Say What!?
New Law for Sex Offenders on Facebook Is Meaningless
I’m willing to bet that every mother with an Internet connection has at one point or another, gone online to check the sex offender registry for her area. After teenagers Amber DuBois and Chelsea King were killed in my neck of the woods a couple of years ago by repeat sex offender John Gardner, I hopped online and found out which neighbors to avoid.
After being convicted of a sex crime, a perpetrator must carry a scarlet badge of dishonor forever. There’s a good way to avoid this lifelong shame: Don’t molest children. Done. You may live your life in relative peace and quiet.
As for those human beings (and I use that term loosely) that sexually abuse children and manage to make it through their prison sentences, they will forever be branded as sex offenders. Their names, locations, and crimes committed are entered into a database accessible to the general public through websites like Family Watchdog.
In Louisiana, sex offenders will now be required to include that factoid on their social networking profiles on sites like Facebook and Pinterest. Possibly Twitter too, but man, ‘sex offender’ takes up so many of those allotted 140 characters. Many states already require these predators to register their email accounts, Internet addresses, etc. with the authorities, but this is the first law of it’s kind in the nation.
Facebook has been removing sex offenders from their site for years, but this new law, effective August 1, is the first that mandates that these criminals include such information in their profiles.
Practically speaking, I’m not sure what kind of effect this will have on the prevalence of child molesters and rapists online, because let’s face it, they already broke the law at least once with their sick yearnings. I can’t imagine one of these perpetrators sitting down at the computer looking for prey and saying, “Oh gee golly, the new rules say I must include my lewd criminal past in my profile, so let’s get to uploading that information.”
The way I see it is that this is one more thing that a repeat offender can be charged with when caught. The more counts they’re charged on, the more likely they’ll finally be put away for good. Meanwhile, make sure you teach your child safe practices on the Internet. You never know what’s lurking there.
Image via David Surtees/Flickr
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Todd Vrancic
Makes sense. Be proactive in the defense of yourself and your family. Someone who has broken that law and is online for predatory reasons is not going to hesitate to break a law requiring a full disclosure of their criminal history.
Rachel Schiller
Just so you know- not all sex offenders are child molesters.
DebaLa
//The way I see it is that this is one more thing that a repeat offender can be charged with when caught. //
Agree 100%. It's not going to stop the predator, just slow him down when he gets caught. Again.
Michelephant
Banning sex offenders from social networking wont make kids any safer and hinders the lives of people who should be registered offenders in the first place. Like people who got caught for public urination or two 14 year olds that had consensual sex but, because of their ages they technically both committed statutory rape against each other. The registry needs a major overhaul.
butterflyfreak
Thank you, Rachel and Michelephant! It drives me crazy that people rely so heavily on a sex offender registry to find child molesters and then they lump everyone on the list in one category. People are on that list for indecent exposure, lewd behavior, etc. I happen to know one guy, he has to carry around this title of sex offender because he had sex with his g/f that he had been with for more than a year. Her parents pressed statutory rape charges on him right after he turned 18, and she was 16. Again, they had been together for over a year when he legally became an adult. That's something that doesn't set well with me, if it bothered her parents so bad, why didn't they just step up and BE parents. I think that only people who are actually child molesters and rapists should be required to register. And, I'm sorry, but I don't consider "statutory" rape really rape if it's consensual and the people are only a couple years apart. Like, if you're talking about a 30+ year old with a 14-15 year old, yeah, that person should be required to register. But if a couple kids are dating and one of them turns 18, I don't think that should qualify as statutory rape.
RaeAnne.USAF
butterflyfreak
Wow, RaeAnne, that means the whole registry thing is even more fucked up than I thought, just great! Jeez I wish we could just do a double tap on the child molesters and be done with it!
Doomy234
But even so, who is to say these offenders arent just creating a new non-registered email to use for Facebook and what not?
ou812
butterflyfreak
Yes, Doomy, you CAN look it up and see what the actual offense is, but most people just can't be bothered looking that up. They just ASSume that everyone on the list is a child molester.