Children’s Safety Act Introduced

By Josh Montez

A proposal introduced today on Capitol Hill hopes to protect children from sex offenders by making it harder for the molesters to hide. The Children’s Safety Act will beef up the penalties for sex offenders who don’t notify states of their residence. Congressman Mark Kennedy of Minnesota is one of the sponsors. Spokesperson Anne Mason says it creates a national sex offender database.

“And this database would provide resources to community members by establishing online access to the national sex offender registry, which includes background information, home addresses and phone numbers, photographs of criminals convicted of sexually violent offenses or criminal offenses against a minor as well.”

And here’s something else we can blame on Hurricane Katrina; Congressman Ted Poe says the storm caused many sex offenders to be lost.

“We know that there are about 15,000 registered child molesters that are displaced because of Hurricane Katrina and their whereabouts really are unknown.”

Carolyn Atwell-Davis, with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, says provisions in the bill make it hard for molesters to hide.

“It will keep better tabs on sex offenders by requiring them to verify their address more often, to provide more information, specific information such as information about their car and social security number, other information that can be used to track them down.”

And those that fail to register would be guilty of a federal offense, not just a local misdemeanor. There are approximately 550,000 convicted sex offenders in the U-S. 100,000 of them are “lost,” meaning we do not know where they live, work or go to school.

Copyright © 2005 Focus on the Family