When a kiddy-fiddler commandeers your cul-de-sac: "C. has a problem perhaps too serious to be called a quandary. A few months ago, she says, her family received a flier from the local sheriff. A registered sex offender was moving to her street of small, single-family homes. Hers is a long street, though, and she expected the offender to be some distance away and easily avoidable. Instead, he bought the house next door." What to do, what to do? The answer is simple, really: just move to Manhattan.
Friday, January 20, 2012
18
Isn't this why we have bridges? To force convicted sex offenders to live under them?
@deepomega I MIGHT HAVE TO DRIVE MY CHILD OVER THAT BRIDGE AT SOME POINT
I'm a registered independent child molester. In other words, your typical swingset voter.
As if suburban children ever even go outside.
@City_Dater As if an American mom would leave her child alone with a bottle.
As a parent, what really annoys me about this is the fact that a sex offender can afford to buy a house while I'm stuck in this crappy rental.
@C_Webb RIGHT? I was like, wait, you get out of prison on a sex offense and off you go to buy a house? WHERE!
@Choire Sicha Maybe they announce their intentions to move to a certain neighborhood, wait for property values to plummet, and then get a great deal?
@Choire Sicha: The only sex offender I know (who is actually in prison right now) apparently has a big trust fund. So they're not all broke.
I get the visceral horror of living with kids next door to a child molester, but ... why is this the only form of offense that has a registry? I live in a city that has a lot of drug dealers and murderers, and I would feel very uncomfortable living next door to one! But do I have a legal right to be informed when one does? No, I do not.
(Related: I had a dream last night where my wife's cousin, who had moved into our upstairs apartment after getting out of jail, where he had been sentenced for drug dealing, announced to me that he was going to "get back in the game again." I said to him "drug dealers attract junkies, cops, and other drug dealers, none of which I want near my house," he said, "I gotta do what I gotta do." My wife does not actually have a drug-dealing cousin and we don't have an upstairs apartment, I should emphasize. In the dream, he was played by Marky Mark!)
@jfruh Well, with Marky Mark as your neighbor, I can guarantee it wouldn't have gone down like your dream.
@jfruh Part of it is media hysteria. Part of it is that, unlike drug dealing and murder, child molestation is a crime that is very, very, very very easy to hide. As recent scandals have handily illustrated. So ostensibly the point of the offender registry is to give parents a heads up that this person preys on children because otherwise they would have no idea.
Of course odds are that their kids are being molested by people they know who have never been caught and they would never suspect, but this is the middle ground we get. Either molesters are everywhere or they're nowhere, or they're only where we've caught them.
Welcome to rape island.
@zidaane I will not stop linking to Pedophile Island until theawl interviews someone about it!
@deepomega And won't we all be embarrassed if they end up developing a utopia.
It's also interesting from the point of view of sheer human irrationality. The perve molests teen & tween boys; the writer's son's a toddler. Psych evaluations of sex offenders show that the ones who go for adolescents view molesting toddlers as just as disgusting as the rest of us do. So the writer's got a good few years before she needs to worry...
A few years back neighbors found out a child molester moved into their neighborhood. These neighbors got together, put signs up on HIS lawn stating "Child Molester lives here" he of course pulled them up and tossed them. Neighbor got smart, they put up signs on their own lawns with big arrows pointing to HIS house "Child molester lives there"...he could NOT touch their signs..he moved. LOVE IT, LOVE IT, LOVE IT..I love neighbors like that!!!!! Watching out for each other, this is what we need in this day and age especially against pieces of s.....t like child molesters.
This is an age old problem. You know how to deal with it, just do it. That means, watch over your child as you are supposed to do as a parent. It takes a village to raise a child but, that does not mean that the village will be doing all your job. Pay attention to where your child is and what he/she is doing. If you can't do that, then don't have kids.