On Saturday, a little girl playing outside in Ardmore was forced into a stranger's vehicle and taken away. A statewide AMBER Alert was issued, leading to a tip that directed police to a trailer park in Marietta, Oklahoma, some 20 miles away. Sunday morning, police rescued the little girl and arrested Fount Duston, the 34-year-old man accused of kidnapping and raping the 7-year-old girl.

Since then, media outlets have tried to find a criminal history for the suspect. The man does not appear to have an Oklahoma criminal record, nor have reporters been able to uncover his name on any sex offender registries. It appears as though this incident is his first offense. 

Sex offender registries are intended to protect the public safety and to keep children from the hands of sexual predators. Unfortunately, these registries, while making public notification of sex offenders in the area, do little to protect anyone. In fact, some would argue that they do more harm than good.

Sex offender registration was first required by the Jacob Wetterling Act of 1994 and later amended by Megan's Law (1996) to include public notification of sex offender status. The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act (2006) further supports these laws by creating a national sex offender registry and by organizing sex offenders into three risk-level classifications, with Level 3 sex offenders considered to be the worst offenders and at the highest risk of re-offense.

Clearly, Megan's Law had good intentions. It was named for Megan Kanka, a 7-year-old girl who was raped and murdered by a neighbor, Jesse Timmendequas, who lured her over to see a puppy. Timmendequas was a twice convicted sex offender who admitted to molesting a 5-year-old girl, a 7-year-old girl, and two infants--only 2 and 3 months old.

Had Megan's parents known the danger that lurked across the street, legislators argued, the girl might have been spared her tragic fate. Hence, Megan's Law was adopted only a month after her murder.

Unfortunately, statistics show that sex offender registration and public notification of sex offender status are ineffective. 

There are a number of reasons why:

  • According to Scientific American, the general public believes that at least 75 percent of convicted sex offenders will re-offend. Studies actually show that, over the course of 6 years, only 14 percent will re-offend, and only 24 percent will re-offend in 15 years. Obviously, any rate of recidivism is too high when it comes to sex crimes, but the facts are clearly out of alignment with public perception.
  • For America's children, the greatest risk of sexual exploitation comes not from the neighbor next door, but from behind their own doors. Only 10 percent of perpetrators of sex crimes against children are strangers; 30 percent are family members and 60 percent are someone the child knows--a babysitter or a family friend, for example. The statistics for adult survivors of rape are similar: 75 percent of rape survivors know their attacker.
  • While most people on the sex offender registry do not pose a high risk of re-offense, those habitual offenders who are dangerous predators are undeterred by registration status. If the suspect in the Ardmore case had been a registered sex offender, would it have made a difference? Would the little girl have been safer if her parents had known there was a sex offender living 20 miles away? It's not likely. Habitual offenders will fail to register as sex offenders, or will seek out victims in other ways. Being listed on a registry will not stop someone from driving to a neighboring town and snatching an unsuspecting child at play, or from breaking into a home in the middle of the night to sexually assault someone.

A Human Rights Watch report, "No Easy Answers: Sex Offender Laws in the United States," says that the current sex offender laws do more harm than good. According to the report's author, researcher Sarah Tofte, "Politicians didn’t do their homework before enacting these sex offender laws. Instead they have perpetuated myths about sex offenders and failed to deal with the complex realities of sexual violence against children.

The myth of "once an offender, always an offender" clogs the registry with people who are really no threat to anyone else, and it slows down law enforcement in keeping tabs on high-risk offenders. Jamie Fellner, Human Rights Watch U.S. program director, says, "The public believes everyone on a sex offender registry is dangerous, but what’s the point of requiring registration by a teenager who exposed himself as a high-school prank or even by someone who molested a child 30 years ago?"

It is clear that sex offender registration laws aren't working the way they were intended. Often enacted as a knee-jerk reaction to horrible and tragic crimes, these laws and their unintended consequences were not clearly considered before being passed. Obviously, sex offender registration reform is needed, but legislators are not too keen on being seen as siding with sex offenders. Public perception needs to change through education, rather than allowing fear-mongering through media hype and political rhetoric.