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October 25, 2005
Beware, monsters out year-round
People in Parker County [dallasnews.com] like people everywhere, want the kids to have a fun 'n' safe Halloween. They want children to be able to run around and ring doorbells without having to worry about creeps and weirdos and perverts, and how can you blame them for that?
To keep the streets safe for trick-or-treaters, the county probation department is going to make about 40 registered sex offenders spend Monday evening in its Weatherford offices. From 6 to 10 p.m., they'll be attending a mandatory Halloween "lock-in" to make sure they don't come in contact with any children. Everyone will be isolated in one area.
It sounds novel, but it isn't entirely original. Similar measures have been enacted in recent years in other communities, ranging from making registered offenders sign pledges promising not to decorate for Halloween to full-fledged Oct. 31 molester round-ups.
Last year, one Michigan community ordered all sex offenders to report to their probation officers on Halloween night with a sack lunch and something to read. Another town ordered offenders to keep their porch lights turned off and get all the candy out of the house.
Predictably, parents, politicians and the non-sex-offending public in general love these measures.
"We're trying to keep kids from going to sex offender houses, knocking on the door and having a pervert meet them there," the Bexar County district attorney told a San Antonio radio station last year.
Just as predictably, civil rights advocates are appalled.
"It's sort of like, 'We're revoking your probation for four hours for one night,' " said Southern Methodist University law professor Fred Moss. "I'm troubled by it."
One Florida county abruptly canceled its Halloween sex-offender lock-up plan a few years ago after a defense attorney threatened to sue, calling the plan an "illegal mass detention."
Well, there might be a legal challenge there – I'm no expert – but it's hard for me to work up much sympathy for sex offenders.
It does not particularly trouble my conscience to think that people who have committed such reprehensible acts might have to sit in a boring and uncomfortable government office for a few hours. It's no worse than what we require of the law-abiding who are summoned, for instance, to jury duty.
But it strikes me that we might be missing the point a little. Protecting the kids from a handful of creepy strangers for four hours a year isn't going to make much of a dent in the crime statistics.
Halloween carries a cultural association with perverts and boogiemen and slasher-movie mutants; it's perhaps a logical time to worry about child safety and "stranger danger."
But you have to credit sexual predators with a little subtlety. They don't usually open the door in a Freddy Krueger mask and snatch unsuspecting trick-or-treaters off the front porch.
Sadly, they are more often people your child (and you) know and trust: relatives, teachers, soccer coaches, priests, ministers.
"There's a much greater risk from someone the child knows," said Carol Duncan, clinical programs director for the Child Abuse Prevention Center of Dallas. "Usually, when children do report abuse, it's been going on for a long time."
Kids need to be wise about this – not scared or cynical but alert to what's appropriate and what isn't. And parents need to pay attention to the relationships their children have even with trusted adults.
There's a kind of naive comfort in imagining that the threat always comes from the stranger, the neighborhood creep, the registered offender whose mug shot was dutifully passed around at the last crime-watch meeting.
If Parker County wants to round up its sex offenders for Halloween, I don't much care. Maybe it will give parents some peace of mind; maybe it will keep some sick and troubled people out of temptation's path.
But the truth is that you can't count on the law to keep predators away from your kids.
Ninety percent of the job is yours – keeping your kids away from predators. They're out there every day of the year.
Posted by Nealus at October 25, 2005 10:38 AM
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