An Australian First: Outing Sex Offenders

HONG KONG - The state of Western Australia has opened its registry of convicted sex offenders to the public, allowing people to go online and see names, photographs and districts where offenders are living. Specific addresses are not provided.

The open-registry said Jonathan Davies of the Australian Lawyers Alliance. Mistaken identities also were seen as a possible concern.

Dr. Cathy Kezelman, president of the group Adults Surviving Child Abuse, told the newspaper The Australian that there were “a number of dangers with a Web site like this.”

“There's a risk of what people do with the information,” Dr. Kezelman said, “and whether there's a sense of community panic if they find out there's an offender living in the area and decide to take the situation into their own hands, so it needs to be very well policed.”

Misuse of the site - including vigilantism, reprisals and republishing the information - carries a jail term up to 10 years, offi cials said.

Dozens of offenders have been identified on the Community Protection Web site, news reports said, and an Australian Broadcasting Corporation story said “parents can also ask police about the criminal history of people who have unsupervised contact with their children.”

The site has been inaccessible since its scheduled launch on Monday due to a technical problem. One report in Australia said the site had crashed due to heavy demand.

Commenters on ABC were divided about the new program, which the state police minister, Liza Harvey, said would provide information on the “most dangerous, absconded and serious repeat sexual offenders.”

Brissyn, who said she was the parent of two children who had been abused by their stepfather, said “sex offenders are predatory by nature” and added that she does “not believe they are fit to reside in normal society again without stringent control.”

Another commenter, sand1962, said the We stern Australia policy set “a very dangerous precedent and one that is almost inevitably going to result in vigilantly behavior,” adding that “we do not need neighborhoods meting our their own punishment.”

“Tough for the rights of offenders,” said Oldiegrumpy, another commenter who said he was the father of three children. “The rights of the community and potential victims are more important than the rights of pedophiles, no matter what some lawyers say.”

Many U.S. states have searchable sex-offender databases. Backers of these and other registries, as my colleague Erica Goode reported last year, believe that “people have a right to know about potentially dangerous offenders in their midst and that the benefit of alerting parents, neighbors and others in a community outweighs any privacy concerns.”

An excerpt from Erica's story:

But as the registries proliferate, so do questions about their value. Critics say that whil e the registries are attractive to politicians who want to appear tough on crime, they often do little more than spread fear and encourage vigilantism.

The monitoring systems cost money at a time when recession-strapped states can ill afford the extra expense, the critics say, and their effectiveness is dubious: Sex offender registries, for example, have had little success in reducing repeat crimes, studies suggest.

Wayne Logan, a professor at Florida State University College of Law and the author of a recent book on registration and notification laws, likens the registries to “legislative catnip.”

“You'd be hard pressed to find a more politically popular movement in recent years,” he said. “Whether it's actually good public policy is a distinct and independent question from whether it's politically popular and makes us feel good.”

Australia, Britain, Canada and a number of European countries have sex-offender registries, but they are principally used by law enforcement officials and are not accessible by the public.

Britain initiated its Child Sex Offender Disclosure Scheme, generally known as Sarah's Law, last year. The government said in a statement that the plan lets parents, guardians and caregivers “ask the police to check whether someone who has access to their children has a record of committing child sexual offenses.”

Home Secretary Theresa May called it “an important step forward for child protection in this country,” adding that it would also help the police “in managing known sex offenders living in the community more effectively.”

France also has a sex-offender registry, and the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the French law does not violate offenders' rights in requiring proof of one's address every year and prompt notification of any address changes for a period up to 30 years.

These requirements are similar to those in “Megan's L aw” and the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act in the United States.

“However useful, the law has always carried great potential for danger,” The New York Times said in an editorial about Megan's Law in 2008.

“One danger has always been vigilantism,” the editorial said. “Child molesters living peaceably in a community after serving their time - and even some people mistaken for child molesters - have been beaten up or fired upon.

“A disturbing new development is the proliferation of local ordinances that go beyond the reporting requirements of legislation like Megan's Law by restricting where sex offenders may live.”

What's your view? Should sex offenders be required to register with the authorities? Should the registry be viewable by the public, with the names and addresses of offenders provided? Are open records likely to result in vigilantism? Are sex offenders in a special class of criminal, or should government datab ases for other criminals - murderers, burglars, stalkers and drunk drivers, for example - also be established? Let us know what you think, and please, speak freely.