Category: General News

The claims that sex offenders’ re-offense rates are frightening and high have been solidly disproven. In fact, statistics now show that re-offense rates for this group of offenders, less than 5 percent, is among the lowest of all categories. Full Letter to the Editor

[reason.com] We are in the midst of a massive mommy moral panic. Across the country, mothers are writing breathless accounts on Facebook of how sex traffickers nearly snatched their children at Target/Ikea/the grocery store. While at Sam’s Club, one such post explains, “a man came up to us and asked if the empty cart nearby was ours.…He was an African American with a shaved head.…It seemed like an innocent encounter.” Innocent, that is, until the mom and kids headed to Walmart and there was the guy again, “feverishly texting on…

[quora.com. Scroll down to the comment by Ben Kirssen] I think it is impossible. At least not without some serious collateral damage. The problem lies in the idea to send “all” pedophiles to an island. First you would have to determine who is a pedophile and who is not. That could prove to be tricky. However the last decade some promising ways of identifying a pedophile have emerged. Brain scans, implicit association tests, measuring penis enlarging tests and psychological reviews all claim with a certain degree of accuracy to do…

[riverfronttimes.com] Four hours into the armed standoff, the narrow residential street in Arnold is crowded with police cruisers, ambulances and SWAT trucks. Two TV news crews set up in someone’s front lawn, training their camera lenses on a boxy armored personnel carrier parked outside a one-floor duplex on West Highview Drive. A TV reporter relays in a breaking news update that federal officials would not release any information about the suspect, only that the man is believed to be armed and that FBI agents arrived at the home around 7…

The plight of registered female sex offenders could be a hard sell to some. Like males who offend, they can and do cause extreme physical and emotional damage to their victims. In addition to prison time, they can also be subject to a long list of lifetime restrictions such as where they can live and work as well as being listed, often publicly, on their state’s sex offender registry. The reason for these post-sentence restrictions come under the guise of public safety, but a growing number of critics are disputing…

[timesledger.com] “Trick or treat, trick or treat, give us something lethal to eat!” That’s not the actual rhyme, but from all the warnings about Halloween you just might think it was. Even the American Academy of Pediatrics is still insisting that “a responsible adult should closely examine all treats.” But why? How many decades of disproving this murderous myth do America’s doctors require before they lay it to rest? Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, first put a stake through the poison candy rumor all the way…

[teenvogue.com] Ten-year-old Leah pretended to have sex with her younger step-siblings. She said it happened a few times and that she was just acting out scenes from the movies. A couple years later, Leah’s conduct was discovered by law enforcement. Leah was 12 when she was convicted of criminal sexual conduct in juvenile court and labeled a sex offender. The law required her to remain on the sex offender registry for 25 years. She says she lost jobs and internships as a result. When she was about to enter her…