So. How many registered sex offenders do YOU know? (UPDATED)
I read Sandra Miller's post, The Path.
You should too. Go. Do it now. I'll still be here.
Sandra's post raised a memory for me. A creepy memory. Creepier now than it felt at the time.
The (40-something) man who lived next door to my brother and I during my last year of High School used to call me after my father died. To talk. I didn't know him. I'd never met him. (There were many trees and at least 35 feet between his property and ours.)
And then one morning, I found a book on the driver's seat of my car. I think maybe a John Grisham novel. Again, I don't remember. But he called me that night and told me he thought I'd enjoy it. So he left it there, in my open car, for me.
Brother and I lived alone that year.
I told the guy next door to stop calling me. Thankfully, he did.
Sandra's post sent me off to do some research.
The map above is my hometown. All of it. (I blurred out the name, obviously.) Each colored square is a currently registered sex offender.
Red square = a sexual offense against children.
- Follow the link, and you can create your own, by state or by zip or by town.
- Click on each square and feel horror unfold.
- Look at the mugshot, the date of birth, the conviction record.
- Wonder what the fuck is wrong with people.
I clicked one square to see the face of one of the "tough girls" who used to threaten to beat me up in High School. She was convicted of molesting a 15-year-old--just a couple of years ago (the site doesn't specify the gender of victims).
I clicked another to discover the face and name of a guy with whom I went all the way through elementary school.
I clicked, and I clicked, and I clicked, and I got sicker, and sicker, and sicker. Some of the conviction records list the victims as young as 7. (Correction: I found one entry in which the victim was 3.)
This number of red squares can't be normal.
This number of red squares has got to be an anomaly.
This number of red squares means I grew up in an exceptionally sick place.
Right?
That's what I'm choosing to believe.
Because I can't bear the idea of pulling up neighboring towns and looking at all of their red squares. At least not right now.
UPDATE
A few screenshots of the "red squares," clicked at random. Just for those commenters who seem to think this post is all about the trials of 19-year-old guys with 16-year-old girlfriends.
You tell yourself what you need to believe.
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
Helvetica Stone
Cary Tennis
Brassawe
Christine Geery
David Dean Bottrell
Matt Paust
Salon.com
Comments
I had a close call w/ an ophthalmologist I had as a girl. I told. My parents believed me, but not the molester's employer. Even when another girl backed me up and said it happened to her, we were not believed.
It happened in my family, it happened in my best friend's family. Maybe it was my Irish Catholic neighborhood, but it seemed to go along with the alcohol and denial.
I hope it's better now. At least there is more awareness.
I live in a neighborhood full of children, so every couple of months I look up the registered offenders in our area. It makes my soul cry.
I grew up near the blue square on the bottom right. In fact, I knew that guy. He was a few years older than me and rather menacing when I had my paper route.
I delivered to him.
Have you read the book Little Children? (also a movie w/ Kate Winslet). While that movie, and The Woodsman (Kevin Bacon) offer some perspective on sex offenders trying to move on with their lives. The conclusion seemed to be that the circle of abuse is nearly impossible to break.
Most neighborhoods in small-to-medium sized towns will look like this. Try an urban area and it's a sea of red.
The scarier question is, how many sex offenders don't you know?
Ya don't have to learn about a 'perp' from the news.
Beware.
I'm not thinking we humans need to be "paranoid"...
But, tune the inner Discern Alarm, until it's Warned.
Maybe a lady from Memphis is only friendly? O Yes.
Maybe she has a middle name:`Mae? Maybe okays?
I'm just wondering if Mae has pleasant garlic breath?
Garlic breath is Wild Mae. huh. It's a pleasant smell.
Please. Be careful. If Ya get the willies? Be so cautious.
I love the song:`Wild Willie's Mustard! Willie farmed.
Willie planted flax? Yes. Oops. Yet, wild mustard seed.
Wild Willie made sour lemon juice? No. Good mustard.
There was more wild mustard than the good flax seeds.
Wild Willie's Mustard was guaranteed. No trust Cargal.
That may be spelled wrong? Aunt Cargul is all bad pork?
A meat packer pig butcher, Cargul, is~no Maybe:`a Louse.
But, a CEO at Cargul will exploit, and a seed blight occurs?
I saying:`Learn to distrust certain people. They are creeps.
I got to get my e-mail fixed, and be discerning too, Be Safe.
A Politico don May dream he's sly, and boast of Renaissance
eras. A wealthy gourmand ? May? He be a chubby angel? huh.
O best, No go to the 5- star restaurants with creeps. Cautious.
A nudist colony? Discern? Folk walk `round naked. Mask on.
The entire life is a Masquerade Ball and They'd mug anybody.
A psychotherapist May pose as a "help" ...'um are nightmares.
(translate in the old fashion agrarian lingo?) Good Night.
There was a known perv in our hood when I was in high school. He was never charged, or arrested, but did one day become an elected official. Actually, he is still representing a part of the city.
I'm not minimizing the danger, I trust no one - you have no idea the level of my mistrust and what has happened to me. But hysteria breeds injustice. "Capturing the Freedmans" is a good education on mass hysteria and how it destroys lives. Everybody wants a witch to burn, someone to look down on. But seeing evil where none exists is a sin unto itself. All I'm saying is, put down your torches and have a clear eye first.
One of my friends had the horrifying experience of googling her then-boyfriend and having his profile come up -- as a registered sex offender.
Every last one was convicted with crimes involving under aged kids.
We're an "active seniors" community, 45 and older, gated, but have more than enough grandchildren visiting almost every day.
Not once has the management notified us of these creeps. But someone put up pictures of all of them a while ago, in the mailroom. Most of us were shocked by this revelation. The management promptly took the pictures down.
And it's not all "19-year-olds with 17-year-old girlfriends," either. I clicked on the red boxes.
I read the convictions records.
None appeared to be "pissing in public." If you know what I mean.
But the truth is that I wasn't molested or raped by strangers. I was raped by one of my uncles and molested by another. I was also molested by a guy my mom hired to babysit me.
The fellow in the car crusing our playground at Alice Birney Elementary School, well, no one had to tell me what he was, he looked at me the way my uncles did. I ran fast and hard and I knew how to dodge through places a car could not go.
Locally we don't seem to put photos with our info, none of my squares had them.
On the other hand, having worked with abused children in this area, I'm well aware that we have our share of perverts. It's just that few of them end up in court - they quietly molest their own family members and don't get arrested.
My guess is that your map represents more about your local law enforcement than your local population. Local population is probably pretty average - which means one in four female children will be sexually assaulted before the age of 18. I can't remember the latest number on guys (hasn't been studied as much) but I think it's something like 1 in 7 male children.
We do have at least one on our local map who appears to be a case of consensual sex with an underage girlfriend - he's 24 now, conviction was 4 years ago, and conviction was "statutory rape."
A lot of our green dots are for prostitution.
The effectiveness of the list is lowered when it's misused.
1. possession of child porn
2. possession and transportation of child porn
3. touching a child
4. oral sex with a girl under age 18 (offender's age at arrest, 22)
5. duplicate of #1 (wow, that makes me confident!)
6. possession and receipt of child porn
7. duplicate of #4
8. touching of a child
9. false imprisonment of a child under 13 (that's an odd one, wonder what that means exactly)
10. child molestation
So out of 10, only 8 are actual people; 2 are wrongly updated addresses. 3 are for possession of child porn, not people I would want baby-sitting my child but not convicted for personally harming children. 1 is a young man who got a blowjob from his girlfriend. That leaves three who were convicted for actually harming children.
3 out of 10, that's not really a great testimonial.
I didn't know he was until a Detective came by to talk to him
and inform me as well. He was such a nice man! (Don't they all
say that?)
I don't really like this business with the map, though. Maybe it shows you some people to be afraid of (though what are you supposed to do besides look at the red squares and be afraid?), but there is no indication that the incidence of this crime is rising, only that systems to track and map the whereabouts of offenders are well-developed. But, I ask again, what are you supposed to do with this information?
Some communities have the bright idea of not allowing past offenders to live in their community at all. As if! But everyone has to live somewhere, even sex offenders. Maybe your community is entirely surrounded by zero tolerance jurisdictions herding sex offenders into your neighborhood
Me, I'm far more frightened by a society that chooses to mark people and track them, that takes people's liberty for long periods but their rights of citizenship for life. To track a sex offender for life is to say that the person's debt to society is never paid, that one can never complete one's punishment for the crime. What do we expect of this growing number of marked past offenders? Do we expect that, as convicted felons and registered sex offenders, they should find meaningful work and become contributing members of society? Do we expect that, as unemployed felons, they will simply stay inside their homes (in those communities that don't prohibit them entirely) and not interact with anyone ever again?
The whole approach makes no sense to me, and I think there are better things to be afraid of than red dots on a Google map.
If you live in Los Angeles....well....don't look. You'll plotz.
"paying forever" is right for some of these..inherently unfair...I agree.
It's very tricky though, when it comes to pedophiles....as a "cure" is rarely found, and repeat behavior common.
It's a hard one for me..and I am a survivor, so please know I take what you say through careful and hard won thought....your point is well made.
It really stop and wonder how safe are our children in our own neighbors?
Thank you for this. Excellent post.
*Which means a registered child sex offender cannot live within 2500 feet of a school or something to this effect.
Because there are a LOT of little squares in my area. a LOT.
and many of the offenders live very near schools--are clustered around them in some cases, evidently living as close as they can to the school.
And if things like incest are underreported, which I can only assume that they are ... it just ... it doesn't even bear thinking about--What does it mean, so many people who do this to children? What does it mean?
I need a brain bleach as well.
As for the statutory rape ... that stuff's pretty clear when you read the record, but I agree that those, often, should not be registered as sex offenders when they were sleeping with their 17 year old girlfriend or (remember this?) running in a naked parade of people with a pumpkin over their heads through town.
Most of the offenders in my area had been charged with aggravated sexual battery of someone under 14 years. And I'm unhappy to say there were a large number of out and out rapists in those little squares. It was those little red squares, the ones with aggravated sexual battery or incest that live near the schools. If you look, you can see how they cluster themselves around a specific school and live there. It's completely chilling.
Went back to my hometown, a little bigger than yours. If Ron Jackson happens into this thread, he can back up the following:
It could be that the legal system is better in S. than in other places. For example, Ron's birth place, and one similar down the road from mine, are filled with people that prostitute their children and/or have them impregnated for "the check". There are a handful of offenders noted in these areas.
Also, strange but true, is that the rural area in the middle of these two lands of abuse are more populated with offender squares than either the areas where abuse is rampant or the 10 block square town in which the rural offenders went to high school. Most of the people I saw there would have been kids of people I knew, which was also freaky.
Finally, there are 106 listed offenders in the tri-city area (pop. ~ 60,000?) where I went to high school (not my little hometown.) That map looks like yours.
All up, the number of prosecuted offenders is probably MUCH less than the actual offenses. Reading Sandra's comments thread on "The Path" reveals that most of us were victims of childhood abuse -- reported or not...
Apparently it's a nation wide pandemic. How can one keep their children safe from these monster?. Many are victimized by their own parents and relatives. Every other month a local teacher is accused of sexual misconduct with a student. Just recently the fucking Band teacher, for Christ's sake!
If you could zoom out on a map of the country, where ever there is a population would show up as solid read there are so many.
It's all very disturbing. Outside of castration and long prison terms, I don't have an answer for the problem.
Releasing drug offenders to make more room for these sick bastards would be a step in the right direction.
My point is that there can be victimization going on but for whatever reason, the offender is protected and not prosecuted for his/her crimes. It could be that the family is prominent and well to do and to let this get out would be a stain on their name....who knows? And incest crimes....well, good luck on getting that to reach outside the confines of their front door. This is the ideal situation for offenders....the most convenient of crimes and add the fact that the victim is probably emotionally attached and too afraid to say anything....it will never see the light of day.
What has always angered me is when the child finally gets the courage to speak up and the mother refuses to believe it. In some instances, they sacrifice the child for the sake of their relationship with the perpetrator. In those cases, they need to put her ass under the jail.
Transfer this lesson on to watching the news. All bad things were there before we knew of them, right?
We are called to live in integrity. Our own integrity, our own actions and words and choices. We each have a purpose, and if we keep our eyes to that, and do not lose faith and drown in fear, we carry out what we can in our own circle.
Maybe you find your circle will have something to do with the red squares. But if not, do not waste your heart and your energy.
OK, maybe this whole comment is me talking to myself. (Bad habit of mine.)
--Although it is the custom here to respond to comments on our own posts, I like it better as it is on my other journaling site; you come to the commenter's blog to say thank you. (Here, responding on our own posts has the dual purpose of bumping ourselves back into the feed--not an insignificant fact!)
So, thank you, VR, for reading my rambly post the other day. Learning lesson for me, yep, as it probably was during your three years! Three years, man!!!
Thanks for sharing yourself here. Lots of wisdom and heart you give to us.
In a puritanical society like ours, anyone can become a sex offender anytime, anyplace.
I see several red squares in my rural neighborhood. And none of them are the man living in a van in my neighbor's driveway. Everything in me says he is one to avoid.
It raises so much "mother bear" in me. And ambivalence. And caution.
I'll be inserting three random screenshots for those who seem to think we're all just one angry dad away from being labeled child molesters. I beg to differ.
In my neighborhood growing up was this friendly guy who built ships in bottles. He had some of them on his front porch on summer days and I remember him urging me and my two girlfriends (we must have been about 7) to come inside to see more. However, my mother had seared not going into stranger's houses into my brain and I always refused. Years later, one of the girls told me he was making child pornography and she had posed for him.
Secondly, I worked in a prison for a few yrs as a counselor and one of my duties was to screen inmates to see if they wanted to have sex offender treatment. So I interviewed hundreds of sex offenders. Some of them were the 19 year old guy who slept with his 17 yo girlfriend and someone got mad. The most startling thing to me was the fact that parole violators, who came into the prison for 30 days after a violation then out again, were often sex offenders who couldn't find a place to live. No one would rent to them. So their parole officer would tell them to live in a national park or by a freeway offramp. One of them had been violated after his parole officer visited him in the local national park and found in his tent a collection of little shoes he'd apparently been stealing from family campsites.
I know how intimidating all those red squares can be, but you know where they are. Did you ever think they might be living in the campsite next to you when you're on vacation?
Justice is indeed blind to lump everybody into the same nasty pile.
I do think it's interesting that you have so many red squares and so few others. In my area it's like 50% blue, 25% yellow, and the rest divided between the remaining colors.
Anyway, "tell yourself what you need to believe" was needlessly hostile. As you can see from the detailed list I provided, there really are people who were put on that list by angry fathers. I didn't make that information up. Those people exist. That doesn't mean that all people on the list are innocent, but it does mean that it's a highly inconsistent list.
I've always thought that there should be special places where people who think of harming children could just walk in and request an immediate and painless death, no questions asked.
I could pull more profiles. Including the one with the 7-year-old.
Don't make me.
This post is not--was never--about 18-year-olds who are ensnared in a legal nightmare because of their girlfriend's pissed off daddy. I know that happens, and I would welcome reading a few thoughtful posts about that situation.
This post is about real sexual abuse of children by adults in the place I grew up. And some of the comments implying that sex offender registries are pretty much just a list of a bunch of high school hanky-panky gone wrong?
I could fill up another two feet of screenspace with evidence to the contrary. At least in that place.
Rated
This is a tough and terrible issue. Emotions run rampant.
If we had a clean and truly just justice system things would work better. If people were not afraid to report things.... If people would not let hysterics get the best of them.... But none of those things are true.
On the other hand, if all people were good and kind and decent. . .
Should we register sex offenders? Absolutely. Should we make sure that registered sex offenders are of a certain type. ie., convicted of true sex crimes? I think so. How do we do that? I am not so sure. Not until we change our laws.
This is very sticky business; these are very thorny issues. They can be discussed and discussed by us to death but we may wind up only making each other angry. So far, we have all tried to remain fairly civil. I guess that s the best we can do at this point.
I have had a very close personal (although not direct to me) encounter with this so I DO know the difference, believe me. And I know the fear and shame inherent.
Sometimes people think that I overprotect my children, but I choose to protect them as long as it is in my power. Just recently two tenth graders were attacked in the public transportation on their way to/from school. These attacks (with knives) were just a question of stealing cell phones, but a couple of years ago, a man was caught trying to pull a first grader into his car when she was waiting for the bus right in front of the primary school. Let the parents protect and the young keep their innocence until they are ready to give it up!
Brain bleach, indeed.
scum...
561 offenders + 244 non-mappable offenders for my square of San Jose, CA. They dump all the sex offenders a block away from the university and a grade school - how clever is that. In that area, there are over 1200 sex offenders.
What is it about those photos that just scream trouble? The creepy just radiates from them. Brain bleach indeed!
In our small town I was SHOCKED as to who all was on the registry. It made my skin crawl but at least I knew.
While we're talking about registered sex offenders, I know of one in Memphis who is seven. He put his hand down a little girl's pants, and now he is on the sex offenders list - forever. At one point there was an outcry in the papers about it, but I'm not sure if the situation was resolved.
These are creepy looking guys, aren't they? One of my hobbies is using face blending software to create prototype faces - the average Bollywood actress, for example. I think I'm going to make an average pervert and see if there are any distinctive features.
For all the moms out there - I'm glad you're protecting your children from strangers. But please please be aware that 90% of sexually abused children were not molested by a stranger, but by someone they know, most often their own father, but also grandfather, mom's boyfriend, uncle, teacher. The guy in the car is dangerous but your child is far more likely to be hurt by the guy in your living room. The most important thing you can do to protect your child is listen and pay attention and cultivate trust. It only takes one time of Mom flipping out when a child tells her something important to lose a child's trust.
I clicked on the map and there are 4 offenders withing 5 miles of us and dozens upon dozens in the "twin-cities" of Centralia-Chehalis, with a combined population of maybe 30,000.
Who knew the problem had reached these proportions?
And they all look like those guys above.
I checked my hometown of 6000 people--not a single registered sex offender of any stripe. Now, if they could map ACCUSED instead of CONVICTED offenders, I know there'd be several, because my old elementary school/church has had a long-running scandal involving several teachers who molested kids for decades, including several very expensive law suits.
Where I live now, there are 5 registered offenders within a 6-mile radius of my house. None of them are close, and none of them are reported to have offended against children. Scroll the map over into town, and the density is higher, but they still aren't showing any red squares. Across the river in Vancouver WA, though, is a whole different story--lots of red squares there.
Again, if it was ACCUSED offenders...it'd be a whole 'nuther story.
I check my current town - within a 30 mile radius there is one single square. That's all.
I check the city where I grew up, my old neighborhood - I can't see the streets for all the red and green squares.
Jesus.
In Vermont, the state police typically notify area residents when a known sex offender is moving into the area. The people have a right to know. I don't believe in generally continuing to punish a convicted criminal after they have served their time - but when it comes to sexual assault, especially pedophilia, I think it is infinitely more prudent to keep a close eye on these folks - the recidivism rate is too high, and I don't want any of the kids in my neighborhood to become another statistic.
Thumbed. Jeez.
How can we, on the one hand, get ourselves all righteous about the content of your post, VR, and then, just silently go along with a picture of gratuitous nudity, on post linked above, that looks just like I looked at age 12... and pretend it is normal, or pretend we don't see it. It is crazy-making. The picture on BBE's post is not unusal in our society. So we live with outrage and acceptance of the exact same thing in our minds.
I leave with the same conclusion I came to in my last post: It makes me angry, and I don't know what to do with that anger.
Sam, I can't quite get to the point where "gratuitous nudity" correlates with child molestation or real statutory rape. I get what you're saying, though. We ARE bombarded with sexualized images of girls (not so much boys)--really, does anybody think Britney Spears wouldn't be the trainwreck she is today if she hadn't spent her entire childhood tarted up like a cheap hooker?
But the "red box" guys in my hometown up there don't appear to be the type who've been prodded into perv-dom by pop culture.
They pretty much scream "Born Deviant."
I'm going with the "something in the water" hypothesis, I guess.
In fact, tell me you look like Julian Sands.
I needs me some illusions...
Just in the major streets around our neighborhood, there are 200 offenders. CREEPY!
Also, we learned that the guy that left us that "note" is doing BIG time now, apparently not only was he filming and photographing adults, but teen girls as well. WTF?
What is wrong with these people?
In some states you can have your record expunged of a statutory rape charge, assuming you've had no additional reported offenses. I had a client last year who finally got his record expunged, about 15 years after he was convicted. However, in listening to his version of events, I don't think it was a clear-cut stat rape case; he himself stated that he may have been "kinda forceful" and she may have "kinda protested a little."
As for the use of these maps, well, I'm all for them. What good are they? If you're a parent of a small child, you might learn that you shouldn't allow your child to walk down a certain block alone, because there's a repeat child sex abuser living there. You may learn what the local pervs look like, so if one shows up at the playground in your apartment building, or starts chatting up your kid at the store, you might be more likely to recognize the threat.
The squares themselves only tell you the general type of conviction: Rape, Child Sexual Abuse, Sexual Battery, and Other (most likely charges like prostitution, being a john, indecent exposure, etc). The part that's useful is that you can click on the square and find out--is the guy who lives 2 doors from me who's listed as a rapist someone I need to be afraid of? You'll get very different feelings if you click and find out he was convicted of stat rape for being 2 years old than his girlfriend, than if you find he has multiple convictions over several years, or that he was charged with a laundry list of crimes for each conviction. Same with child offenders--stat rape? Generally a 5 or more year difference (in some states it's three) will result in a state rape charge even if the offender isn't over 18 (think about a 17 y.o. having sex with a 12 y.o.--that IS stat rape even though he's not legally an adult), so looking at their ages can again make a huge difference in how concerned you need to be for your kids.
Flashers and peepers, by the way, often escalate. This is not just something they use to advance the plot in crime shows, it's a well-documented truth. So even those relatively "victimless" crimes can often indicate someone that needs watching.
As I said, I work with victims. Some of these guys may have gotten screwed by the system, but the majority of them are on there for a damn good reason. I have zero sympathy for an adult sexually abusing a child--and I mean anyone under 16. I have less-than-zero sympathy for a repeat offender/predator. Again, study after study has shown that these types of offenders ARE NOT CUREABLE and will always be a threat to their target type.
I tend to be a big fan of "Judge-Not, Reasonable-Doubt, Innocent-Until-Proven-Guilty, Death-Penalty-Is-Too-Permanent" type arguments...for just about anything else.
But violation of children?
Yeah, call me Judgy McJudgerson and yell "Gotcha."
I will echo a PM from one of my friends who grew up with me there:
"I'm surprised these guys are still around to be showing up as red squares. If they did anything to MY boys, they wouldn't be. Of course, I'd be in jail...but..."