Child sex offender's register

A child sex offender's register will soon be in place. Photo / Getty Images

A child sex offender's register will soon be in place.

It will allow police and the corrections department identify and manage the risk posed by sex offenders to the community, once they've completed their sentence.

The register won't be open to the public -- but in some cases, information might be released to a third party such as a parent or the guardian of a child. So I think, if you read between the lines, that means that if a convicted child sex offender began a relationship with a woman who had children, then police or corrections may chose to step in and tell her about this man's history.

Many will say the register should be open to the public, but I am not one of them.

I think the risks to a community are far greater if the register is made public, and i'll tell you why I think that way.

Last year I did a story on this issue for the sunday programme on tv one. It looked at whether we should have a public register -- a sort of name and shame list that revealed the names of everyone who'd committed sex offences.

And as part of that story, I interviewed a convicted serial rapist. He'd kidnapped a woman. He'd committed grievous bodily harm, and he'd raped women on a number of occasions. He'd spent years inside. Years.

I spoke to him when he was going through a programme to rehabilitate him for life on the outside. He didn't know how to use the internet, or a mobile phone. He'd been inside for so long...The world had moved on. He had no idea how to live in the outside world.

The person looking after his rehabilitation said to me that this man was more likely to reoffend if his identity was revealed on a register. She said a register would send him underground. He would likely try to keep his identity secret for fear of abuse and vigilante attacks -- and so he'd move round, disconnect from the community, live a reclusive life -- and that, she said, would be a trigger point for him to re-offend.

I had a number of conversations with this woman over the course of a few weeks and she changed my thinking on the sex offender's register. It cannot be a public record -- it should only be available to corrections and police.

I live in a community where, a couple of years ago, word got out that a convicted sex offender was living among us.

He'd been there for a while, no-one knew, but when the community found out...Well, people were up in arms. Meetings were called. There were threats to 'hunt him down'. Some parents said they had children who played in the streams or at the beach in the nude...And so they had a right to know if a sex offender was living in the community, because clearly the community was no longer safe.

And this is the real risk, I think, that a register poses.

It can create a sort of safety-net. Parents will think their children are safe because there is a register in place.

But here's the reality -- the greatest risk to children doesn't come from those who are on that register -- it's comes from those who aren't.

Parents and care-givers will always be their children's first and last line of defence.

One question I have- Why is it restricted to child sex offenders? Why doesn't it also apply to rapists or those who commit sex attacks on adults?