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3:07am June 10, 2014
Anonymous asked: I saw that you said you don't believe in sex offender registries. I was just curious, if you ever have the time/energy, why? I am a survivor and I do think they're important (for the moment) but I really love your perspectives on things from "outside the walls" and I would love to learn what you think if you're ever able/willing to share. Thank you very much, and I hope you have a really fantastic day.

I think that they drive sex offenders to become criminals because it makes it harder for them to live an ordinary life.  And I don’t believe in systems that pretend to make things safer but actually create more crime.  I also don’t believe in the idea that once you’re a sex offender, you’re always going to re-offend.  Some of the people who have hurt me definitely reoffended, but I know one who did not.  He was given the choice of either getting counseling or turning himself in to the cops, and he chose counseling, and it actually worked on him.  He has not re-offended.  But he was highly motivated and had a fairly well-developed (if sometimes skewed) conscience, which helped.  

Also his problem was less pedophilia and more misogyny, at least in my eyes — he hated women for not giving him the sex and family life he wanted so he took it out on the nearest and least powerful ‘woman’ he could find.  At least that was his explanation to me, that he took out his ‘hatred of the world’ on me.  

Sex offender registries don’t take into account individual differences of those sorts.  They just assume once an offender, always an offender.  The man who molested me knows people from the therapy group he went to, who also molested kids.  He said that some of them were on the registry and it made it very hard for them to find jobs in the legit world.  Some of them did turn to jobs in the criminal world when the legit world failed them. To me, even a small percentage of people doing that is a horrible loss and puts people in danger at least as much as sex crimes do.

I also have a problem with the fact that sex crimes are treated as the worst possible crimes.  We have a sex offender registry.  We don’t have similar registries for crimes that are a lot worse than sex crimes.  This is because our society has become convinced that sex crimes are the worst crimes, sexual abuse is the worst possible abuse, and that in general if sex is involved it makes things worse than if it isn’t.  But in reality, there are things that can be far more devastating than sex crimes, and we don’t have registries for people who commit those crimes.  We don’t have a hate criminal registry, we don’t have a murderer registry, we don’t have a serial killer registry, we don’t have an infanticide registry.  To me, all of those things are at least as bad as sex crimes if not worse, but we don’t have registries for them.

So there are a lot of reasons I don’t agree with sex offender registries, and I’ve only been able to put some of them into words, but hopefully that gives you some idea how I feel.  I understand why people would disagree with me — they’d see it about keeping themselves safe, their children safe.  But I’m not even so sure that sex offender registries do that as much as they promise to.  And I do suspect, from what I’m told by someone who has friends who are on these registries, that sex offender registries make it hard enough to get a job that some people turn to worse crimes, just to survive, and that can’t be good for anyone at all.  And that’s besides the fact that sex offenders are people however awful what they’ve done, and the registries feel like a violation of their rights as people, especially if they’ve already served their time or done their community service or gone into therapy or whatever.

I do, though, completely understand why people would disagree with me on pretty much all of my reasons.  They remain my reasons.

Notes:
  1. gloomkittie said: i don’t have all your reasons, but i’m against them too. the ability to change plus the fact that the age the crime was committed (which does matter because 17-19 is different from 40+ imo) aren’t available makes them irrelevant and cause more crime.
  2. withasmoothroundstone posted this