In Wisconsin, two 15-year-olds whose foster parent caught them having consensual sex were charged with felony sexual assault and put on the sex offender registry for at least 15 years.
In Arizona, it’s possible for a minor who streaks nude at a football game to be charged with a sex offense and put on a registry. In Massachusetts, teens caught sending a nude photo of themselves could end up on a registry.
Existing in every state, registries list children as young as elementary school age; a small fraction of their crimes were rape or resulted in other types of severe sexual harm.
Originally, registries were conceived as a way to inform communities about convicted sexual predators living in their neighborhoods. But researchers, conducting several different studies over the years, have largely determined that putting minors on registries does not enhance community safety and reflects a miscarriage of justice that runs afoul of the juvenile justice system’s promise to help rehabilitate youth.
Most youth who commit sexual crimes don’t do so again as adults. The federal Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehension and Tracking has said its review of other researchers’ analyses showed that, depending on the study, 7% to 13% of youth reoffended. Those percentages drop significantly more as time progresses, according to a study, published this year in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, concluding that the risks of sexual reoffenses end around the age of 19 for those who’d been convicted of sex crimes when they were years younger.
Efforts at reforming or altogether eliminating registry laws seem blocked by legislative concerns about public reaction, said attorney and psychologist Jennica Janssen, a cognitive behavioral therapist whose doctoral thesis examined public perceptions surrounding youths on the offender registries.
Lawmakers reluctant to get rid of registries
Politicians may be wary of proposing changes to the sex offender registry that they presume the public might not support. For instance, the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, which congresspeople sometimes refer to while drafting legislation, recently published its 2022 “Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act—Summary Assessment of Research.” Examining nearly 30 studies critical of aspects of the sexual offender registries, that assessment found that the “literature typically contained methodological flaws that rendered findings unreliable, invalid, or of little to no applicability to individuals not directly included in the research itself.”
The assessment did not review any studies finding that registries had a positive impact. That’s because, according to experts in the field, they don’t exist. (The project manager for that Library of Congress assessment did not respond to Youth Today’s request for an interview.)
“The research is very consistent on this. There are no research studies that show [the sexual offender registry] is actually effective in the way it is applied,” said University of Wisconsin psychologist and researcher Michael Caldwell, a senior staff psychologist at the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center and past president of the Wisconsin Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers.
“All of the observational studies show the same thing,” added Caldwell, a forensic evaluator in youth courts and author of dozens of peer-reviewed papers. The registries “tend to categorize lower-risk people, don’t have any effect on recidivism for anyone on the registry. And it certainly causes them problems. And there’s no evidence it has any effect on the general population in terms of sexual violence.”
“For youth,” continued Caldwell, whose papers weren’t included in the Library of Congress assessment, the outcomes “are even worse.”
Over decades, registries were standardized
In 1947, California created the nation’s first sex-offender registry, setting off a trend. Other states followed suit, according to the Library of Congress report.
It wasn’t until the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act was passed in 1994 that a federal law existed to help standardize the process. The law was named after a Minnesota boy abducted in 1989. A man linked to attacks on other boys confessed to the murder almost 27 years later. The law allowed, but did not require, the release of offender information to the public.
In 1996 Congress passed Megan’s Law, named after a New Jersey girl who was raped and murdered by a neighbor with two previous sexual assault convictions, which requires community notification. Then, in 2006 Congress passed the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, setting federal standards regarding who must register and for how long and standardizing procedures for making the information public. The law was named after a 6-year-old Florida boy who was abducted and murdered in 1981.
But advocates say that placing minors on a registry equates juvenile behavior with adult behavior, ignoring the reasons why a separate criminal criteria and justice system was established for juveniles. That system recognizes that adolescent brains still are developing, resulting in some youthful wrong decisions that an older, more mature person might not make.
Long-term consequences for youth
Many of the crimes youth are convicted of are directly related to being young, said Vic Wiener, a Juvenile Law Center attorney focused on barriers to jobs, schooling and other collateral consequences of youth involvement in the justice system.
“It’s related to curiosity, impulsivity, risk-taking and lack of knowledge about boundaries,” Wiener said. “Most youth, once they are caught, are not likely to reoffend.”
The Juvenile Law Center’s “Labeled for Life” report, summarizing laws in all 50 states and reviewing 16 studies on juveniles on sexual offenders registries, concluded that, “Children on the registry — including some as young as 8 years old — face residency and employment restrictions as well as barriers to education; suffer the stigmatization of being labeled a sex offender, and can face possible incarceration for failing to meet onerous registration and reporting requirements.”
What’s more, children who are put on sex offender registries are twice as likely as other youth to experience sexual assault; five times as likely to be approached by an adult for sex; and four times as likely to report a suicide attempt, the report stated. They experience 52% more harassment and violence and are 44% more likely to be homeless because registries restrict where they can live.
Wiener was confused by the Library of Congress report suggesting that the studies its researchers reviewed were too small or too biased to be able to draw any conclusions.
“The idea that there are limited studies on this is very troubling,” Wiener said, referencing Wisconsin researcher Caldwell’s analysis of 106 studies that included more than 33,000 youthful sex offenders. Caldwell’s analysis found that from 1938 through 2014, after roughly 59 months, 4.9% of those persons had reoffended. From 2000 to 2015, 2.75% of them had reoffended.
“There’s a lot of research, and the data is consistent,” Wiener noted. “The researchers I work with on youth registration have told me the research is unanimous in its agreement on the ineffectiveness of youth registration and [the] harms.”
Yet, that research has not led to any substantive reforms, youth advocates argue.
“This is an emotionally charged topic,” attorney and therapist Janssen said.
Her examination found that public perception regarding youth charged with a sex offense changes significantly depending on the severity of the crime committed. The majority of the 1,384 respondents in that study, which has yet to be published, did not feel that placing minors on the registry enhanced public safety. More than 70% indicated they did not fear a hypothetical situation with a juvenile sexual offender and more than 60% did not feel safer with the youth on the registry
Reforming the registry act “is not an initiative everyone wants to support,” she noted, and that results from a belief that the public would oppose such a move.
“Everyone can agree there’s a particular stigma that comes with sex offenses,” Janssen said. “It’s not that offenders should not be brought to justice, it’s just that the sex offender registry is not the way to do it.”
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Award-winning journalist and author Tristram Korten’s work has appeared in GQ, The Atlantic, the Miami Herald and a wide range of other publications. Formerly he was editor of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.
