AUSTRALIA
The Conversation
Caroline Taylor
Adjunct professor at Edith Cowan University
Eyal Gringart
Senior Lecturer and Discipline Leader, Psychology within the School of Psychology and Social Science at Edith Cowan University
The sexual abuse of children remains one of the most urgent and unremitting issues across the globe. The royal commission into sexual abuse of children in institutions has given currency to an entrenched and critical social problem. However, our newly published research into Australia’s first publicly accessible register of sex offenders highlights the dangers of public misunderstanding of how it works and, indeed, of where the risks for children are greatest.
While many see the royal commission as an unprecedented examination of child sexual abuse in Australia, the reality is that it avoids any focus or recognition of where most of this abuse occurs, which is within a family setting. This is extremely important: it means that a child is most vulnerable in the context where the utmost safety is expected as well as assumed.
Notwithstanding this concern, the royal commission and recently completed state inquiries into abuse in institutional settings mean sex offenders outside of the family institution – their crimes, modus operandi and propensity to repeat offend without detection – are very much to the fore in public and political discourse.
Alongside these debates sits the issue of managing convicted sex offenders. Countries have established “sex offender registries” whereby certain types of offenders are listed and required to inform police of their residence, work status and other movements.
In the US, California first implemented a sex offender registry in the 1940s. The model is now established across every US state. It was not until the mid-1990s and into the first decade of the new century that countries like the UK, Canada and Australia implemented such registries.
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