‘Nobody worries about our children’: unseen impacts of sex offender registration on families with school-age children and implications for desistance

Abstract

The current paper presents findings from a qualitative study using a web-based survey (n = 58) and open-ended interviews (n = 19) to investigate the impact of sex offender law and policies on family members of convicted sex offenders. Specifically, this paper discusses the impact sex offender policies and ‘extra-legal’ restrictions made by employers and landlords on housing and income stability, as well as impacts on family dynamics: a far less examined consequence of sex offender laws. Participants described how their children missed out on family bonding activities due to restrictions placed on their registrant parent, such as having their father attend school events, taking their children trick-or-treating, and going on family vacations. Responses indicated that policies intended to protect children and families are in reality tearing these family members’ lives apart. As a result, registrants and their families experienced social rejection and isolation, both of which are obstacles in the process of desistance from offending behavior and successful reintegration. Experiences of these family members shed light on the unintended punitive consequences of current sex offender policy and the critical need for reform.

Keywords:

• Sex offenders
• registry
• criminal justice policy
• children
• parenthood

Acknowledgement

This work would not have been possible without the support of our own family members: thank you to Kevin, Miles, Maggie and Robert. We are deeply grateful to the participants who shared so deeply from their own experiences. In addition, we offer thanks to the anonymous reviewers and editors for excellent feedback.

Notes

1. There is a strand of advocacy, discussed later in this paper, which actively promotes this terminology for much the same reasons. While sympathetic to some of this advocacy, especially as it promotes humanizing, our use of the term does not connote alignment with a particular agenda.

2. This study received approval from the University of Delaware Institutional Review Board; respondents gave informed consent prior to participation and provided pseudonyms. All other identifying information has been removed. When quoting, we use only the pseudonym and do not report race, age or other information, both because our sample does not allow for comparison across subgroups and because we wish to avoid enabling identification beyond that which our respondents have elected to allow. We believe that our respondents deserve the allocation of agency that choosing their own pseudonyms provide some of our sample is skewed towards activists who embrace public identities.

3. RSOL is a national advocacy group with several state branches throughout the United States. The second author has presented at their meetings on several occasions, and thus has developed trust with the leadership and the broader advocacy community, while maintaining independence (no honoraria have been accepted). RSOL Members primarily consist of registrants, family members, and allies who seek to reform or overturn overly punitive or inclusive sex offender policies at the local, state, and national level, while supporting laws and policy that are fact-based and promote ‘public safety, safeguard civil liberties, honor human dignity, and offer holistic prevention, healing, and restoration’ (nationalrsol.org).

4. We did not ask this directly, but we did ask about RSOL participation as well as involvement in policy advocacy of any kind. The majority of the sample had NOT attended an RSOL conference (42 of 58) but described themselves as involved in policy reform efforts (41 of 58).

5. Please contact the authors directly if interested in viewing the survey and interview protocols.

6. Respondents were asked to select their age range.

7. In keeping with qualitative analysis, we did not ‘count’ the usage of particular words by respondents, but rather analyzed their responses for both explicit and implicit meaning. This makes it difficult to report the percentages of our respondents who expressed particular themes. (We do so when possible. For example, we coded responses relating to shame and stigma more than 80 times across the respondents.) But each of the categories of themes reported here was salient in almost every respondent.

8. The percentages reported are the number of respondents who provided responses related to the themes identified out of the total number of respondents who provided responses to that particular prompt. Not all respondents provided responses to each question or prompt.