Predator panic: reality check on sex offenders

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In the largest and most comprehensive study ever done of prison recidivism, the Justice Department found that sex offenders were in fact less likely to reoffend than other criminals. The 2003 study of nearly 10,000 men convicted of rape, sexual assault, and child molestation found that sex offenders had a re-arrest rate 25 percent lower than for all other criminals. Part of the reason is that serial sex offenders - those who pose the greatest threat - rarely get released from prison, and the ones who do are unlikely to re-offend. [...]

While the abduction, rape, and killing of children by strangers is very, very rare, such incidents receive a lot of media coverage, leading the public to overestimate how common these cases are. Most sexually abused children are not victims of convicted sex offenders nor Internet pornographers, and most sex offenders do not re-offend once released. This information is rarely mentioned by journalists more interested in sounding alarms than objective analysis. One tragic result of these myths is that the panic over sex offenders distracts the public from a far greater threat to children: parental abuse and neglect.

source: Article 'Predator Panic: Reality Check on Sex Offenders' by Benjamin Radford; www.livescience.com/othernews/ 060516_predator_panic.html; LiveScience; 16 May 2006