Sex Offender Registry: Modern Day “Scarlet Letter”

First, let me establish, for once and for all: I am a woman. I know, it’s shocking. I feel just as strong an abhorrence as the next person about sex crimes, especially against children, as you do. I imagine (and I have a huge imagination) that suffering that level of humiliation and pain at the hands of a rapist would be devastating, that it would take me years, if ever, to really recover. Or forgive. And I am not immune to the anger people feel about Foley, or any other child sex predator. So the first person to call me heartless in comments will be deleted. (Seriously.)

That said, our modern day “scarlet letter” punishment of forcing convicted sex offenders, who have served their time, to reveal their conviction publicly on a database is neither moral, nor helpful towards preventing another crime. It might serve to help in some individual cases, but overall, I believe it’s more damaging to our society and to our ability to prevent future crimes.

For one thing, rape and child molestation is never about sex. It’s about power. The perpetrator of such horrible acts is generally someone who feels so powerless, the only way they can evoke a feeling of power is to rape. They generally have been abused themselves, physically, mentally, or sexually, often as children, when they were the most vulnerable too. It’s a terrible cycle of powerlessness and violence. Understanding that is more key to stopping repeat offenders than knowing that your neighbor down the street had a rape conviction 15 years ago.

So, imagine you are a psychologically-damaged rapist (you’d have to be damaged to enjoy raping, remember), who has been in jail for years, paid your debt to society, and is now rejoining the human race. But everywhere you live, a steady stream of neighbors stare at you, watch your house, or otherwise make you feel like an outsider, constantly. How in the hell are you supposed to regain a normal sense of power in your life when you are ostrasized? Instead, it brings you further into the cycle of powerlessness/need for power, and you are just that more likely to rape/molest again.

You want to know what’ll stop rapists from raping again? A well-funded program of frequent psychological visits to overcome that damage which brought them to rape in the first place. Having police and social workers tracking their movements for as long as it takes for these offenders to stop the cycle, both to protect the public and to give the offender a framework to perhaps truly rejoin his fellow man. A public which treats them as they treat any other average stranger, not as someone they saw on a sex offense registry that they should look on with suspicion and fear.

This is not a doctrine to coddle criminals and pedophiles. It’s a tried-and-true way to stop repeat offenders, make our streets safer, and – gasp! – do it morally. Our criminal system would work best if a balance were struck between taking criminals off of streets and denying them the privilege of freedom, and follow-up evaluations and treatment to try to get at the underlying issues.

Let me put it into a simple analogy even the most obtuse can understand. Let’s say your toaster broke. You put it in the closet for a year, and then you take it out. If you expect to plug it back in and have it work without having fixed what was broken in the first place, you ought to have your head examined. 

I can’t believe that I, an atheist, am out-Christianing most Christians in this country on this and other issues. (Atheists have no moral ground, right?) The rapist or molester needs as much healing as his or her victim, in order to stop inflicting damage on others. Isn’t that what Jesus would want you to do? What the hell is “turn the other cheek” than a call to understand and empathize even with the most abhorrent person, someone who would commit sexual violence against women or children? What else is it but a call to heal wounds, not to hate the sinner but to love him even when it is the hardest?

People who are for the sex registry say they feel safer knowing where all the offenders in their neighborhood are. But does this really make you safer? If a sex offender has not healed the wound on their own soul already, they are just as likely (or more so, I surmise) to rape again anyway, registry or no. Having your name on a sex offense registry regardless of how major or minor your offense was, how much remorse you feel, or how much you’ve changed, is like picking at that wound, over and over again, until it drives you to stop your own pain in some other way. Perhaps, even, by raping again.

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