This Rape Victim Wants To End the Sex Offender Registry

Source: reason.com 12/2023 issue, Women Against Registry (W.A.R.)

“A lot of people on the registry are on there for consensual behavior, things I think many people agree shouldn’t be crimes,” says Meaghan Ybos, the president of Women Against Registry.

When Meaghan Ybos was raped in 2003, it was the sort of assault you see more often in cinematic crime fiction than in reality. A stranger, wearing a ski mask, broke into her home, held a knife to her throat, and forced himself on her.

Twenty years later, Ybos is president of Women Against Registry, an organization dedicated to ending sex offender registration across the country. Ybos’ advocacy started down that unorthodox path when her rapist was finally caught, nine years after the attack. She then learned that the Memphis Police Department had neglected to test the majority of the rape kits it collected, including hers. Since then, she’s been pushing back against the myth of the rape kit “backlog,” pointing out that in much of the country it isn’t actually a backlog. The police departments simply weren’t testing thousands of kits.

In May, Reason’s Billy Binion interviewed Ybos by phone:

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It’s always informative and amusing reading the comment section on articles like this.

Whenever the subject of “sex crimes” and the registry crops up, most of the time, everyone goes on about “victim’s rights”, and “protecting the victims”, and how victims should have the “strongest voice”…

Yet, whenever an actual victim speaks out against the registry, all of a sudden the registry supporters flip the script…clamouring that whoever disagrees with them must have some sort of “agenda”. They insist that the victim somehow “sympathizes” with abusers/sexual deviants, are simply too “traumatized” to have a valid opinion at all, or even go so far as to insult and scorn the victim. It’s rather demented…honestly.

The author of the article points out (correctly) that the registry is nothing more than theater, doesn’t protect anyone, and actually destabilizes people, thereby increasing the potential of reoffense.

However, most people don’t want to hear that what they blindly support is an absolute scam…they’d rather hold onto their false sense of security, and delusional moral supriority.

Comments on this well written article are interesting. She should reach out to Patty Wetterling who feels similarly with the effects of the registry to see if they could get some traction on the topic.