“The List” – People on the “sexual offenders” list for acts committed when they were children

DuBac is on the sexual offenders list for something she did at age ten.

One morning during her junior year, DuBuc returned to her room from psychology class to find a yellow Post-it on her door: “We know you’re a sex offender. GET OUT OF OUR DORM. You’re not wanted here.” She tore it up, and told no one. A few days later, as she sat in her room working on a paper for class, she heard a ping from her AOL Instant Messenger account. The sender was anonymous. “We know you’re a sex offender,” DuBuc read. “Get out.”

She no longer felt safe in the dorm. But in order to rent her own apartment she’d need a decent income. She applied for jobs that interested her—working with the homeless, helping out an urban ministry—without success. Then McDonald’s, Burger King, and Subway turned her down because of her offender status.

That’s a fairly mild anecdote, from this excellent and unsettling long read by Sarah Stillman.

The sex-offender registry, and any law that can be sold as protecting minors from sexual predators, are a clear case of democracy failing. The sex-offender registry, and the relative ease of passing any law, as long as it can be sold as protecting minors from sexual predators, are clear cases of democracy failing. It’s so easy for a politician to curry favor with voters by voting to “protect children” – and requires too much courage for a politician to resist the tide, or to try to repeal bad laws already in place. Aaaargh.

These laws are driven by citizen-activists, who often have personal reasons for their activism. Which is great – but those activists may not understand the consequences of the laws they advocate.

Back in 2006, she 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?”

Even when kids are clearly guilty of sexual abuse – and many simply aren’t guilty of anything that should include prison crime – the system is entirely unprepared to deal with them in an intelligent or reasonable way. The “treatments” kids can be forced to often themselves amount to a bureaucratically inflicted form of sexual abuse.

On the other hand, democracy sucks, but so does everything else. It’s not as if the example of the Vatican gives me much confidence in non-democratic systems’ ability to do the right thing about child sexual abuse. At least with a Democracy, there’s some hope for reform (and there are some activists and hopeful trends covered in the article). All it requires is citizens and politicians willing to advocate for people on the sex offender list.