Is it Good Policy to Regulate the Passports of Sex Offenders?
As the U.S. and Australia regulate the passports of child sex offenders, critics say the measures violate rights.
The days of overseas travel may soon be over for Australia’s convicted child sex offenders.
On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said she planned to introduce legislation that would cancel the passports of about 20,000 people on the national child sex offender register. The new legislation will “make Australia a world leader in protecting vulnerable children from child sex tourism,” according to the foreign minister’s office.
While on the surface the announcement may not seem controversial, the move drew criticism from within Australia and in the U.S., where officials have also moved to regulate the international travel of child sex offenders.
In February of 2016, President Obama signed International Megan’s Law. Though less aggressive than Australia’s policy, which if approved by Parliament will strip sex offenders of passports, the U.S. law requires the government to notify countries of international travel by registered sex offenders and to add “unique identifiers” to their passports.
Critics have called both policies unfair, ill-informed and ineffective.
“We have initiated a boycott of Australia and everything that is Australian,” says Janice Bellucci, executive director of the Alliance for Constitutional Sex Offense Laws, which brought an unsuccessful lawsuit against the U.S. law. The California-based group advocates for the civil rights of sex offenders. “We have asked friends and family not to buy anything from Australia.”
Bellucci and other critics opposed to the policies say they paint all registered child sex offenders with too broad a brush. Having sex with a 15-year-old when you’re 19 or possessing child pornography, they say, is much different than engaging in child sex tourism.
They also argue that the policies are not informed by academic research.
“People have this belief that once a sex offender, always a sex offender – that people have the inability to control themselves and they will offend over and over again,” says Tamara Rice Lave, a professor at the Institute for Legal Research at University of California—Berkeley. “In fact, that is not what studies show about sex offenders. And in Australia you are talking about 20,000 people who can be impacted.”
In effect, critics say, these passport laws can unnecessarily curb the rights of people who are unlikely to re-offend or who offended as juveniles. One Australian politician said there would be exceptions to the law for “legitimate business or family reasons, and for pedophiles living overseas who need to return to Australia as their visas expire,” according to The Associated Press.
But Lave says the devil is in the details.
“If it’s Friday and you find out your brother is hit by a car and is in the ICU, when are you going to get before a judge? Not before the weekend,” she says. “It’s best to have exceptions, but does that mean someone will be able to take advantage of them?”
According to the Australian foreign minister’s office, almost 800 registered child sex offenders traveled abroad in 2016, and more than one-third did so without permission. The foreign minister hopes the higher standards will stop child sex offenders from visiting vulnerable countries where they are out of the reach of Australian law.
Child sex tourism is a widespread problem in Southeast Asian countries, the closest neighbors to Australia.
Exact figures about the sexual exploitation of children in Asia are hard to come by, though a report by UNICEF found that between 11 percent to 22 percent of girls and between 3 percent to 16.5 percent of boys across East Asia and the Pacific are sexually abused. Southeast Asia continues to experience a tourism boom, with 187 million tourists predicted to visit in 2030, according to a report by charity World Vision. With such rapid growth, the number of travelers with easy access to vulnerable children increases, the charity says.
The U.S. government has no similar plans to cancel passports of child sex offenders, but Lave says she could foresee similar legislation being proposed.
“Anti-sex offender laws are as American as apple pie,” she says. “You can get re-elected by associating yourself with a sex offender law, even if they don’t work.”
The right to travel the globe that you evolved on is a human right and no government has the authority to take that away. They might protest and say that they do but that would mean that they own your body and can therefore do with it what they please. This is not true however much they might get stiff at the idea.
While on probation clearly there are many restrictions that one must abide by. However, once deemed “fit” to not be in prison and/or on probation and having paid that famous “debt to society” then you are done.
That’s that way it should be in the world’s shining light of human rights America RIGHT – Well, perhaps at one time but certainly no longer. Now America is a police state with more of it’s population locked in cages than any other country.
Shocking stats that most Americans are too stupid to comprehend. Not that surprising when you consider how many Americans believe in angels and a fantasy supernatural being – sad and pathetic in these modern days!
The government must allow you to leave the borders of their fantasy countries and travel the earth that you evolved on and as a human being have every right to wonder around for your 80 years plus or minus that you have as a living being on this planet.
That plus all the statistical facts that this sort of punishment does nothing to protect children and only benefits the politicians who use the entire cluster f^ck as a manipulative tool for their own selfish personal gain.
This is nothing new! In Nazi Germany Jews had a big J stamped on their passport- eventually were denied permission to leave the country
So…they keep you prisoner in a particular country and then they make it impossible for you to live decently in that country? It would be interesting to know what these countries vision actually is for RSOs? Gas chambers maybe? I tell my students all the time that when these types of ostracism and oppression have happened in history the first step is to make the public believe that the subjects of the ostracism are less than human…. I would say if we are not there yet we are well on the way….