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Things that don’t keep children safe, and why we can’t stop buying them

Posted: 18 Nov 2010 10:16 AM PST on

PREVENT CHILD ABUSE NEW YORK’S BLOG

It costs money, it’s illegal in at least one state, it uses information that is accessable for free, and people are buying it. One of the iPhone’s best-selling apps in recent weeks is called Offender Locator, an application that gives you the address of all registered sex offenders near you.

Surely, this is a fantastic development in child safety, right? Information that will keep your child safe, sent right to your phone. Unfortunately, like most issues concerning the sex offender registry, the information it provodes is at best not terribly useful, and at worst can be counter-productive to child safety.

How can this be? Answering this question reveals some important truths about child sexual abuse that are often not reported by the media. First of all, the majority of sexual offenses against children do not result in a sex offender getting convicted and registered. Most children don’t disclose their abuse while they are still children, many disclosures don’t result in any legal action, and many attempts at prosecution don’t result in the perpetrator being convicted of a sex crime. This means that an overwhelming percent of sex offenders aren’t registered as such. But what’s wrong with knowing the whereabouts of the ones who are registered? That answer depends on how that knowledge is used and the context it’s used in. Living in close proximity to a sex offender doesn’t necessarily put a child in danger, as sex offenders are very unlikely to kidnap a child. Sex offenders are much more likely to gain access to children in their families or jobs. That means it’s much more important to know if your sister-in-law’s new boyfriend is a registered sex offender than the guy down the street, but how many of us would ever think to use the registry for this?

Keeping children safe from sexual abuse is the responsibility of all of us, but it cannot be accomplished by relying on the database of registered offenders. Parents need to know the facts about child sexual abuse, and they need to be very mindful of situations when one adult is alone with one child. They need to realize that, in almost all cases, children who are sexually abused are abused by someone the parent, child or both turst. Parents need to realize that just because someone “seems nice” or is related to them doesn’t make them safe. This is an overwhelmingly big, dark, complicated realization, but once parents accept that, they can take real, useful actions to keep their kids safe.

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