It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the moment someone in politics announces, “I have come up with a pointless but harsh new law targeting sex offenders,” someone else must shout, “I have too, because I hate them even more!”
Thus we find that in New York State last Friday, two State Senators, Democrats Jeff Klein and Diane Savino, proposed legislation that would prohibit Level 2 and 3 sex offenders from playing Pokemon Go. The senators are also demanding that the game’s developers eliminate any Pokemon within 100 feet of a registered sex offender’s home.
Not more than 48 hours later, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that he was going one grandstanding step further and directing the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to make it a parole violation if even a low-level sex offender decides to play the game. As The New York Daily News reports, “If a sex offender is caught playing the game in New York, it would be a violation of the terms of their parole and they could be returned to prison.”
It should be noted here that you play Pokemon via an app on your phone. Animated creatures appear on your screen as you walk around, and you tap it to “catch” them. Playing the game is about as menacing as playing Candy Crush at the bus stop.
And yet under Cuomo’s new guidelines, if you are a Tier 1 offender — a non-violent offender such as a teen sexter, or someone else considered to have the very “lowest risk of repeat offense” — you could actually go to prison for playing Pokemon.
Overkill much?
Worse than this draconian punishment is that while these prohibitions are touted as efforts to “safeguard New York’s children,” they actually do nothing of the sort.
These laws are based on the mistaken notion that mere proximity to a sex offender puts a child in peril. Or, as Sen. Savino warned, “It’s dangerous to let our children linger in front of a sex offender’s home to play a game.”
Is it really? A University of Chicago study by Amanda Y. Agan compared Washington D.C. streets with and without sex offenders on them. She found no difference in the number of sex crimes committed on them. How could that be?
Well as it turns out, sex offenders don’t do a lot of re-offending. In fact, they have the lowest rate of recidivism of any criminals other than murderers. I realize that most of us have heard the opposite, that sex offenders are insatiable rapists. But a study in Georgia by the Sex Offender Registration Review Board looked at the 17,000 people on that state’s registry and determined that about 100 of them were “predators” with a compulsion to commit sex offenses.
Meanwhile the Poke-laws being proposed in New York act as if everyone on the Sex Offender Registry is about to rape any child walking by.
If we really want to keep our kids safe — the politicians’ ostensible goal — obsessing about stranger-danger is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. The vast majority of child abuse is committed by someone in the child’s life, a relative or other trusted adult, not some guy jumping out from the bushes. So to make kids safer, it makes far more sense to teach them how to recognize, resist, and report sex offenses. We also have to let our kids know that we will listen to them if they come to us, and not be mad at them. The key is to take away the abuser’s greatest ally, secrecy.
It feels as if politicians use sex offenders as megaphones: mention them and everybody listens. But saving kids from sex abuse requires government and the rest of us to take actions that have actually been proven to make a positive difference.
Fear-pokemongering does not.
Lenore Skenazy is founder of the book and blog Free-Range Kids, and a contributor at Reason.com.
