Hacker News Reader

Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

It could be worse.

An estimated 1/4 of all registered sex offenders were minors at the time that they became offenders. The single year of your life when you're most likely to become one is 14.

There are a lot of horror stories like a guy whose 13 year old girlfriend send him a nude photo, her parents found out and reported it, and now he can't live within a certain distance of an elementary school for the rest of his life.

Yeah, if a 24 year old man has pictures of a 13 year old, that's a problem. But a 14 year old boy having pictures of a 13 year old girl?

As a society, we really don't believe in forgiveness.

View on HN

The issue here is not the registered offenders list but that things like this are considered crimes and somebody could be convicted for them.

It’s not about forgiveness, it’s about minimizing future harm. If you are an actual (and there should be a sufficiently high bar for that) convicted child abuser you should never be allowed to be employed in any job which allows you to have authority over children etc. in such cases “forgiveness” would certainly be against the public interest.

I don't disagree with you. And I don't disagree with you for the simple reason that, according to all evidence, "pedophile" is not a characteristic that people can change. Any more than "gay" is.

But that's not the way that the law is written.

I don't understand how giving a statistic of the average age of juvenile sex offenders supports your point.

The point is that we, as a society, sometimes punish people severely forever. Even when there is no reason to believe that that person is a risk to society.

They aren't in a category called juvenile sex offenders. They are simply registered sex offenders. For the rest of their lives. Randomly punished forever for doing normal stupid kid things.

https://jlc.org/issues/juvenile-sex-offender-registry-sorna estimates this at about 200,000 unlucky people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com