Kids as young as 9 are on the sex offender registry...for life

Southwestern Law School Professor Catherine L.Carpenter puts it bluntly in her new research paper, Throwaway Children: The Tragic Consequences of a False Narrative. "Truth be told," she writes, "we are afraid for our children and we are afraid of our children." Being afraid for our kids has lead us to create ever harsher sex offender registration laws. We want to protect our kids from creeps.

But this protection plan of ours has backfired. And now, Carpenter writes, whenever we arrest a minor for a sex crime, our fear "of our children ensnares and punishes them under the very same laws that were designed to protect them." In other words: We treat minors like monsters, because we vastly overestimate the chances of them committing another sex crime. This fear, "is premised on a false narrative that includes flawed studies on recidivism rates and misguided case decisions that embraced these findings."

source: Article 'Kids As Young As 9 Are on the Sex Offender Registry...for Life'; www.freerangekids.com/kids-as-young-as-9-are-on-the-sex-offender-registry-for-life/; Free Range Kids; 17 January 2016