DoubtingThomas wrote:Res Ipsa wrote:
Maybe it's because those of us who are parents don't rely on laws to keep our children safe. All you do in these posts is tell us how terrible these laws are for people who molest children. Your posts are irrelevant to the topic of child safety.
Not sure how conclusions like "The national panel data do not show a significant decrease in the rate of rape or the arrest rate for sexual abuse after implementation of a registry or access to the registry via the Internet" are irrelevant to the topic of child safety. Can you please explain.
I see it as the government's failure to protect children. I want a government that effectively protects children. Yes, parents shouldn't rely on laws, but the government is suppose to help.
and when did I say laws are terrible for child molesters? Please don't misrepresent my words, it is not nice.
Wait! Wasn't it you who posted a parade of horribles about how terrible sex offender laws were for the poor victims convicted of child abuse? Of course, you didn't want to call them child molesters, you called them attractive young teachers. I get that you don't want to acknowledge 14 year olds as children, but legally, when it comes to consent, that's what they are. So, no, I'm not misrepresenting your words. I don't think you fully understand the consequences of your words.
Now, let's think about public sex registries for a minute. What they are supposed to do is alert parents with children to the fact that an offender is living in their neighborhood so they can take actions to reduce the opportunity for the person on the registry to molest their children. If we wanted to test whether that works, we couldn't just look at changes in overall rates of arrest. We'd have to compare the rate of molestations of children whose parents used the registry with those who didn't. The study you quote didn't do that. Have you found any study that evaluates whether use of a public registry by parents affects the odds that their child will be molested?
But you didn't just limit your criticism to registries -- you are criticizing sex offender laws. You know, the ones that actually result in people going to jail. Are you claiming that locking up someone found guilty of child molestation doesn't protect children by taking that person out of circulation, at least for some period of time?
On the general topic of sex offender laws, you've been a one-note samba, with the note being: these laws are unfair to people convicted under them. Having apparently not gotten agreement with your point of view with that argument, now you've switched to child safety. But nothing in your posts has promoted child safety. It's perfectly reasonable to argue that, because public sex-offender registries have little, if any benefit, to children and impose a tremendous social cost on those listed, that we should get rid of them. It's entirely a different matter to argue that people who don't adopt your point of view on sex-offender registries (which is we should either dump them or severely limit them), they don't care about child safety.
What every parent knows is that laws cannot stop someone from molesting their child. The laws that are on the books can't keep their children safe. What can is educating their children and acting as a responsible parent. The laws can only punish after the child has been molested. And parents who take the time to educate themselves understand that the greatest risk to their child is not some guy on the registry living in their neighborhood. It's family, and friends, and teachers, and scout masters, and clergy -- adults who have regular access to their children.
So far, all I've seen you argue for is eliminating or limiting the use of sex-offender registries and reducing the scope of sex offender laws. Exactly how is either supposed to make children safer?
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951