Should there be a 'Sarah's Law'?

Part of me says no b/c it's like continuing punshiment once a jail sentence is up; it can be an invasion of privacy. more practically though it could save children from becoming victims. I say this as a victim of a pedophile. I only wish people could have been warned about him.

The News of The World can sell papers by printing juicy details of sex beasts, so of course it's dressing this up as a 'public interest', but bascially a 'Sarah's Law' would make rehabilitation well-nigh impossible by utterly destroying the only basis on which it can work. This isn't based on an inflamed concern for the 'rights' of sex offenders (though yes they do have rights, tough luck NOW). No rehabilitation = no trust between sex offender and probation officer = sex offender goes underground and re-offends, or is forced to associate more with other sex offenders who 'understand him' and the chances of changing behaviour further shrink.

There is an urgent and unresolved qn of what is to be done with compulsive sex offenders - treating it as a form of insanity which leads to crime rather than as a criminal tendency seems to me to be the safest thing. Ironically the tabloid description of these people as "sick" needs to be taken literally if we are to deal with them better.

(This is leaving out several more difficult qns - the fact that the majority of paedophile abuse is within a family or institutional setting, and the tendency for a highly sexualised society to both idealise and sexualise children, for instance)

Gareth I agree with you that this law doesn't speak to how most offenders find their victims. But I still think it helps. What about the father of your child's friend when they're having a sleepover? The babysitter? Perhaps the offender will be more circumspect knowing that his past is available to interested parties. I don't believe in encouraging vigilantism and I acknowledge these types of laws aren't the best solution. But I don't think the abuse potential is as high as people think. e.g. there haven't been a rash of public lynchings in the US b/c of meghan's law.

The basic question, though, is "is child sex abuse a crime or a sickness?". i.e. do we believe that offenders will be able to resist re-offending or not? The tabloid angle on this is that no, once a pedo always a pedo. But if so then surely this is a mental illness (if a very destructive one) and should be treated as such - i.e. care and treatment should be given and cures sought.

If that isn't true then the criminal justice system has to assume that once a crime has been punished, the assumption must be that the offender won't reoffend. This isn't a very sensible assumption in many ways because a lot of offenders obviously do.

Both Sarah's Law and renewable sentencing mix the two things - crime and illness - up a bit. But renewable sentencing is on the right side of things, I think. You keep a sex offender in prison for the duration of their sentence, then in a hospital for as long as you think they're likely to do it again. Then you move them out and privately keep tabs on them. The problem with Sarah Payne's killer (and Meghan's from what I remember) is that everyone involved thought he would re-offend but they had no means of keeping them incarcerated.

plus the obvious things abuot inevitability of vigilantism and the plainly obvious fact that the general public are, on some matters, fundamentally think and cannot be allowed to direct policy on such a highly complex psychological issue.

I do believe it's a sickness but once that person takes it out of their head and assaults children a crime has been commited.

btw, the law in the us applies to all sex offenders (rapists, etc) not just pedophiles.

The point of a compulsive mental illness though is surely that definitionally the sufferer does not have control over whether the compulsion is acted upon. If they did have control it wouldn't be an illness, it would be a crime pure and simple. So of course when a sex offence is committed you don't say "hey thats OK you're ill", you decide whether it is a result of a mental illness and if it is you accord that person whatever treatment you'd normally offer to the mentally ill. (In this case because the mentally ill person is a danger to society the onus has to be to remove them from society.)

I think if that principle is enshrined in law it might as well be extended - I would like to know for instance if my neighbours and colleagues have previous convictions for violence or robbery since clearly it will affect my dealings with them.

A substantial proportion of offenders fail to re-offend after this treatment.

In the light of this unprecedented success, it is anticipated the pilot scheme will be extended to other London boroughs in the not too distant future.

Her killer only received four years for the abduction of a nine year old girl previously, because somewhat inexplicably, the judge accepted expert medical evidence put forward by his defence counsel that he was not a pederast.

Any would-be "Sarah's Law" would not therefore have previously identified him as being a danger to local children.

Tom, I understand all your points and my civil liberties-minded intellect concurs. This is a tricky issue for me though as I realize I'm not the most subjective person. But I don't think that invalidates my opinions.

the man who assaulted me is due to be released from prison in 2009. He has received no rehabilitation. I'm not too concerned with how meghan's law treats him when he gets out because I plan on watching him like a hawk to keep him in line.

Like I said above what really frightens me is how little seems to be being done to understand why paedophiles become abusers in the first place. A significant proportion were abused themselves, and so the behaviour is normalised for them - but we can learn surely from de- indoctrination and addiction cure techniques. And what of the ones who weren't abused? At some point Sarah Payne's killer became sadistically attracted to children? Why? And could that development have been stopped?

Of course, this happens on a daily basis - yesterday's example being calls in the press for propective British Citizens first being made to take an oath of alliegance. Nothing wrong with that of course, but under the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, THEY ALREADY DO. Mr.Blunkett on the button as always. *sigh*

On the contrary, doctors had previously concluded that Sarah's killer was NOT a pederast.

Are we really surprised that there is little understanding in what causes people to assault children? Treatment and understanding of mental illness has barely emerged from the dark ages. . .

Snobby old Matthew came up with an amusing spelling mistake in this thread, though.

Hasn't sex abuse committed by non-strangers been the subject of enormous debate and public awareness campaigns since the 80s with the setting up of ChildLine and numerous sex abuse scandals concerning children's homes etc. I don't understand the relish with which some people keep repeating the statistic that this is where the majority of abuse occurs. Does that mean we should forget about the still significant proportion of abuse which is committed by strangers? Why such willingness to mock this concern? Is it a hatred of the idea of family which makes someone say that if four times as many paedophile murders are committed by family members then what we should really be worrying about is PARENTS? When obviously such abusers are just paedophiles who happen to be parents. (How can you be dismissive of that proportion of paedophiles who are strangers while at the same time tainting families in general on the basis of parental molesters who make up a far far smaller proportion of parents over-all than the proportion of stranger paedophiles do to paedophiles over-all?)

even if this enumeration is true, these aren't "equivalent" proportions: you shd be comparing [parental molesters: parents over- all] with [stranger molesters: strangers over-all].

surely one of the reasons some many shy away from lookng hard at the problem of in-family abuse is that WHATEVER the course of action, it tends to be nightmarishly complex and produce victims of a variety of kinds (on one hand, continued abuse of members of a family; on the other, broken-up families, single parents on the poverty line, rifts within family where one child is abused, another sides with so-called abuser etc etc), whereas locking up Sarah Payne's killer — and similar friendless loners — seems straight-forwardly win-win. They have no family, friends, dependents: there are no innocent bystanders.

If it's true that abuse produces abusers, the currently somewhat overlooked majority of abuse — eg within families — is the point at which the social problems (which *include* stranger abuse but are not generated by it) eventually needs addressing. It has to be said that attempts to do this in the past — the notorious cases in Cleveland? — have been a catastrophe.

Sarah's Law will not help for all the reasons placed above, but also it may well increase levels of vigilantism not to mention create exactly the kinds of stigma and stress which may trigger someone to re-offend.

This is why it is far better that they are removed from the criminal system altogether, which have scant regard for such lofty and high- minded ideals as rehabilitation. They'll release someone when they reach the end of their sentence, it's as simple as that. Likelihood of reoffending only ever gets addressed at parole board meetings.

Pederasts are therefore far better dealt with by the medical profession. Someone sectioned under the Mental Health Act 1983 will be detained indefinitely, until in the opinion of at least two doctors they are fit for release.

Which brings me back to my original point - what we need to deal effectively with these people is a medically AND legally accepted definition of pederasty.

And Judges need to stop speaking with so-called authority on medical issues. In sentencing Sarah's killer, the Judge unhelpfully commented that he did not consider the accused to be mentally ill, as he had exhibited clear-headedness throughout. Such remarks prevent sex offenders from being treated for mental health issues, as legally they are regarded as completely sane. In my view this cannot be right.

On the mental illness point - paedophiles have abnormal innate desires but is there any evidence that this leads to them being fundamentally less capable of choosing whether or not to act on their desires? It's not as if they hear voices ordering them to molest children.