Deseret News | Sex offenders are not only in the city parks

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Sex offenders are not only in the city parks

By Jay Evensen

Deseret News

Published: Thursday, May 26, 2005 4:33 p.m. MDT

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Most sexual assaults are committed by someone the victim knows. This includes baby sitters or others in positions of authority. Research shows this is true for 60 percent of boys and 80 percent of girls who are assaulted. Because some people are reluctant to turn in a relative or close associate, only a fraction of offenders ever are arrested or convicted.

Because officials believe so few offenders are ever caught, it's hard to come up with meaningful statistics showing how often a convicted pedophile strikes again. But research shows it doesn't happen that often. One study found a 13 percent reconviction rate for child sexual molesters, while another put the figure at 20 percent. This is lower than the reconviction rate for criminals convicted of other crimes, although these figures are hotly disputed by some.

About 20 percent of sex crimes against children are committed by females. This flies in the face of the commonly held view that only males do such things, although males clearly do commit most such crimes.

In about half the cases, the perpetrator is another juvenile between 13 and 17 years old.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, some treatment programs have been found to keep sexual offenders from committing new crimes, but the evidence here is still pretty slim.

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Utahns may remember the recent parole hearing of Eugene Holt Swenson, a 77-year-old man sentenced to life for sodomizing and assaulting his grandchildren. One granddaughter, now 18, sobbed through her dramatic testimony as she urged the Board of Pardons and Parole to keep him locked away for good.

That is a more common face of child molestation than the stereotypical dirty old man in the park.

But that, of course, doesn't mean there aren't dangerous dirty old men in the park.

And that's the difficult thing. The facts don't make protecting our children easy. Utahns should keep looking up past offenders who live in their neighborhoods atwww.cr.ex.state.ut.us/. They can pass laws and restrictions if they like.

But they should know that Little Red Riding Hood has a lot more to worry about than the wolf in the woods.

Jay Evensen is editor of the Deseret Morning News editorial page. E-mail: even@desnews.com