Members Lucky Posted February 4, 2009 Members Share Posted February 4, 2009 The NY Times today reports something rather astonishing. The website MYSpace has come up with a list of which of its members are registered sex offenders. They have reported having 90,000 sex offenders registered with their website. Facebook does much better, only 8000 of its members being registered sex offenders. The United States has 700,000 registered sex offenders, and nowadays you can go online and learn if your neighbor is one. But what I don't get is how MySpace and Facebook were able to come up with these figures. Can't you be rather anonymous in signing up? Nonetheless, MySpace has turned the 90,000 names over to two different attorneys general, and already people are lamenting the fact that our children are not safe online. But others point out that online bullying is much more of a problem for children. So far, I haven't had one known sex offender contact me, but then, I may be too old for them. I have noticed a bully or two. How about You? Are you registered? If so, kindly let the admins know so that they can inform on you. And, if you want to be better informed on this topic, then here is the article I am quoting from: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/technolo...space.html?_r=1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest zachary Posted February 4, 2009 Share Posted February 4, 2009 i believe the term is "short-eyes", not just short, maybe that's the confusion. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Lucky Posted February 6, 2009 Author Members Share Posted February 6, 2009 Gee. So few responses- and here I was thinking the post might make me a new friend! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members RA1 Posted February 6, 2009 Members Share Posted February 6, 2009 Lucky, Even before you mentioned something about finding a friend it was obvious that you were trolling for a sex offender. Unfortunately I think they are like alcoholics in that it takes a lot to get to the point of admission. However, I don't know any and, like you, I might be willing to help one if it would do any good. I have a 38 Special I could use as a last resort. Best regards, RA1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
caeron Posted February 7, 2009 Share Posted February 7, 2009 I don't think I've ever heard of anybody being sexually assaulted on the internet. The idea that sex offenders on myspace are more dangerous than ones anywhere else seems ridiculous to me. Never mind that many registered sex offenders are tagged for consensual teen relationships that break ill-considered age of consent laws. So, no, I don't find it horrifying that myspace has a lot of registered sex offenders. What I would find horrifying (well maybe just sad), is if parents fail to properly supervise their kids and let them get into trouble. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
caeron Posted February 7, 2009 Share Posted February 7, 2009 For another look at the willy nilly stigmatization of sex offender registries, read this. http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail..._offender/6726/ There's an academic paper here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1100663 to quote from their results, which match my bias against large scale notification laws: our findings imply that a state should always employ a registry (the optimal size of the registry depends on the shape of the relationship between sex offense frequency and registry size). On the other hand, our results also suggest that notification laws are only attractive when the size of the registry is relatively small. We estimate that putting a notification law in place deters -1.07 yearly sex offenses per 10,000 people, but a notification law that covers 14.79 sex offenders per 10,000 people (the sample mean) leads to 1.3 additional recidivist sex offenses per 10,000 people. Basically, they're saying that offenders should be required to register with the police who can watch them, but that public notification about sex offenders INCREASES their recidivism, which makes perfect sense to me. If you turn these people into total pariahs, their lives are already fucked up, there isn't much upside to behaving. Sorry if this is a sidebar for people, but I think we need to be careful in our stigmatization of sex offenders. Not all of them are serious crimes and even for the serious crimes, if we give them no way out, then they are going to keep offending. If you care about this much, I suggest you skim the results and conclusion section of their paper, it's more nuanced than my pull quote. For instance some level of notification, while it increases recidivism among registered offenders, decreases reports of first time offenders. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Lucky Posted February 7, 2009 Author Members Share Posted February 7, 2009 No one told me how MySpace knew it had 90,000 registered sex offenders as members. If they can figure it out, so can this site. So, how many here? No, I am not asking that they be banned. I agree that the sex offender label is applied too liberally and has been turned into a social stigmatizing issue rather than a real effort to help police with crime enforcement. It's a shame when someone who clearly is never going to commit a sex crime is forced to register because of some technicality. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
caeron Posted February 7, 2009 Share Posted February 7, 2009 On that, I have no idea, since you can just sign up with any email address. It is odd that they can identify them. Perhaps because of the attorney generals they were capable of tracking back all the email addresses to their registrations. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest mineallmine Posted February 7, 2009 Share Posted February 7, 2009 I am always of the mind that yes we should protect our children. Though parents tend to expect everyone else to do it and to not look out for their children themselves. they want laws and things that do it instead of suprvising their own children and taking responsability. In this day and age it seems easy to blame everyone else. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
