A Q&A on Megan’s Law: Should it apply to child offenders?

Sex offenders

Should a child be forced to register as a sex offender, sometimes for life? (Staten Island Advance photo)(Staten Island Advance photo)

We passed Megan’s Law decades ago, requiring sex offenders to register with the police and identify themselves to neighbors. But should it apply to kids? Critics say that’s a mistake, and have filed a lawsuit intended to exempt juveniles.

Dr. Elizabeth J. Letourneau did the first study looking at the consequences of Megan’s Law on juveniles. She found that kids rarely commit a second offense, and that the people they are most likely to hurt are themselves. She spoke with Julie O’Connor of the Star-Ledger’s editorial board. Below is an edited transcript.

Q. Why might a child have to register under Megan’s Law?

A. The history is that in 1994, the federal government passed the Jacob Wetterling Act, which required all states to subject at least some adults convicted of sex crimes to registration.

Shortly after, it was amended by Megan’s Law, which required that they also release registration information about higher risk sex offenders to the public.

None of that required states to subject children to the registry. In 2006, the Adam Wash Act extended these adult sanctions to children. Some states refused to, even though it’s federal law and they faced the loss of certain federal funds.

Q. In New Jersey, a child can get on the registry for anything from exposing himself to rape. What other reasons have you heard, across the country?

A. Behavior that we would consider normative: sharing nude images or engaging in intercourse within the context of a romantic relationship, or mooning people. There’s a wide range of behavior, some harmful, some not.

Q. If you’re over age 14, you have to register for at least 15 years in New Jersey. A younger kid can petition to be removed when he or she turns 18. Is there any research to support this delineation?

A. No. We know children’s brains continue to develop all throughout adolescence. There are dozens of reasons why kids engage in this type of behavior: lack of knowledge or adult supervision, impulsivity, hanging out with other delinquent people, boredom.

A small portion may have an interest in younger children and be acting on that. There is no rhyme or reason for setting a cutoff point at the age of 14, or subjecting children of any age to these policies.

Q. I read that one out of every four girls and one out of every six boys suffer some form of sexual abuse before age 18. In a third of these cases, the offenses were committed by other juveniles. And the single age with the greatest number of offenders was 14.

A. All of that research is accurate. Whether that influenced how this policy got delineated, I don’t know. Regardless, it defies logic that you would hold a 14-year-old much more accountable – for 15 years to life – than a child one day younger than 14, who would be held accountable until they reach the age of 18.

Kids are most vulnerable to making mistakes, including those that cause harm, when they are first learning a complex behavior. Use the analogy of driving: Fifteen-year-olds are the worst drivers, and they’re the youngest legal drivers. Their brains are less developed. They have the least amount of knowledge, experience and so on.

We have driver’s ed. But we don’t have that for interpersonal sexual relationships, which are very complex. The concept of consent is one that many adults find difficult to define.

Kids who are 14 are on the cusp of puberty, beginning to engage in sexual behavior, and this is the time when they are most vulnerable to making bad choices and mistakes.

Unlike driving, we do not provide good information on what the rules of this road are. In fact, in many places, we suppress information on how people should behave when they are sexual.

We will tell an older kid not to punch, tease, hit or kick a younger kid. ‘He hit me first,’ the older kid will say. And we say: ‘You’re twice as big.’ But we never give this same clear messaging when we talk about sex. We don’t tell them that younger kids are off-limits.

We assume that kids will know this intuitively. To us, it’s obvious.

But what we see are increasing rates of arrests for child sexual abuse crimes when kids are 12, 13 and 14 years old, then a drop in arrests of kids 15 and older. That is a standard learning curve. What you see is kids figuring out the rules of the road on their own.

By the time a kid is 15, they’ve figured out that younger kids are off-limits. But they aren’t born knowing that.

Q. You are against putting any juveniles on Megan’s list. Why?

A. There are only two ways that registry policies could have a positive effect on public safety – by reducing recidivism or reducing first-time sex crimes. They do not do either, based on data from thousands of cases in half a dozen states.

Q. Is it true that young offenders have a small chance of repeat offenses, unlike adult offenders?

A. The sexual recidivism rate is less than 3 percent for children who have committed sex crimes. Adults reoffend at a rate of about 18 percent.

Q. What about kids who committed the most serious offense, a rape? Should they have to register?

A. We looked at offense severity to see if that had any influence on the impact of registration, and it does not.

Here’s the analogy I use: If you’ve got a kid who has a really bad earache you take him to the doctor, who says drugs won’t help. This is viral. The severity of an ear infection doesn’t change the fact that antibiotics won’t work. It doesn’t suddenly make an ineffective treatment effective.

Yet some doctors will still give desperate parents anything, which results in resistance to antibiotics. So it has a harmful effect.

Reserving registration for the most severe cases does not turn registration into an effective policy, it’s still ineffective. It does not reduce the likelihood that a child won’t commit another sex offense, because kids are already at low risk of doing so and labeling them sex offenders is not an effective strategy.

Every dollar you put into a failed policy cannot be put into an effective policy. It doesn’t work. And registration exposes children to very severe forms of harm.

Q. Like what?

We compared kids who had to register with kids who didn’t. They had all engaged in problematic sexual behavior, but whether they had to register depended on the state they lived in.

The kids who were required to register were four times more likely to have attempted suicide in the last 30 days than the ones who weren’t. They were also five times more likely to have been propositioned for sex by an adult in the past year, and twice as likely to have been sexually assaulted.

When we label children as registered sex offenders, it causes other people to view them as less than human. That’s when we increase the likelihood that adults will abuse children.

Sex offender notification was supposed to be a policy that reduces the likelihood of child sexual abuse. But it is associated with an increase likelihood of child sexual abuse. You couldn’t have a worse outcome.

Q. Do some serial sex offenders commit their first crimes as children? How else can we protect future victims?

A. It is not the case that if we took away registration, we would be left with nothing. We would have the money and resources to put into effective forms of therapy found to prevent recidivism or first-time sex crimes.

For example, we just developed a school-based intervention that provides students in 6th or 7th grade with clear information about why they should never engage younger kids in sexual behavior.

Preliminary results show that they learn that. Currently, we only have therapy for kids who have already demonstrated problem behavior. It doesn’t occur to most people that you have to tell your 12-year-old: When you’re with your younger friend, you cannot touch his penis. And we need to explain why – that younger kids can’t consent to sexual behavior.

If we say, as a nation, that kids cannot consent to sexual behavior because they don’t know enough to make good choices, then holding them to account for 10 to 15 years makes no sense. We cannot blame them for bad behavior, when we’ve already said they don’t know enough about these behaviors. That’s illogical.

I would argue it’s also immoral, given that registering children is associated with an increased risk of suicide and sexual assault victimization.

Q. How likely are politicians to scrap juvenile registries, based on research like yours?

A. We have seen several states roll back their use of registration. Oregon did so in 2016, Delaware in 2015. Florida, Maryland, Oklahoma and Texas are states that work to keep kids off registries. In New Jersey, a case challenging the constitutionality of Megan’s Law for children is on its way up to the state Supreme Court.

I don’t think there’s any way to defend subjecting children to registries based on strong evidence that it doesn’t work, it’s harmful to children and the enormous cost of these policies. I cannot fathom what the rationale would be.
