Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

DAN GUNDERSON: When North Dakota State Senator Tim Mathern started getting calls from angry mothers about a sex offender living near a school, he responded like lawmakers across the country. He began working on a law to ban sex offenders from living near schools. But then Senator Mathern did some homework and he changed his mind.

TIM MATHERN: The simplest solution would be pass a bill 2,000 feet around every school. Get it passed right away, and we could get that done. But no children would benefit, no families would have a safer community, no schools would be safer.

DAN GUNDERSON: Senator Mathern's research showed him why restricting where sex offenders live would not make school safer. When there are restrictions on where sex offenders can live, some offenders stop registering with police. Then no one knows where they live and the law is useless.

He also learned children are most often abused by a family member or a friend, not a stranger. Senator Mathern decided to change his legislation. Instead of saying sex offenders can't live near schools, the law passed in North Dakota restricts sex offenders from going on school property. Mathern says some of his legislative colleagues continued to favor a tougher, broader ban.

TIM MATHERN: Sometimes lawmakers don't want to know the facts. There really are two things that affect public policy. One is the facts and the other is the feelings, the political pressure. And there are, in fact, legislators who would say, don't confuse me with the facts. I've already made up my mind.

DAN GUNDERSON: Mathern says he knows some voters may criticize him for narrowing the focus of his sex offender legislation, but he says he's found most of his constituents agree when he explains the facts.

TIM MATHERN: I have not gone soft on sex offenders. In fact, I'm getting tougher. But I'm using facts, I'm using reason. I actually want children to be safer. I want this neighborhood to be safer. For that to happen, we can't just do knee jerk reaction when there's a crime.

DAN GUNDERSON: But that's often what happens. Most sex offender legislation is passed in response to a heinous crime that grabs headlines and sparks public outrage.

Patty Wetterling has seen it happen many times. Her son, Jacob, was kidnapped 18 years ago and he's never been found. Wetterling says grieving parents often help pass bad legislation.

PATTY WETTERLING: After you have a child kidnapped and/or murdered, somebody will come to you and say, here, do this. This will make it all better and your child will not have died in vain. And you're very desperate and vulnerable. And so part of me wants to protect other parents from falling into that. Let's not make bad laws.

DAN GUNDERSON: Wetterling says parents across the country whose children were victims in high profile sex crimes are now joining forces to focus attention on the need for more effective sex offender laws.

She says right now, 97% of funding is targeted at 3% of sex offenders, the offenders who make the headlines. She says there needs to be a better balance between punishment, treatment, and prevention. And Wetterling says too often new laws are passed without adequate funding.

PATTY WETTERLING: Don't pass laws in our kids' names and then don't put any dollars behind it. That's such an insult. All that is, is a photo op, so you can look good. And yeah, everybody's happy, they pat each other on the back, and there's no dollars there. It's infuriating.

DAN GUNDERSON: Wetterling says she hopes to convince lawmakers to pass effective sex offender laws and spend more money on programs to protect kids who are abused and might grow up to be violent sex offenders.

Wetterling goes to speak with lawmakers armed with pages of statistics and research. Surprisingly, that information is sometimes missing from the debate over sex offender laws.

Lisa Sample is a criminologist at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. She's studied how sex offender laws are made. She says the legislation is often shaped by misinformation or a lack of information.

Most of the legislators in her study said their primary source of information was the news media. Sample says it's clear most sex offender legislation follows a crime against a child and the resulting public outrage.

LISA SAMPLE: What I think we don't do, however, is to put those kind of events in a larger context. And the fact that child homicides are so incredibly rare, and especially sexually motivated child homicides are even more rare.

And so I'm not sure it's misinformation that we give the public as much as it is a lack of information. We just don't give them enough information to understand risk appropriately.

DAN GUNDERSON: Sample says while great attention is focused on stranger abductions of children, the greatest risk is from a family member or friend. Sample says understanding that fact builds a stronger case for more programs to prevent sexual abuse.

Many of the experts interviewed for this story pointed to prevention as a key area that gets little attention. They say it's hard to get funding for prevention because prevention doesn't produce quick results, and it can be hard to prove a program kept someone from committing a crime.

Nancy Sabin believes prevention is the most neglected solution to sexual violence. Sabin heads the Minnesota-based Jacob Wetterling Foundation. She says it's easy to focus on stranger danger. It's harder to address family issues closer to home. But she says lawmakers don't deserve all the blame.

NANCY SABIN: The question I like to ask the public is, where do we think these guys are coming from? They're coming from our homes. So we've got to get over some of the fear and find the right words to have really important conversations so that none of us are raising sex offenders in our homes. If we can't help fix this problem, who can?

DAN GUNDERSON: Starting that public discussion may not be easy. Talking about sex raises issues of morality and religion. But North Dakota State Senator Tim Mathern says he's convinced successful solutions to sexual violence won't happen until the public is engaged in a meaningful debate.

TIM MATHERN: These public policies have to be discussed and the citizens have to start influencing their legislators to use facts, to use research, to use an approach that actually works, not an approach that just gets more votes. We have to make sure that we aren't shooting ourselves in the foot by being righteous, but making things worse.

DAN GUNDERSON: In Minnesota, a panel of experts recently completed a comprehensive report to serve as a guide for sex offender policy in the state. One of the report's authors says the biggest challenge is just getting lawmakers to read it. Dan Gunderson, Minnesota Public Radio News.