Hello,
People who hurt children are monsters, but is this constitutional?
Of course, this is all deeply unjust. Making pariahs out of criminals is pushing them to continue to be criminals. So going to bat for child sex offenders in particular would be a little bizarre, but they happen to be a subset of a group of people (people who have committed felonies) in the US who need to be treated better.
Some people are “child sex offenders” because they had sex with someone who was basically the same age as them (only 1 or 2 years apart). In many states my first girlfriend would have been guilty of statutory rape against me, and I find that deeply absurd. Sex offenders range from the most innocuous to the most heinous of crimes, and include people who, to my mind, haven’t even done anything wrong at all. So the way they are treated is troublesome to me.
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The recidivism rate of sex offenders is lower than many people believe it is. https://psmag.com/news/whats-the-real-rate-of-sex-crime-recidivism
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I’m not sure I buy into what I’m suggesting, but wouldn’t a better idea just be a “felon” label on the passport instead? It at least would be more neutral and categorical.
If a country sees this either way, they probably won’t let him or her into the country. Is the point more to label them with the equivalent of a scarlet letter and keep them in the country?
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Agreed.
“California Reform Sex Offender Laws filed a lawsuit challenging the law in U.S. District Court in San Francisco shortly after HR 515 was signed into a law by President Obama. They say the law will include those convicted of misdemeanors such as “sexting” or public urination to be identified as a sex offender on their passports.[16] The lawsuit says that “a passport symbol that identifies an individual as a registered sex offender could place at significant risk that person as well as others traveling with them, including family members and business colleagues”.[17]” -Wiki
As a bill written by the US Congress I am not at all surprised that they were ok with casting a wider net than was necessary. In the case of passport identifiers scarlet letters shouldn’t required when the same information can be added to the embedded chip in passports along with all the other PII already there. (eliminating the risk described above)
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I read this as a way of trying to curb sex tourism. I would guess that most sex tourists are wealthy and not convicts. So it may or may not have any measurable effect.
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And some poor guy who really had to pee for doing it in the wrong place and getting caught (even if it’s 3 AM the cop is the only one around)…
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I’m certainly not going to argue that some of the wide variation in things deemed a sex crime are not heinous but are they worse than murder? How about arson/murder? Kidnapping? Torture?
All of those things I think would not show up on someone’s passport. And could potentially be worse.
Sorry I think all of this is effed entirely.
Personally I think a good goal would be to have less sex crime in the world, rather than the current goal, which seems to be torturing sex criminals.
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If a passport says that someone is a convicted felon, that sounds like it is a good reason not to let them into my country.
If the passport is more specific about what kind of felony it is, I can turn back convicted murderers at the border and just ignore labels such as “sex offender” on the passports of sexually repressed countries such as USA or Iran.
The United States’ reputation in this respect is such that I initially understood the phrase “child sex offenders” in the headline not to mean “people convicted of sexual attacks on children” but as “people who have been thrown in prison for peeing in public before they were 14”.
Don’t know if the US constitution has anything to say about it.
It is obviously a limitation of a person’s rights under UDHR Article 13 (the right to travel internationally) and maybe also UDHR Article 12 (“attacks upon his honour and reputation”).
The question is, are these limitations justified?
Like all the other medieval attempts at turning felons who have done their time into pariahs, it interferes with the idea of rehabilitation; it is sentencing people to life as a second-class citizen.
And it makes me appreciate § 113 of Austrian criminal law, which actually forbids publicly accusing people of crimes that they have already served their time for - it gets treated like a minor form of libel.
Also, as a general problem for society - we will never get the “minor” sex crimes under control (those that were considered “perfectly ok” in former times or still are in different places) if they keep getting lumped together with the worst of them. There are cases that never get reported because the victim does not want to destroy the perpetrator’s life. There are other cases where the victim is not believed because “only real monsters would ever do that, and we know he’s not a monster”. So I do consider nuance in those things a good thing.
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Oh, I agree entirely. I tend more on the “rehabilitate” side of discussions concerning the function of justice system, especially when we’re dealing with mental illness (which is at the root of many, if not most, felonies). And branding people with scarlet letters and shunning doesn’t help at all in this regard.
The person I was responding to was asking why brand sex offenders specifically for life and, in the US, where this is happening, it’s not just sex offenders who are branded for life and there is substantial evidence that sex offenders are more likely to reoffend than other classes of offenders. I also strongly feel that this latest move to brand child sex offenders is red meat to the tough on crime crowd. It’s not like we could do something more productive to address the actual problem here, after all.
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I’m not sure labeling Spacey a pedophile or not is a very significant issue here. He sexually assaulted a much younger person, who, for example, was not legally competent to enter into a contract due to his age. As a society in the U.S., there is broad consensus that 14 is too young for someone to be able to consent. Spacey knew, or should have known this, but went ahead. I agree with you in general that it’s not a black and white issue of at what age people will be generally competent to give consent. But in Spacey’s case, I don’t think there is any gray area.
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A tangentially-related objection that doesn’t in any way detract from the point you are trying to make: There is a broad consensus 14 is too young to consent to have sex with someone who is 26. I think most states allow consent given by 14-year-olds within some close-in-age rules. This is on my mind because there’s a simultaneous discussion in another thread about the horrorshow of giving people lifelong “child sex offender” labels for having sex with people who are basically the same age as them where laws don’t recognize close-in-age exemptions.
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@cheem,
Just bc 33% of women report being raped (meaning it is probably higher, bc reporting is never 100%), doesn’t have anything to do with recidivism. And your linked article doesn’t touch on recidivism, it is more of a discussion of possible incidents (and a scary one at that, those are some terrible numbers).
and…
@anon48584343,
But these people weren’t all “convincted of the most heinous of crimes.” Sex offense convictions range all over the place, from serial rape to the classicly mocked ‘urination in public’ to posting naked selfies. The registries cast a huge net, and keep people from rehabilitation regardless of the actual crime or possibility of reform (is rehab a better word?).
This article discusses risk stratification in sex offense recurrance, and how the majority of people so labelled are very unlikely to re-offend
https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/188087
So branding them all for life, on their passport, seems a bit draconian and absurd.
Recently, Colorado’s registry has come under criticism. Here is a nice Op/Ed that covers the topic well:
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You’re absolutely right. The U.S. needs a federal law protecting these kinds of relationships. Many states do have some kind close-in protections, but some have none at all.
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These are the ones you read about where the girl’s parents sick law enforcement on her black boyfriend. A multi-layered issue, to say the least.
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Not really, no. Unfortunately.
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BTW: y’all get the 1930’s European resonance of forcing a despised minority to use specially-marked identity papers and restricting their travel?
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Well, this is horrible, obviously, and a real problem. But the reason it’s possible is that parents are consenting on behalf of the child, who is legally not capable. Parents stand in the shoes of their children all the time and make decisions for them, for good or ill.
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Is slave labor in prisons constitutional? Is states continuing to bar convicted felons the vote constitutional?
