I'm not a monster I'm a person that made mistakes when I was a child.
And I didn't even know what I was doing.
We all want to protect children.
Listing juveniles on the public sex offender registry doesn't protect anyone.
Putting their name and their faces and their address on the public registry
devastates entire families.
We were playing with dolls and the dolls were kissing
then we were kissing
and then it led to little fondling, you know over the clothes, under the clothes.
That was, that was it.
But obviously that was enough to to convict.
I was 12 and she was eight. It was during the summer
and I you know experimented and did some things that I shouldn't have done
but I didn't know.
I didn't know the consequences.
I thought something like this came with a grounding or a spanking.
I was still that young.
I've spent maybe close to eight years behind bars.
Is that you?
That is me I was young, right?
When you hear sex offender you don't think it's a 12 year old little boy
that's crying himself to sleep in a juvenile cell.
Most people think if you're on a registry you're definitely dangerous
and so, but it's really, the real fact about it is
that there's a broad range of offenses that can place a person
or especially a child on the registry.
Where's your socks?
We all want to keep our children safe.
The problem is that the laws are based on faulty assumptions.
They're based on the assumption that children and adolescents who commit sex offenses will,
are at high risk to commit more sex offenses.
This isn't true.
There are many studies, there's been over 30, that show low recidivism rates
for youth who have sexually offended.
That's the main point of registration notification
is to reduce sexual recidivism, and that does not work.
I was a child. I was misunderstood.
I did something wrong, yes.
Punish me and punish me appropriately,
but don't throw me into a den of lions.
And I could understand paying some sort of price for doing something that wasn't right,
but absolutely not have them put on the public registry,
and have their names in all of the local newspapers,
and then expect them to go to school and mingle with the other kids.
The police will publish your information on the official website.
In some states it's, they'll make mailers, they'll make flyers.
Sometimes its lawn signs saying sex offender lives here.
And all the neighbors were handed out pamphlets describing my sons in the house
and where the sex offenders live.
Vigilante groups coming to my house.
Molotov cocktail thrown at the house.
The holes are still there around my bedroom window
where the BBs went through the vinyl siding on the house.
They were 11 and 13 years old.
A person on the registry
even if it's a person that's 11 years old 12 years old 13 years old
cannot enter or live in zones that are frequented by children
meaning a park, a daycare, a nursery, a school.
That found it hard to you know find a place to live.
Find... it's been difficult to keep jobs.
I dropped out of college because of the registry.
The registry also directly affects my own children my wife.
We have moved nine different times within the past three years.
They've been in four or five different schools
and that makes me feel like a horrible parent
because I can't give my children what they need.
No matter how hard they're trying right now in their lives,
to get their lives together,
it's never going to go away.
You just google up their names and up comes all the sex offender information
for what happened when they were 10 and 12 years old,
is turning out to be a life sentence.
This person has this label for the rest of their life,
based on something that they did when they were a child.
Juveniles should not be subjected to registration or notification,
you know, in the absence of any supportive evidence whatsoever
that there's a community safety effect.
Youth should be protected from these laws