Protecting Our Kids: How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us

This thought-provoking work raises important questions about sex offender laws, drawing from personal stories, research, and data to prove the policies promote fear, destroy lives, and fail to protect children.· Provides research-based evidence that the mean-spirited and panic-driven sex offender laws, aimed at branding a group of offenders as inhuman and unworthy of civil liberties and human rights, increases fear, destroys the lives of offenders and their families, and fails to protect children· Shows that emphasizing sex offenders and stranger-danger as the primary threat to child well-being and safety prevents focus on and attention to policies that prevent far more pervasive forms of child abuse, such as physical abuse, neglect, and maltreatment· Analyzes the sociohistorical context surrounding the emergence of current draconian sex offender policies · Challenges the idea that sex offenders must be continually monitored and publicly identified· Tells the stories of convicted sex offenders and their families and how they survive in a society that views them as the "worst of the worst"