Apathy Sketchpad

Original (11th April 2007):

The other day I read that some areas of England were planning a trial run of a variation of Megan’s Law (or Sarah’s Law, depending on which poor innocent girl you want to slander by attaching her name to this monstrously awful idea). The day after I read that no, actually, they weren’t, because (as I mentioned) it is a monstrously awful idea. This proves The Sun dead wrong, but then, most things that happen do.

Largely on the chance that some of you have been mad, in a coma, or back in time for the last few years, I should probably explain that Megan’s Law is the law the American government brought in (after a large amount of public pressure) which allows people to find out details of sex offenders living nearby. It is named after a young girl who was murdered, and the British variant spelling “Sarah’s Law” was named after a broadly similar case here. In some cases it tells you a limited amount of information (say, how many live near you and roughly where) and in some cases it will give you a name and an address and loan you a crowbar, a shovel and a flaming torch just in case you’re feeling up to a little vigilante violence.

That is, of course, the Unnervingly Massive Drawback with the idea, but it is still all worthwhile if the advantages outweigh the Unnervingly Massive Drawback. So, for the sake of balance, the advantages are…

There are no advantages.

There is nothing — nothing — to be gained from such a law. Supporters of the law will tell you that it helps protect people, but this is patently untrue. For one thing, there is the repeated claim on the news that the law simply “drives paedophiles underground”. That’s not to say that they were ever terribly open about it, but it means that they just stop telling the police where they live and then the police can’t pass the information on. There’s no real evidence that the law has this effect (although the amount of sex offenders who cooperate with the police is about 97% in the UK and while figures vary between states in the US, it’s uniformly far lower than ours), but nor is there any evidence that it doesn’t, nor indeed is there any evidence that is achieves anything very much at all, with the possible exception of making a few people feel safer.

Here is a report from the NSPCC on the subject, and they — and please bear in mind when I tell you this that the NSPCC is an organisation whose sole agenda is to protect children and therefore probably don’t care that much about the rights of paedophiles — say this:

There is currently insufficient proof that the community notification practices of Megan’s Law makes children safer [sic]. … Policy-makers should ensure that sex offender management policies are based on objective evidence of what makes children safer and not on popular responses to high-profile sex crimes such as Megan’s Law, however tempting it is.

And I can see how it’d be tempting. A lot of people seem to want the law, probably because of mindless tabloid pap like The Sun endorsing it, but also because of news stories like this ‘news’ story about things a victim’s mother said after the event, in which people whose opinions are obviously biased are paraded as news — with the implication presumably being that their closeness to the case in question lends their opinions some kind of experience and hence authority, when in fact it makes their judgement clouded and their opinions predictable and irrelevant. Nor does it help that most people, including myself up until I started writing this, are wholly ignorant of existing legislation to disclose information about paedophiles to communities, on a discretionary case-by-case basis. They hear about Megan’s Law and assume that the current situation is the other extreme. And nobody corrects them.

For their part, the Tories seized upon the opportunity to ask, almost Have I Got News For You style:

Could the Home Office be trusted to correctly identify paedophiles?

A terribly clever bit of satire, yes, but hardly intelligent debate. I think the general consensus is that the government should probably fix the Home Office rather than legislate around it.

But to my mind, all of this misses the key point. (The key point, by the way, having nothing to be with paediatricians.) Say I go into Subway hoping to have a footlong Chicken Teriyaki with sweet onion sauce, lettuce, tomato, (trust me; I’m going somewhere with this) peppers and onions, on Honey Oat bread. Say then that the probably-Chinese girl serving me tells me that they have run out of Honey Oat bread and only have Italian Herb And Cheese. Do I then say “oh, never mind, then” and walk out?

No. Not unless I’m in a very unusual mood. I went in there because I was hungry, not because I wanted that particular bread.

So why should we imagine that when a suburban single mother, trying to do the best for her children, discovers via some new law that there is a paedophile living near her house and locks her young daughter away from the world, that the paedophile in question will do anything other than pick on someone else? These people have to live somewhere, and I don’t honestly believe there’s a community in the country where someone could live in peace if people knew they were a convicted paedophile (and if there is I wouldn’t fancy living there after a few years of Megan’s Law; they’d flock to it — it’d probably end up having more paedophiles than streetlights). And then you still have someone being abused, only you also have a load of other poor girls trapped in their homes 24/7, house prices constantly bouncing up and down as the paedophiles move about*, random mob attacks on anyone who lives near or walks past the paedophile’s house, and the illusion of safety. How is that better?

The only answer I can see to that (rhetorical) question is that, from the point of view of a parent (which from a democratic standpoint is a pretty important point of view given the number of parents around), it’s easy to feel that if Megan’s Law were implemented, you could at least make your children safer, and honestly, I would never criticise a parent for wanting to protect their own children, even if it did mean just spreading the danger around everyone else’s. It’s not exactly socially responsible, but I can’t honestly say I wouldn’t do the same.

But that’s a basis for deciding where to let your kids play, who they can see, and what time they have to come home. It is not a basis for lawmakers to legislate on.

I hope the latest “ruling out” of Megan’s Law sees an end to all this stupidity. Unfortunately, it appears that it probably isn’t, at least, not in the eyes of the tabloid-reading, ITV Play-phoning, semi-lobotomised C2DE types. There is, right now, a petition on the government’s new e-petitions website in favour of the ridiculous law. The text of the petition (which at present seems to have run for a little over a month and gained a rather sad 28 signatories) reads as follows:

We are fed up with the threat of paedophiles having the protection of the law as they do at present. We demand that you allow the public the fundamental right to feel protected and safe. The government has a duty to afford this to us and are currently failing spectacularly in this by allowing Paedophiles to integrate freely and anonymously in our neighbourhoods. We can legally have ASBOS publicised and are made aware of petty criminals who may damage our cars and windows, but when it comes to protecting the most precious thing that we all have we are forced to live in ignorance and danger. GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER MR BLAIR/BROWN/REID .WE WANT SARAH’S LAW NOW. THIS WILL NOT GO AWAY.

Aside from the shaky grasp of punctuation (which I know I over-react to, but I do feel these things are important if you’re petitioning a world leader), this demonstrates several brain defects, most notably that as ASBO is a short-term punishment given to young minor offenders. It will not trigger vigilante action. The publication does not continue for the rest of the offender’s life. It is superficially similar, but not actually similar. Alas, a large portion of people operate on a purely superficial level and so these arguments can carry a lot of weight.

The bottom line, to me, is that if you think that someone who has been convicted of child abuse can ever re-enter society then you cannot support Megan’s Law, and if you thing that someone who has been convicted of child abuse cannot ever re-enter society, then surely you think they should be dead, castrate or in prison, in which case Megan’s Law is pointless.

At no point on the spectrum does Megan’s Law become a good idea.

Update (24th April 2007):

Look, see, this is just what I’m talking about. How does this add to our understanding of the case? The father just wants to see someone punished, and as much as he won’t admit or realise it himself, I can’t imagine he really cares who it is. I think the same thing is true in court; whenever you see a trial on TV (or more usually a dramatised trial since cameras aren’t allowed in UK courtrooms, at least, not while there’s a trial going on) you always see the prosecution lawyer impressing on the jury how horrible the crime was; how inhuman the actions; how important it is that the jury prosecute the perpetrator. This is a cruel and intellectually offensive tactic; they’re implicitly equating “the perpetrator” with “the defendant” and they’re trying to instill in the jury the same feelings as Lucie’s father has: that someone has to be punished. They’re trying to make the jury angry, and they know full well the jury only has one possible outlet for that, short of a punch-up in a sequestered hotel. I don’t think that kind of argument should be allowed in court.

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*Presumably they would eventually set up a sort of insider property trading racket this way, whereby people buy houses near paedophiles, then sell them when they move away and the local property prices recover, although the paedophiles themselves would necessarily be buying high and selling low and would probably start demanding a cut. Could be a nice little earner, especially since they’d be exempt from capital gains tax. Sometimes I worry about the way my mind is wired up.