Sex offenders not a threat to MySpace

In a shocking move, the networking site MySpace recently removed over 90 000 users that they had identified as sex offenders in an attempt to make the site safer for children. The number of culled accounts is undoubtedly shocking, and has been used by the likes of Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal as evidence to the fact that “social networking sites remain rife with sexual predators.” And while this may be true, the actual risk is nowhere near what many think.

In fact, the danger posed by these individuals is relatively low. They aren’t hiding behind anonymity—as their being identified as sex offenders can tell you—and don’t present the same level of threat as predators who use aliases or pretend to be children themselves.

Protecting children requires education on net safety in conjunction with classic “stranger danger” tactics; however the problem here is of a different scale. Despite what we typically think of when we hear the term “sex offender,” this wasn’t an army of child-hungry rapists. These were 90 000 people who have been horribly stigmatized as being the very worst amongst what encompasses a variety of crimes.

As a result of highly publicized cases, the general population assumes that sex offenders are more prevalent, more likely to re-offend, and more likely to commit a horrific crime than they actually are. Tales of child molestation that reach the national level are so shocking that they stick in our minds, and we then overestimate their likelihood of occurrence because of the availability heuristic.

While I don’t excuse the behaviour of sex offenders, their risk to the community is exaggerated. The more brutal crimes of rape, sexual assault, and child molestation are most often committed by friends, family, and acquaintances of the victim. Similarly, while sex offenders are five times more likely than other criminals to commit another sex crime, their rates of recidivism are quite low.

According to 1994 study by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, only 5.3 per cent of men who had committed rape or sexual assault re-offended within three years, and only 3.3 per cent of all sex offenders committed another sex crime during this period. What’s more, when compared to other criminals, sex offenders were less likely to commit another crime (43 per cent versus 68 per cent of non-sex offenders). However, despite this, they are still ostracized and are considered to pose great danger to public safety.

Watchdog groups in the US turn sex offenders into pariahs, and their monitoring tactics lead to harassment. Whereas other criminals are forgiven for their transgressions, tools intended to protect communities from sex offenders serve instead to mark those individuals for humiliation. In Canada, the sex offender registry is currently confidential, but they are no less looked down upon and despised.

Though a sex offender serves their sentence, they’re never truly regarded as having been rehabilitated. Long-term mandatory registration serves as a constant reminder that they’re no longer trusted and makes them guilty until proven innocent. Yes, some of them pose a threat to the community, but they’re not the only criminals that fall into this category. In the interest of safety, registration criteria should be both expanded and made more stringent. All individuals deemed to be violent or dangerous, regardless of the nature of their prior crime, should be required to register in such a fashion with the RCMP. Meanwhile, non-violent sex offenders whose crime is of a lesser nature, and who have been determined by professionals to pose no significant threat to their communities, should have no further legal obligations than their non-sex offender counterparts.

Some of these 90 000 banned users might have posed a threat to our children, but ostracizing them isn’t the correct approach. The real danger isn’t hiding in plain sight, and protecting our children can’t be achieved by blanket bans, whether it be on the Internet or in our cities with “predator-free zones.” These people have done wrong in the past, it’s true, but when even Tom doesn’t want to be friends with them, you know that we’re going too far. ..News Source.. by Conal Pierse, Managing Editor