Registration of Sex Offenders: Good Idea?

There's a very good article today in the NYT Magazine, about adolescent "sex offenders." More and more states, and the federal government, are beginning to treat juveniles who engage in inappropriate sexual behavior (at all levels of severity) like adult offenders, and this includes the requirement of public registry. Many who work in the field are very concerned that this trend is causing much more harm than good. Below are excerpts from the article:

It wasn’t long ago that therapists and victim advocates had to fight to get the justice system to take sex abuse by adults, much less by juveniles, seriously. If a case even made it past the police, the charges were often dismissed in court, notes Craig Latham, a Massachusetts psychologist who treats sex offenders and consults with law enforcement.
Around the same time, though, the victims’ rights movement began to burgeon, bringing much-needed attention to sexual abuse. Rape-crisis lines and centers were created; the federal government started providing states with money for victim services; and men, women and children went public with their stories about being sexually assaulted.
Robert Longo, now the director of clinical services at Old Vineyard Behavioral Health Youth Services, a psychiatric hospital in Winston-Salem, N.C., remembers appearing on “Donahue” and “Oprah” in the 1980s, making pronouncements like: “Sex offenders can’t be cured.” And: “Victims are damaged for life.” Neither statement was based on good research, he now says. “We were desperately trying to bring attention to the issue,” Longo says of himself and other sex-abuse experts, “and we went way overboard.”
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Though there is no definitive way to predict, unfortunately, [which adolescent will continue to commit sex offenses], some juvenile-assessment tests — which include questions about a youth’s sexual history, antisocial behavior and support system — can help clinicians evaluate the risk of that individual committing another offense. The questionnaires, however, have not been scientifically validated, and no single actuarial tool — even for adults — is airtight. For juveniles, the task is even trickier because, by definition, adolescence is a time of development and flux; a boy who seems at high risk for repeat offenses at 14 may no longer be so at 16. And a low-risk 14-year-old boy could become higher risk by the time he is 16. Indeed, the manual of one juvenile-assessment test highlights the complications: “No aspect of their development, including their cognitive development, is fixed or stable. In addition, their life circumstances often are very unstable. In a very real sense, we are trying to assess the risk of ‘moving targets.’ ”
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The last part of the brain to develop is the frontal lobe, which is responsible for impulse control, moral reasoning and regulating emotions — the things that adolescents lack when they decide, if they make a conscious decision, to molest a younger kid. So, instead of being compulsive like pedophiles, adolescents tend to be impulsive, which means tactics like “grooming,” in which an offender woos a child for weeks or months before a sexual assault, tend not to apply to the majority of juveniles, Chaffin notes. It’s not that juveniles can’t distinguish right from wrong; it’s that they don’t perceive risks and consequences the way adults do — as parents of teenagers know all too well. “I’ve been arguing for a classification called ‘puberty in the first degree,’ ” said Timothy Kahn, a Seattle therapist who has treated and evaluated thousands of juveniles with sex offenses, “which gives them a break for what they do when they are 12, 13, 14.”
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In a Newton, Kan., program, teenagers keep logs of their masturbation habits, in which they detail their fantasies and how often they masturbate to those fantasies, which therapists then read, in addition to working on anger management and doing other exercises. Some of the teenagers also participate in what’s known as psychodrama. During these exercises, a teenager stands in front of an audience of peers, parents and other relatives who attend the group therapy. Then, the teenager describes the victim — hair color, personality, age — and what the offender did.
The teenager often chooses a friend in the program to play the role of the victim, whose task it is to pepper the teenager with questions: “Why me?” “Did you molest other kids?” “I thought we were friends; will we ever be friends?” Then audience members offer their own questions, along with praise for the teenager’s bravery and honesty, during a process that lasts about an hour and a half. Jeffrey King, the director of the program, explains the rationale behind psychodrama, saying: “Sharing is a way of getting it out of their soul. If they are moving forward with treatment, they’ll be able to say, ‘I was only thinking of myself and getting my needs met.’ ”
But Longo argues that when these exercises re-enact offenses, they may shame boys and reinforce their self-image as “sex offenders” with bad, deviant traits rather than as kids needing lessons in setting boundaries and creating better relationships. Critics complain, too, that intensive monitoring of adolescents may have similar consequences. Adolescents in some therapy and probation programs, for example, aren’t allowed to go to playgrounds or swimming pools, even with adult supervision. “You can’t see what they are doing underwater,” a Colorado probation officer, DeeDee Cagle, told me, referring to the pool rule, which applies to adolescents with a single sexual offense, as well as those with multiple offenses.
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Some programs also monitor adolescents by requiring them to undergo polygraphs. While the exams are not typical in other juvenile-delinquent programs, according to a 2002 report by the Safer Society Foundation, a sexual-abuse research and advocacy organization, about 44 percent of outpatient adolescent-sex-offender programs use polygraphs — up from 25 percent eight years earlier. Researchers have long questioned the reliability of the polygraph as a lie detector, and Elizabeth Letourneau says that adolescents may be particularly vulnerable to “admitting” to more than they actually did. “A polygrapher might say, ‘You failed this part; is there something else you’re not telling me?’ Then you may give up more information to try to pass.”
Judith V. Becker is a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona and is considered one of the foremost experts in juvenile-sex-offender evaluation and treatment. She told me that she and her colleague Kurt Bumby have visited adolescent-sex-offender programs and asked teenagers if polygraphs ever failed to pick up lies the boys told. Yes, some of them said. Becker and Bumby also asked if the boys ever told the truth and polygraph results indicated it was a lie. That happened, too. Similarly, Mark Chaffin, co-director of an Oklahoma program for adolescents, said that teenagers there told counselors that in previous programs they felt pressured to confess to sex offenses they didn’t commit. “They thought they would never get out of there otherwise,” he told me. “It’s not an uncommon occurrence; it’s part of the culture of some facilities.”
Adolescents’ treatment progress may also be delayed by unfavorable results from a test known as PPG, or penile plethysmography, in which a band is placed around a boy’s genitals to measure his erectile response to audio or visual stimuli. Only about 10 percent of adolescent outpatient programs in the United States still use PPGs, according to a 2002 Safer Society report. “Years ago, people were using them on children as young as 11 and 12,” says Peter M. Byrne, the C.E.O. of Behavioral Technology Inc., which distributes PPG technology in the United States. Now Byrne doesn’t generally recommend PPG for anyone under the age of 16.
But according to Colorado’s state guidelines on juvenile sex offenders, adolescents 14 and older are eligible for PPGs. Cagle, the probation officer, told me that while she requires every adolescent client with a sex offense to undergo either a PPG or a much less invasive viewing time test, which measures sexual interest by the length of time someone looks at photographs, she prefers the PPG. “I like to know what kind of kiddo I’ve got,” she said. But no one has ever done a controlled trial of PPG comparing “normal” adolescents to those with sex offenses. “Kids are aroused by anything,” said Craig Latham, the psychologist, who along with other sex-abuse experts have been trying to ban the use of PPG with adolescents. “They are aroused by sitting there with this thing on their penises.”
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Certainly, one consequence of community notification is that as these adolescents move into adulthood, they may struggle to stay in the mainstream because they have a hard time finding and holding jobs. Becoming a teacher or a doctor or joining the military may be virtually impossible for those labeled as sex offenders on public registries. Even job prospects at Target, McDonald’s or any business that performs background checks aren’t promising. In interviews, people in their 20s told me that they have been either fired or turned down for jobs at retail stores, fast-food restaurants and social-service organizations after employers discovered they were adjudicated as juveniles for sex offenses.
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Of all the worries the public registries create, though, the most frightening for many families is vigilantism. In 2005, a man killed two adult sex offenders he tracked through a Washington State community-notification Web site. And last year, a 20-year-old Canadian man with a list of 29 names and addresses from the Maine Sex Offender Registry went to the homes of two convicted offenders, shooting and killing them. Both men were strangers to the killer. One of the offenders had raped a child. The other was convicted for statutory rape; he was 19 when he had sex with his girlfriend, who was two weeks shy of her 16th birthday.