Take a look at this sinful city
If you decide to live here you better make sure your kids are implanted with a state-of-the-art GPS because this town is smothered with perverts. If you haven’t noticed, this city is at the heart of Silicon Valley, a home for plenty of upper and middle class folk. Knowledge of where their local children humpers live has no affect on their lives aside for giving them another reason to be scared to leave the house.
If you had the choice between living next door to a child molester or a computer programmer, whom would you choose? Unless you have an irrational fear of computer programmers, like most girls, you would probably choose to live next to them. Now consider the same question with this added stipulation: the child molester molested his last child at the age of 21 and now he is 30. He has no criminal record aside from the time he played ‘Guess the Animal’ with a blindfolded 9-year-old girl. 9 years after the little girl correctly guessed ‘human,’ the molester has been a law-abiding citizen with his only vice of being too nice.
For the majority of Americans, this stipulation has no affect on their initial answer yet they still live amongst hundreds of sex offenders. Americans voted for the sex offender registry to be open to the public. The problem with sex offenders is that their motives aren’t resultant of their respective economic status. The upper and middle class believe they can avoid robberies and gang violence by moving to a ‘nicer’ neighborhood. These ‘nice’ neighborhoods didn’t get nice on their own. These neighborhoods must be expensive enough in order to reach the golden price that is just high enough to segregate all those who are ‘not nice’. Americans obsessed with safety are willing to dish out a large sum for their bubble not to burst.
Sex offenders, unlike gang members, return to their ‘nice’ suburban homes following their time in prison. People with money and political power suddenly have another incentive for being paranoid about their family’s security. Like most of the governments’ attempts to make us safer, they end up offering an illusion of safety in exchange for our personal freedoms. A national sex offender registry is no different.
Given this futile attempt to actually make our neighborhoods safer, we are left with a bunch of sex offenders suffering severe embarrassment and isolation for a crime they have already paid for. Why don’t the Americans vote for a public registry of all felons? Why do ex sex offenders pose such a bigger threat? Americans love to watch these people be nationally embarrassed as they reinforce their children’s force field. But they don’t realize this punishment is not worth a crime that is already paid for.
3 comments:
I would guess that America's motives are twofold:
First, sexual crimes are generally portrayed as being a product of a deeply twisted psyche. Almost anyone can understand why someone might steal (even if they wouldn't themselves) or why someone might, in a moment of anger, lose control and kill. Not to mention--you could kill someone in two seconds of anger and regret it immediately, but it's very difficult to imagine a sexual crime that wasn't premeditated. So there is a sense that, as a crime, there is something different about these people as most people cannot sympathize with or understand sex offenders as they might with thieves or other criminals.
The second reason is who is targeted by the crime. Thieves do not target particular groups and aside from domestic murder I have not heard of any statistical trends in who is killed. But the vast majority of sexual criminals target women and children, groups we are conditioned (particularly children) to protect.
erin,
Those are good points which can explain the additional paranoia revolving around sex crimes. Again, they objectively pose no bigger threat than a drunk driver or an armed robber.
I can imagine a non-premeditated sex crime, and a feeling of regret as soon as the hormones die down. I'm sure that sexual lust can be as powerful and as uncontrollable as murderous rage, at least in some people. Maybe the reason why sex crimes are considered worse than crimes of violence is because American culture is so incredibly anti-sex and pro-violence.
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