I'm sorry firewoman, it was my bad, it's just a hotbutton of mine. It's just the perception that known sex offenders, especially really violent one's, are responsible for the majority of the abuse or even the majority of the trauma caused by sexual abuse in society is really putting more kids in danger than saving any. MOST children are abused by a family member or a close close family friend. MOST children know and trust their abusers. MOST parents of abused children know and trust the child's abusers.
It would be wonderful if we could spot offenders of this nature and simply avoid them, but we can't. I find the idea that we can have a known offender moved away from a school to "make kids safe" just terribly sad and unhelpful. So the child is safe from that KNOWN person. How many other people is the child in contact with?
And unfortunately the attitude that abuse is as bad or worse than death (which i see now you don't have! Sorry!) does exist widely. It's hard to take, because it's like, imagine you had cancer and everyone you met said "you never survive that" or you were overweight and everyone told you "you'll never be slim" or ANY situation where something has happened and you feel or are or act a certain way and the attitude of everyone around you is "you're broken, you can never be fixed". It's really hard to recover with society telling you how you can't.
A sample of some things people have told me about my past:
"ew, your brother!? That's REALLY disgusting!" (at a time when the "disgusting" aspect of it being incestuous abuse rather than non-incestuous abuse bit hadn't occurred to me)
"You'll never really get over that will you. Poor thing."
"Those people should be shot!" (yeah, he's an abuser but ALSO my brother, and ALSO an abuse victim himself so forgive me if it ain't quite so clearcut for me!)
"You'll never COMPLETELY recover of course" (a therapist! I never saw her again...)
I could go on for pages and i won't! lol.
Basically to me, given what i know, both first hand and in terms of research (because i have a daughter now, and i take her safety really seriously) it is ALMOST irrelevant to know a sex offender is living in your area, because it's common enough that there is a sex offender in every area, and knowing where the specific sex offenders are doesn't, in fact, make anyone safer, and in fact the false security given by feeling one KNOWS where all the sex offenders are and thus where the potential danger is coming from, is actually making everyone less safe.
