Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us: 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"