Do You Scour the Sex Offender Registries?

As a Real Estate professional, I’m often asked about the probability of a particular neighborhood’s housing of registered sex offenders. The concern is the same as mine, and rightly so. We want our children and families as safe as possible. I often refer these families to one of several sex offender registries. There is a growing number of Web sites that make it simple and easy to find out how many registered sex offenders live in a given area. Many of the Web sites are a result of Megan’s Law which went into effect in 1996 requiring states to make information on registered sex offenders public. Web sites such as Family Watchdog (www.familywatchdog.us) and the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Sex Offender Public Website (www.nsopw.gov) are free while some mobile apps can cost a few dollars.

What concerns this writer is how diluted the list has become. Round-the-clock media coverage of high profile abductions and murders have contributed to a general sense that society has run amok, when in fact violent crime rates in most areas are generally lower now than they’ve been since the 1970s, according to Lenore Skenazy, author of "Free Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts With Worry" (Jossey-Bass, 2009).

According to Skenazy, the number of people registered as sex offenders has been exploding for 15 years, and not because of the escalation of high-risk perpetrators. She notes that while there are still plenty of creepy criminals on state registries, the MAIN reason the list has grown so large is because we’ve “dumbed-down” the notion of what constitutes a sex offender.

Did you know that a person can wind up on the registry for urinating public, visiting a prostitute or in 32 states, taking part in the silly prank of streaking? I sure didn’t. But perhaps the most problematic group of “sex offenders” according to Skenazy is TEENS. Teen boys getting caught having sex with their girlfriends, and more times than not, consensually. In Texas alone, 4,000 registrants ended up on the list as juveniles. And in Georgia, it was found that less than 1% defined as “predators” were actually considered driven by compulsion to commit sex crimes.

Skenazy states that adding to the registries to “keep our children safe,” they’d likely be safer if registries were smaller and more meaningful. She further argues sex offender registries contribute to an irrational fear of “stranger danger” when in fact nearly 90% of all crimes against children are committed by a family member or other people they know, according to David Finkelhor, who directs the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.

So what is a concerned parent or Realtor to do? I know I’ll continue checking out the Web sites myself and when asked, I’ll refer them to my clients. After all it only takes one individual to cause real fear in a community. I guess it really is better to FEEL safe than BE sorry.