Two days before Halloween, MSNBC reported that paroled California sex offenders who have no permanent home partly because of a state law that bans them from living near schools or parks, will be under supervision to make sure they have no contact with children out trick-or-treating.
I am always amazed how the movement to raise awareness about child sexual abuse is a victim of its own success, and this article underscored that point. Residency laws prohibiting sex offenders from living within a certain distance of places frequented by children, leading to offenders becoming homeless, are an example of this.
The first thing I thought as I read this article is that it must be harder to keep tabs on a homeless or transient sex offender than it is for one who has a fixed address and a landlord. The second thing I thought of is how this law may be putting more children at risk by encouraging sex offenders to live with family and friends. As background, it’s important to realize that most sex offenders preying upon children don’t kidnap their victims. Rather, they rely on gaining the trust of their victims and their victims’ families, and eventually use manipulation, threats or the power inherent to an adult-child relationship to keep their victims quiet. Residency laws largely ignore this fact, assuming that keeping sex offenders physically away from large groups of children keeps offenders from gaining access to them.
So how do sex offenders gain access to children? Some become parents, foster parents or step parents. Some work with children in a professional capacity (such as teachers), or a volunteer capacity (such as scout leaders). Some are given access to children through their extended family or community- they become that nice person who’s always willing to babysit. Some offenders may resort to hanging out in parks and near schools to befriend children, but the aforementioned techniques are surprisingly effective.
We rarely think of child sex offenders as people with parents, siblings and significant others. It’s very easy to demonize people who do acts so destructive and harming. But sex offenders do have families, and these families often have trouble reconciling the person they love with an action they don’t understand. Often these families rely on our society’s general ignorance about CSA to convince themselves of their loved one’s innocence, or if not innocence, their overall goodness and reformability. The loved ones of sex offenders will usually either declare the innocence of the offender of will say how much they’ve changed since their conviction. People do change, but their basic patterns of sexual attraction rarely do. While there are modalities of therapy that can diminish a sex offender’s attraction towards children and teach them skills to keep from re-offending, the leading professional opinion is that someone who has sexually abused children as an adult should never be trusted alone with children. This is why policies that tacitly encourage sex offenders to live with family carry a hidden risk- by living with people who are the most likely to downplay their offenses, and are least likely enforce a “not-to-be-left-alone-with-children” rule, children are often placed at risk.
How can we keep children safe, now that we’ve ruled out residency restrictions and increased supervision on Halloween? Factual, evidence-based information about CSA needs to be ingrained in our culture, and into the policies of every institution dealing with children. Everyone working for children in our court system needs to know even more about CSA than the general public, because having tough laws does no good if judges don’t understand the complex dynamic of sexual abuse well enough to convict guilty parties. Sex offenders often manage to keep their victims from disclosing their abuse for years- often until the survivors are adults. Many states have statute of limitations on the prosecution of child sexual abuse that essentially keeps adults from seeking justice for their victimization. This needs to change. Any time a pedophile gets convicted, it interrupts their cycle of child molestation. It can also result in them getting treatment, and getting placed on a sex offender registry.
I got to pass out candy to trick-or-treaters this Halloween. As I watched the pint-sized princesses and super heros come and go, I found myself hoping that Halloween is the only time in their lives when they find themselves begging for food. I hoped their futures would never drain them of the creativity and enthusiasm they displayed. I hoped the un-costumed caretakers I saw watching them on the sidewalk weren’t true monsters. But somehow, the notion that a sex offender may be playing the role of human candy dispenser didn’t worry me too much.
