"When kids are accused of sex crimes"

The New Yorker article about what happens when teenagers -- and sometimes kids as young as 10, -- do something that falls under definition "sex crime", and go onto sex offender registry for life:

http://ift.tt/1MgUwa9

Quote:

at the age of ten, [Charla] Roberts had pulled down the pants of a male classmate at her public elementary school. She was prosecuted for “indecency with a child,” and added to the state’s online offender database for the next ten years. The terms of her probation barred her from leaving her mother’s house after six in the evening, leaving the county, or living in proximity to “minor children,” which ruled out most apartments. When I spoke to the victim, he was shocked to learn of Roberts’s fate. He described the playground offense as an act of “public humiliation, instead of a sexual act”—a hurtful prank, but hardly a sex crime.

And while Charla Roberts' punishment was to be on the state's sex offender registry for "only" 10 years, her name is still on private online databases. Once your name is on the Internet, there is no effective way to remove it. Any prospective employer googles it, and finds you are "sex offender". A childhood prank can ruin your life:

Quote:

Not long ago, [Charla] learned that her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend was circulating a link to a commercial Web site called SexOffenderRecord.com. The site featured Charla’s photograph along with her race (black), age (twenty-five), and home address, as well as the message: “To alert others about Charla Lee Roberts’s Sex Offender Record... Just Click the Facebook Icon.”

These registries were created in mid-2000's in the wake of some horrific sex crimes perpetrated by men who were previously convicted. Which got huge publicity precisely because they were so unusual. In other words, edge cases. And as I once read on this forum, edge cases make for bad laws:

Quote:

Back in 2006, [Stacie Rumenap, of "Stop Child Predators"] helped bring a Florida father, Mark Lunsford, to Capitol Hill, to tell the story of how his daughter, Jessica, had been kidnapped, raped, killed, and buried by a man with a long history of abusing children. Together, they lobbied for the passage of Jessica’s Law, in Florida and beyond. But, soon afterward, Rumenap learned that Lunsford’s eighteen-year-old son had been arrested in Ohio, for heavy petting with a fourteen-year-old. Now the teen faced inclusion on the very registry that his father had fought to bolster in his murdered sister’s name. “When these laws started getting implemented and enforced, we didn’t realize what would happen,” Rumenap told me. “Now here we are, stuck asking, How do we solve this problem?”

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/21qnRFZ