to protect our children from the people on that registry that might actually do harm to them if we can't keep track of them for all of the other "offenders" on the list?

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The original intent of the "sex offender" registry was to provide public safety. It's no longer about public safety. Rather, it's an Industry and an easy vote for ruthless politicians. Wake up America! We are NOT any safer due to current laws which label everyone and anyone "sex offender". Someone you love could be the next one on the list.

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The sex offender recidivism rate is just a bit above 2%. They have the second lowest rate of all offenders.

And who is the least to re-offend? Killers! They have a recidivism less than 2%.

Really makes you wonder why we don't make Burglars and Assaulter stitch on scarlet letters!

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I totally agree and like to express great concerns over this overblown law. What is behind all these? Fear-based/Money making plans, Politician's easy-popularity gain, ego-driven, state/local funding gain. Dear citizens, this is a money game for the private and public sectors, righteous and just as it may look on the outside, yet it is not so.

Many lives are totally ruined for life by this senseless law and hysteria. Solution: do not react to unnecessary hypes and learn more about the hidden facts of sex-offenders' law.

Our children are most likely victimized by unsuspected or trusted family members. Study the statistics and facts by medical experts.

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Being molested as a child or having your child sexually molested or even, God forbid, murdered, causes pain that is unimaginable for that child and everyone involved in that child's life. Falling victim to today's sex offender hysteria due to a teen-age mistake and having to suffer such consequences for a consensual, totally non-violent act causes pain that is also unimaginable for that individual and for everyone involved in his life. There are victims on both sides of the sex offender line, and it is getting more and more difficult to always clearly see where that line is drawn; we would all do well to remember that. I am encouraged in that I see in this article and in all but one of the posts thus far the spirit of forgiveness and a willingness to recognize that there but for the grace of God could be I or someone I love.

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I put this comment in earlier, but it never appeared on this blog. I don't know where you live or where you are talking about when you say that people who became aware of sex offenders created flyers and distributed them to people all around the neighborhood. Where I live, it is against the law to do that. We had a sex offender move into our neighborhood and an officer of the law came to our door in a designated area around where the offender moved in. They notified us and gave us a paper saying where the person lived, etc. But it also included a statement that saying that the information was intended for the people who lived within the certain and was not to be circulated. It would be a violation of the law.

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Being molested as a child or having a child who is sexually molested or, God forbid, murdered, causes unimaginable anguish for the child and for everyone involved in the child's life. Falling prey, through a teen-age mistake, through a consensual and totally non-violent act, to today's sex offender climate, also causes unimaginable anguish for the individual and for everyone involved in his life. There is pain and grief on both sides of the sex offender line; we would all do well to remember that. I am encouraged in that I see in this article and in all of the posts except one thus far a spirit of forgiveness and the willingness to recognize that it might be easier than any of us could imagine to find ourselves on the wrong side of that line.

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There's an article in an old issue of the Economist about the problem with the sex offender laws. The problem is that the general label "sex offender" doesn't indicate weather or not there is a threat to children or not. It goes on to say that the large number of very different sorts of sex offenders makes it difficult to identify those that pose a very real threat.

Click on my user name to visit my previous post for the link to the article since links are no longer allowed on Parentdish.

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I think it's a good idea to do what you suggest: ask the offender what his (or her) crime was. But I'll not rely on his (or her) story alone. I'd also get corraboration from court records or someone I know in law enforcement. What's to say the person would tell me the truth?

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I cannot speak for everyone, but, I do speak for many, my son included. A lot of those who are labeled "sex offenders" are not truly offenders, sexual or otherwise. How they were put in this position runs the gambit of innocent and not so innocent possibilities. This is where a lot of people need to say, "But for the grace of God, go I". While this may not apply to you, if you think back over your own growing up years, you may know someone who would be considered a sex offender, had their behavior come to light. How many of you reading this have ever stepped over the line? I'm not talking about, a heinous sex crime, something more like a lack of good judgment, too much to drink or just getting carried away in the moment, going a little too far with your minor aged girlfriend, when she said "no" or even when she said "yes"? Again, this may not pertain to you; maybe it could have been a friend, a relative, the star quarterback on the high school football team or just someone in the neighborhood. Be truly honest, could you or those other people been mislabeled as a sex offender, by description of the laws today.
Do you think it would be fair to label and treat the above type of "crimes" with the same lifetime restrictions received by that person, who rapes, molests, sodomizes and does this repeatedly? This is what is happening to so many pimple face kids today, primarily boys, who were caught necking with their underage girlfriends and many others who just made poor choices, but, are now mature enough to know better and not apt to repeat whatever put them in that situation ever again? Personally, I think there are 2 sides to every story and if the label fits, so be it, but, when it doesn't, change the label and save a life from being ostracized, penalized, demoralized and just plain lied about for the rest of their lives.

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