The Pokémon Go craze is sweeping the nation and beyond, sending young people scurrying through the streets, phones in hand, frantically seeking these fictional little creatures.
It also has politicians scurrying to find heavy-handed answers to trumped-up fears.
That’s because it didn’t take long before someone realized that, horror of horrors, with all of these children, teenagers and twentysomethings scampering about, some of them ran the risk of coming close to one or more registered sex offenders.
But this latest prohibition will not help safeguard children any more than residency restrictions or Halloween prohibitions aimed at sex offenders, two other politically popular and drastically overused tools, do.
Studies of residency restrictions — forcing registered sex offenders to live in ever-narrower areas — show no benefit to public safety and no reduction in sexual crime against children.
The FBI data on children abducted for nefarious purposes in 2010 show less than 1% of the abductors were registered sex offenders; in 2009, none were.
We also need to acknowledge that approximately 96% of all new sex crimes are committed by first-time offenders, people never before convicted of such an offense and therefore not on the registry. And that child sexual abuse is committed almost exclusively by those in the victims’ lives — their family members, peers and authority figures, not random strangers they stumble across.
