Polish project of a Sex Offenders Registry – a mental health professionals’ perspective

Abstract

The paper discusses the governmental draft of the Act on counteracting threats of sexual offences. It assumes the creation of the Registry of Sex Offenders in a version with a limited access and a version available to the public. The registry is supplemented with a publically available map of sexual crime threats, which includes the places of sexual offences and the places of residence of offenders. Criticising the proposed solutions, the authors point out the lack of integration with other interventions conducted in Poland against sex offenders, noncompliance with the recommendations of the most important expert circles in the field, as well as the research results showing the lack of effectiveness of the planned measures to reduce sexual offences. Anumber of negative consequences of making the sex offenders'data available to the public was also highlighted in the form of a clear deterioration of social rehabilitation prognoses, additional stigmatisation, as well as social exclusion of the offenders themselves and the victims of sexual violence. The summary emphasises the need to counteract the problem of sexual offences in a systematic way and the need to diversify the interventions undertaken against the offenders, depending on the level of risk of sexual recidivism.

Integrating Kindergartener-Specific Questionnaires With Citizen Science to Improve Child Health

“…The debate between pros and cons of public sex offender registries remains (13–20). A careful protocol must thus be discussed thoroughly among multiple stakeholders, including solving several key issues, such as: (1) suspects in suspicious incidents positioned and posted by citizen users should be anonymized and only available to certain groups (e.g., local polices) before any formal investigation; (2) citizen users posting suspicious incidents should be identifiable by certain groups (e.g., different levels of administrators responsible for target locations) for investigation purposes; (3) before confirmation, actual locations of suspicious incidents should be offset toward a random direction by a maximum of 2 kilometers in urban areas and a maximum of 5 kilometers for rural areas, for example; and (4) after confirmation, the information of criminals may be to different extents available to various groups (e.g., the full identity might be only available to local polices and kindergarten/school administrators).…”