21 Aug 2017

Looking Myself Up on the Registry – guest post from Sonia Van den Broek

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“Looking Myself Up on the Registry – guest post from Sonia Van den Broek

“by Karen Suhaka – BillTrack50 August 15, 2015

This is a guest post from Sonia Van den Broek, sharing a personal take on sex offender registries, a topic we have covered a couple of times.

< strong>Looking Myself Up on the Registry

Yesterday, for the first time, I pulled up my state’s sex offender registry. The number of purple four-sided shapes is astounding. The shapes are like squares with their sides sucked in, and all tipped onto a corner, rather like an exclamation point or tiny explosion. I had thought they were red; that must just be in the movies.

Yet this was no idle browsing or searching for a nearby neighbor. I was looking for myself. Six years, three months, and two days after I was arrested, I felt strong enough to search for myself.

Of course, this is no typical Google search, curious what past employment sites list your name or how many Facebook results you can find. This is the willingness to find a version of yourself on the worst place on the Internet: the unforgiving, voyeuristic Sex Offender Registry.

The registry itself is impassive. It treats predatory criminals with the same bland face that it does the lesser offenses. That is one of its deep downfalls. While some states attempt to create distinctions among offenders, listing risk levels and court summaries of the crimes, there is not much difference in the eye of the reader. One sex offender equals another sex offender.

Once, I had a conversation with another woman in my sex offense treatment group about the difficulty of presenting yourself during the photo taking. It’s a tricky time. For one thing, the cop never tells you when he’s going to take the picture. (I’ve lived in several counties within the same state and this holds true for all of them.) So you stand for a while, unsure when the picture is taken and how many he has.

A bigger concern is how happy to look. For every other picture in the world, you want to look happy! Engaged! Participating! But on a sex offender registry, that looks inappropriate. It looks like you were happy to commit your crime, happy to get caught, and happy to appear on the registry. To the person looking at the photos online, a single smile can convey all these things – even when none of them are true.

However, if you look stern or don’t smile, you look predatory. Unashamed for committing the crime. Careless of the pain you’ve caused and ready to inflict it again. It’s likely that none of these things are true either. And while this face is easier to portray, it also feeds the worst stereotypes about sex offenders.

For women, an additional set of stereotypes and negative images are present. Too much makeup and you’re a whore; too little makeup and you’re a careless woman who preys on children because that’s all she can get. Men offenders have their own set of stereotypes to fight, of course. But the ones applied to women are particularly vindictive and judgmental.

For several years, I practiced “my look” in the mirror before driving to the police station. I decided that the best look is a slight smile coupled with kind eyes. (Try making that face under pressure!) The expression is open but not blatant, kind but not beckoning, unashamed. It seems best. It says “I’m not gloating about what I did and I’m not a monster.” Thus, the worst extremes are avoided.

There is also the possibility that your victim is looking at this photo. It is not a comforting thought. Statistically likely, this person knew you before the crime, had pictures of you in family Christmases or with family friends or at school. This person could easily look you up on the registry to keep tabs on you, know what neighborhood you live in, even see where you work. There may be anonymity for the victim (as is the case with nearly every minor victim), but there is none for the person convicted of the offense. And even though I finally summoned enough courage to look at my face on the sex offender registry, I still feel a large measure of shame. My face shouldn’t be there. This registry shouldn’t exist. But that, as you can guess, is the topic of another blog post altogether.