Behind the Headlines

            Immune to sensationalized headlines and rebellious toward scare tactics, I let Are registered sex offenders living near your child’s school bus stop slide, with borderline indifference the first few times I heard the blurb. The follow-up catalyst for outrage, how safe are our children, caught my attention.

            With martinchill’s (gather.com) recent attention to journalistic integrity still fresh in my mind, I cringed through the complete story. I don’t think the emotions I worked up were the intended response toward the target offenders. Behind-the-scene issues and where this article might lead the community bothered me more than where sex offenders live.

            Having survived twenty-three years with children in the school system in question, hundreds of reports of violent attacks on students and not one of them related to registered sex offenders at bus stops, the relevance of the this being headline news confused me.

            Assuming my desensitized approach had allowed me to miss something important in the few years since I had a child in school, I prepared to jump on the corrective bandwagon once I had the facts. I searched for reports of registered sex offenders harassing school children at bus stops.

            I found a website where bus drivers discuss problems with students abusing one another at bus stops and on the bus, but saw nothing about registered sex offenders. I found the article about the mother who discovered a registered sex offender lived across the street from her child’s bus stop and prompted the news report in question, but nothing in that article about the registered sex offender doing anything to her child. (This article also states that it is not against the law for a registered sex offender to live near a bus stop, and tells us the registered offender saw the cameras and didn’t want to be interviewed and I wonder why that is mentioned) The articles wraps up with “For now, derrick’s family says they don't want his stop moved but they will continue to keep a close eye on him.”

        I found two recent stories about teachers either being fired or tried for sexual misconduct with students, several articles about students assaulting one another, a few articles about wanting to amend our laws to remove criminal charges for those who forget they are carrying and bring guns into the schools, but no charges against registered sex offenders at bus stops.

            My beef is not with addressing a concern every parent and citizen should have, or with the advice to know the community and watch over children. I have a problem with what I see as little regard for the validity of the presumed problem (How safe are our children) and the false security offered in the subliminal suggestion that we ostracize the registered sex offenders. Logic and experience tell me registered sex offenders are not the biggest threat to the safety of our children.

            Registered sex offenders have been caught, done their time, reported their addresses, and know everyone is watching them. I doubt they pose near the threat of abusers who have not been caught or have not registered, and are more likely friends and relatives than strangers across the street from the bus stop. We do our children a great disservice by pretending otherwise, or offering them a decoy to fear more.

            My biggest questions are: what will people do with the information after searching the registered offenders list, and will they be so focused on this that they will not ask why the school system is not doing more to protect our students from teachers and one another. Unless I missed something in my search for specifics, I wonder how this story originated and why it was given the attention it received.