Hi there, I'm a sex offender

You may not know that, but you may know me. My son Billy is in third grade at Cooper Elementary. I drop him off and pick him up most days, and I have attended several of the parent days and parent lunches there with you. The superintendent has given me permission, and that was all that was needed. Now that has changed. Before I can come to school for any reason again, I have to run an ad like this one, at my expense, for two weeks. There will be a hearing at the end of the two weeks, and any of you who want to keep me from going on school property are invited to come and speak against me. As I understand the legislative bill, only negative testimony will be heard. Apparantly they don't want anyone saying anything good about me. Anyway, here's the notice, and it will run every day for two weeks, and then the meeting will be held in the board room at the administration building at 7 p.m. on February 28. See ya'll there!

If you aren't laughing by now, if you realize that this is real, then I hope that you are crying. The bill calling for everything outlined above, Virginia House Bill 1366, has passed the House Courts of Justice Committee unanimously. The full House of Delegates votes on the bill Tuesday, February 3--TODAY.

We are in the midst of a whirlwind at this point in time. More and more studies are being released, showing what we have been saying for years, and more and more journalists are writing the facts and the truth, and everything they write points to the utter ridiculousness of legislation such as this. And then the crosswinds of more restrictions and harsher laws and legislation based on nothing resembling facts and truth threaten to blow us away, especially, it seems, in the South.

I cringe for every child of every registered parent in the state of Virginia. Did the proponents of this horrible legislation consider them, I wonder, even for a moment?

What most registered parents of school children will choose, of course, in order to avoid the pain and humiliation and bullying and all the other negative consequences to their children, is to not place the ads, to not ask for a hearing, and to quietly remove their presence from their children's school lives.

Someone else will take them and pick them up. No more parent days or field trips or school lunches shared. No parent or counselor conferences. No school plays or basketball games to cheer on the budding actresses or future NBA stars. They will become the invisible parents, parents not allowed to do what even the most ignorant legislator surely knows is vital for optimizing the future of America.

They will no longer be involved, for thirteen years, in what is the major part of their children's lives.

This is getting boring, but it's Halloween again

I really thought this year was going to be different. Last year the "big, bad sex offender at Halloween" hype started as early as August and was in full swing in September. This year, all was quiet on the scare tactics front through the end of September and was slow going into October. However, the past few days have picked up speed, and some of the articles are so self-righteously infuriating about how they are making

Halloween safer for children by--take your pick--visiting all registrants in their district on Halloween/not allowing registrants to decorate; hand out candy; wear costumes; leave their houses; have their lights on/requiring registrants to come to "informational" meetings or seminars/some other equally idiotic nonsense. Most places limit the restrictions to those on parole or probation, but some do not.

Children are at increased risk of harm from one thing on Halloween, and that is being killed or injured in an auto-pedestrian accident. I read one article where part of law-enforcement's efforts on Halloween included increased traffic patrol. One.

Last year I wrote the "Official Halloween Blog." I don't think I can improve on it for factual information, so I am repeating it here. Happy, safe trick-or-treating, everyone.

Originally printed 10/10/2013

Why advocate for not monitoring registered offenders on Halloween? What's the harm? I'm so glad you asked.

• Most Halloween restrictions apply to everyone on the registry or everyone under supervision, whether or not their offense had anything to do with a child. This broad-brush application is bumping up against constitutional protections. Many registrants are forced to gather in one place for special "therapy sessions" or "pep-talks" or movies shown by law enforcement. If the registrant is not under community supervision, this sounds a lot like unlawful detention to me.
• It is an unconscionable waste of taxpayer money. There are so many other areas in which law enforcement could be gainfully occupied on Halloween other than checking that registrants have no lights on and no jack-o-lanterns on the porch or showing movies to a roomful of registrants. One of these areas is traffic duty since the only increased risk to children on Halloween is not assault by registered sex offenders but car-child accidents.
• Many, probably even most, registrants are family men. They have children. Under these restrictions, they cannot decorate their houses with or for their children; they cannot attend the carnival at the school with their children; they cannot take their children trick-or-treating. 

Now it's time for the experts to weigh in:

This is from an academic research study:
“There were no significant increases in sex crimes on or around Halloween, and Halloween incidents did not evidence unusual case characteristics. Findings did not vary across years prior to and after these policies became popular.

“In order to contextualize sex crimes against children we examined over 5 million victimizations that took place in 30 states on or around Halloween in 2005. The most common types of crime from among the incidents reported on Halloween and adjacent days were theft (32%), destruction or vandalism of property (21%), assault (19%) and burglary (9%). Vandalism and property destruction accounted for a greater proportion of crime around Halloween compared to other days of the year (21% vs. 14% of all reports). Sex crimes of all types accounted for slightly over 1% of all Halloween crime. Non-familial sex crimes against children age 12 and under accounted for less than .2% of all Halloween crime incidents.

“Other risks to children are more salient on Halloween. According to the Center for Disease Control, children ages 5 to 14 are four times more likely to be killed by a pedestrian/motor-vehicle accident on Halloween than on any other day of the year. Regarding criminal activity on Halloween, theft and vandalism are particularly common. Sex crimes against children by non- family members account for two out of every thousand Halloween crimes, calling into question the justification for diverting law enforcement resources on that day away from more prevalent public safety concerns.”

This is from non-academic commentary:
 “The intimidation campaign is a silly diversion of manpower and a waste of your tax dollars. Police and the politicians who are in search of tough-on-crime votes will tell you otherwise, but don’t believe the myth that Halloween is the night child sexual predators wait all year for. The facts tell a different story... Over the past several decades, there has not been one reported instance that I can find of a convicted sex offender molesting a child on Halloween night.”

And finally, this is a Halloween safety research and resource guide for parents published October, 2011, by a highly regarded world wide organization called safekids.com. There is nothing to quote from them. There is only the fact that they have researched every element of harm to children in connection with Halloween; their guide covers every possible eventuality and tells parents how to guard against it. It has many graphs, charts, and results of studies. Not one time within its 8 pages do the words “sex offenders” or “registry” appear. I believe that is called an argument from silence.

So please, enjoy Halloween; help your kids enjoy Halloween. And please spare a moment to think about the children whose Halloween enjoyment is curtailed because one of their parents is a registered sex offender and they are unfortunate enough to live in one of the jurisdictions where unneeded laws and restrictions make Halloween all trick and no treat for them.

I want to title this WTF but I'll settle for What the Hell?

This has gone too far. In "If It Saves One Child," I referenced a case where three-year-olds were "investigated" for "sexual fondling" in their pre-school bathroom for looking at and touching each others' wee-wees. The article reports that, in the wake of the publicity about the incident, the mother of another student at the school "...called the state's child abuse hotline to report she witnessed her child, who was not involved in the first incident, touching himself." 

Then there was the case where the mother of a three-year-old was given a ticket when her son, playing outside, couldn't get into his house in time and urinated in his yard in view of horrified--my emphasis and my sarcasm--neighbors and, unfortunately, the policeman who gave the ticket.

What was fortunate is that, in both of these cases, nothing resembling actual charges were filed, and subsequent reports indicate that they were dismissed as being without merit.

However, a six-year-old in Wisconsin was not as lucky. When he and playmates engaged in a "playing doctor" episode and the mother of one of the children pressed charges, she found a district attorney not only willing to prosecute the case but eager to do so. This case is fraught with accusations and a host of issues, but the bottom line is this: this child, charged with and adjudicated for first degree felony sexual assault, will be required to be on the public sex offender registry when he turns 18 for something he did at age 6. In the words of the article, "...District Attorney Lisa Riniker has guaranteed that one local 6-year-old boy will have a series of awkward therapy sessions as an adolescent, and again as a middle-aged man—if he lives that long. In a less-rosy outcome, Riniker’s targeted kid just might succumb to the stress of life as a publicly listed sex offender, and retreat from society, or even kill himself."

This is appalling; this is unacceptable; this is criminal in itself.

And now, today this is printed. A nine-year-old boy in Ohio has been charged with gross sexual imposition for pulling down another child's pants and touching him inappropriately. This is a breaking story, and nothing has yet been finalized as to how it will be handled. Even though the news report stresses how prosecutors use discretion in handling juvenile cases, it is filled with words such as, "sex crime," "criminal," and "criminal charge," and it is titled, "9-year-old boy charged with sex crime."

Nine is older than six. Nevertheless, this, from all appearances, is a case of childish play and curiosity. If it must go beyond the purview of the parents of the children and the possibility of some counseling, why is

family court not adequate? Why are prosecutors and even the possibility of criminal charges and sex crimes part of the equation? If the juvenile prosecutors and the Juvenile Court referenced in the article preclude the possibility of this child having a criminal record and being required to register as a sex offender, then they are doing it right, and I hope that is so. However, my confidence level is not high.

The trend is to criminalize, more and more, behavior that is not criminal, behavior that is merely stupid, and, most disturbingly, behavior that is part of normal childish curiosity and play, behavior that is part of normal child development.

And most disturbing of all is the fact that the sex offender registry, something sold to the public on the grounds that it would protect children, is now a weapon used against children and putting them in unfathomable danger.

Sex offender alert: get those bumper stickers off that window!

~~by Shelly

This will sound like my friend Lenore Skenazy at Free-Range Kids, but honestly, this has just gone too far.

Besides being poorly written and edited--it says "several police departments" and identifies none; it uses "sick" when it means "stick"-Freudian slip?--this article and what it says are ridiculous.

The premise is that seeing bumper-sticker-type stick figures portraying a family with young children will incite someone with pedophilic tendencies to--what?-follow the car home, kill the parents, and abscond with the children? Attack the car at a stop light and drag the children from the car?

The article, and presumably the warning of these police departments, whoever they are, also cautions against anything on the car that identifies the school that one's child goes to. The only rationale I can think of here is that someone intent on abducting a random child would not know that schools contain children until he sees a bumper sticker announcing, "My child is an honor student at Roosevelt Elementary."

And don't even get me started on the ridiculous notion that children are abducted from schools by strangers on a regular--or irregular--or any kind of--basis.

Lenore's mission is to debunk the notion that our children are at risk every minute of every day from every conceivable danger. I wonder if she will re-think her position now that she has been alerted to the potential horrors that await those who put stick figures on their cars.