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.

Do we need to be afraid of dirty old men?

I read something this morning that I need to throw out for consideration.

In brief, a senior citizen--73 years senior--has been forced from his home in Michigan. His conviction--and not the first--was for indecent exposure to school children. His home was close to the school on the route a bus took to reach the school. According to reports, he stood naked on his front porch as the bus went by.

If reports are true and accurate, most would call him him a dirty old man, including myself. My question is, is it necessary to bring to bear the weight of the state of Michigan's sex offender registry and the forceful removal of an old man from his home to deal with a dirty old man?

The courts had already required that he erect a fence around his property that could not be seen through. Unsatisfied with this, an assistant prosecutor filed an appeal asking the court to force him to move. This won the day, and the bare-butted old gentleman no longer lives where innocent children will have their delicate sensibilities shocked at the view.

Most of my readers, including myself--I do read my own posts and usually enjoy them--remember our own youthful encounters with the dirty old man in the neighborhood. Those of us over the age of forty remember how we dealt with it. We shrieked, we screamed, and we ran for home or school, depending on our destination of the moment. We babbled out to mom or dad or Mrs. Smith what we saw, and we got, quite possibly, minimal reaction.

If it was a small town, we might have heard, "Oh, Mr. Turner's daughter let him get outside again," or "Someone needs to tell Sheriff Tate to have a come-to-Jesus talk with Mr. Parker again." Then we were given a brief explanation that sometimes some people do things when they are old or when they are sick or when they have mental illnesses that people not so afflicted do not do. Then we were told to always run home or to school and tell an adult about it but not to worry about it. My friend told me her mother told her that if it happened again, to point at him and laugh before running away.

In a larger city where everyone didn't know everyone, the explanation and the advice sufficed.

And we did what our parents told us, and we went our merry ways. And we were not assaulted or kidnapped or traumatized or fearful for our lives or our safety. And that is what we in turn told our children when they came running home babbling about the man on the corner who unzipped his pants and waved his willy at them.

But somewhere along the way, that wasn't good enough. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, we decided that the precious sensibilities of our children were being assaulted and that they were in imminent danger of terrible harm. We didn't have the sense to realize that it was our reaction that scared our children senseless rather than what they had seen. We decided that we needed to protect our children in every situation rather than teach them how to protect themselves. We decided that such people were perverts, and that perverts needed to be registered and shamed, and their families shamed, and the strong arm of the law and of the courts was not only the appropriate way to deal with the situation but the only way.

And we added yet another category of offender to the registry in order to "protect the children."

And we continue to teach our children that they are not safe in the world and that they don't have enough sense to know what to do when something unexpected occurs and that they can't take care of themselves.

In my humble opinion, we are doing a great disservice, not only to the dirty old men but to our children also.

It's Obviously Not Too Soon to Talk About Sex Offenders and School Bus Stops

School is starting soon across our land, and parents of the type that Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids refers to as “helicopter parents” are girding on their armor and preparing for battle with the massive number of potential threats to their children’s safety.

Not content to have residency restrictions in place that keep registered sex offenders often so far from schools, day-cares, and parks that they can live virtually nowhere, parents are now turning their eyes to bus stops.                                                          

When one mom in Virginia Beach, Virginia, did not get what she wanted from the school board—her daughter’s bus stop relocated due to a registrant in the neighborhood—she went to the media with her complaint and request.

This issue has been brought up as a concern not only in Virginia but also in Oklahoma, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, North Carolina, and California, to name only some. It is a jurisdictional issue, and many counties and districts include school bus stops as a “safe” area. What this means differs as well, depending on the jurisdiction. Some limit the exclusion to registrants who are on parole or probation or to those whose offenses were with children. Some go for a more shotgun approach and apply the restrictions to all on the registry for any purpose. Some do not include bus stops in the restricted areas.

With so many states—there are more than the ones named—and so many jurisdictions within states making this a priority, one would believe the problem must be significant. Just how many kids have been abducted from school bus stops by registered sex offenders—or by anyone, for that matter?

On the other hand, knowing that, according to the FBI, registered sex offenders were responsible for child abductions in less than 1% of the actual cases, and knowing that, according to several sources including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the number of actual, real abductions of children and teens for nefarious purposes averages 115 a year, I didn’t see how it could be significant.

I was not overly surprised, then, when my search engine, in spite of being prompted with several different phrases having to do with children taken from school bus stops, refused to give me anything. The closest I came was the case of Jaycee Dugard, who was taken off the street walking to a school bus stop in 1991, Brittany Locklear in 1998, taken from her own front yard waiting for the bus, and this year's abduction of 15-year-old Kathlynn Shepard and her friend who accepted a ride in a pick-up after getting off of their school bus. There have been a few other reported attempts but no actual kidnappings that I could locate. And in two of these three cases, the perpetrators did not live close to where the abductions occurred. The identity of Brittany's killer is still unknown.

It would appear that the danger inherent in registrants living in proximity to a bus stop is minute, right up there with the danger to trick-or-treaters from registrants on Halloween.

Why do we keep trying to address problems that don’t exist? Are there no real ones that need addressing? Someone said, “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” Isn’t it time we listened?