What Is Sexual Abuse?

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Child sexual exploitation is a real problem, but the perpetrators are rarely strangers.

Lifetime punishment for those who have already offended is not the best way to protect children.

Comprehensive school sex education helps children protect themselves from being molested.

Megan’s Law (1994), the Adam Walsh Act (2006), efforts to require special sex offender license plates, and dozens of other laws restrict the movement, residence, employment, privacy, and every other right of convicted sex offenders.

Megan’s Law was sponsored by New Jersey congressman Dick Zimmer, who recently died at age 81. Signed by then-President Clinton, the federal law required states and municipalities to set up websites listing the local addresses of convicted sex offenders who had completed their sentences.

The supposed reason for this is the familiar chant of every moral panic: “Helping families make informed decisions for themselves and their children.” Decisions about what? “Quick, change lanes, we don’t want to drive behind a molester.”

Predictably, these registries are used by vigilante groups attempting to drive registrants out of their community. Cities across America also require offenders to surrender their civil rights on Halloween—despite no evidence whatsoever of an uptick in offender activity. Laws regulate where registrants are allowed to live—requirements so stringent that they often end up under freeway overpasses, homeless camps, or in the desert. If they weren’t poor, sick, and hopeless before........

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