Should New Zealand establish an official register of paedophiles and other sex offenders? Justice Minister, Phil Goff, seems intent upon setting up some means of ensuring that people are not employed in situations where they present a risk to children or others. For a year now his department has been looking for ways to better manage sex offenders after release from custody and he expects to receive their paper shortly.
A register of some sort would seem to be inevitable if agencies are to keep track of such people. The real questions are about who should have access to it and how it should be used.
Mr Goff is not contemplating a register that would be available to the public. He cites recent events in Britain as evidence of what can happen when any such list is published irresponsibly. With public opinion inflamed by the murder of an 8-year-old girl, a weekly tabloid took it upon itself to start printing names of known paedophiles. It had published 49 names and photographs and pledged to continue until all 12,000 offenders on Britain's register had been "named and shamed." When it saw the consequences last week the newspaper came to its senses.
For seven nights vigilante groups in several British communities took to the streets, waving placards, yelling abuse and hounding innocent families from their homes. Windows were smashed, cars burned, houses firebombed. One or two of the victims were guilty only of having the same name as someone on the list. There was a suicide that may be attributable to the witchhunt.
Meanwhile, the police and probation service had issued warnings that the hysteria could only drive paedophilia underground and hamper efforts to help them to control their behaviour.
The British experience has been a salutary warning to the careless, but not a reason to permit no wider access to a register than Mr Goff seems to envisage. He talks of restricting its availability to "officials such as the police." That suggests access might not extend much beyond the probation service and any other state agency charged with assisting the offenders' rehabilitation. The question is, can those agencies be relied upon also to safeguard the interests of public safety? And should they be expected to do so?
There will often be an inescapable conflict between the interests of the individual offender's privacy and rehabilitation, and the interests of a community in monitoring the movements of a convicted paedophile in its midst. Some recent tragedies do not engender confidence that psychologists and probation officers will give sufficient attention to the public interest. There ought to be a way to allow responsible, non-government public interest organisations to use the list, too.
Mr Goff is one politician who usually takes a clear-eyed view of crime, recognising the primacy of public safety without losing sight of some basic human rights. Schools and pre-school centres, organisations such as the Scouts, child welfare services, parents using day care, employers in industries which have contact with children, should all have a right to submit the names of prospective employees to an official registrar. At the same time there should be safeguards for those on the list. They should be informed that they are on it, given the chance to check and challenge any information held about them and invited to record treatment programmes they have undertaken and character references they have earned.
Britain simply keeps a record of convicted sex offenders and requires them to notify the police when they change their address. That does not seem to go far enough. In some parts of the United States the police alert parents when a convicted paedophile moves into their neighbourhood. That is going too far.
New Zealand, which already has codes for the use of personal information, can establish a register with rules balancing the rights of the individual with those of the community. This is not a society prone to lynch justice; it can be trusted to use a register responsibly.
<I>Editorial:</I> Time for a register of sex offenders
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