A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom
2018-02-11 · Guest: Lenore Skenazy (President of Let Grow) · 52:02
Modern culture of fear and sex offender registries
Bob Zadek interviews Lenore Skenazy, famously dubbed “The World’s Worst Mom,” about the modern culture of fear surrounding children and the legal systems that exploit it. They discuss the irrationality of public sex offender registries, the criminalization of normal parenting, and Skenazy’s work with the “Let Grow” initiative to restore childhood independence and resilience.
Topics: Sex Offender Registries, Parenting, Civil Liberties, Free-Range Kids, Let Grow, Criminal Justice Reform, Risk Assessment, Recidivism
Speakers: Bob Zadek — Host Lenore Skenazy — President of Let Grow and founder of Free-Range Kids
The Exploitation of Scare Tactics [00:24]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in California. And a special good morning to my guests in Portland, Seattle, Denver, Sacramento, and San Diego. Thanks so much for joining us this morning.
This morning’s show brings us to a subject which, to a substantial degree, makes me embarrassed to be an American and, more importantly, terribly distressed about the direction our country is going in the area of the abrogation of our civil liberties, the natural rights protected to us in the Constitution.
This morning’s show, we will see the exploitation by our government of scare tactics, where the government periodically uses an existential threat, manufactured or real, in order to “temporarily”—perhaps—compromise our liberty. We all know about instances in the past when martial law is declared in a country because of an emergency. We know where, during a hurricane or during a natural disaster, rights are put aside for the minute, curfews are imposed, things of that nature. Well, the threat this morning is another symptom of that, but it is pervasive and scary.
I’m happy to welcome this morning to the show perhaps the American who has done more to call attention to this topic and perhaps to reverse it than any other. I’m happy to welcome back to the show Lenore Skenazy. Lenore Skenazy first appeared on our show way back several years ago when she was “The World’s Worst Mom.” Lenore will explain to us how she got that moniker and how that journey from World’s Worst Mom has brought her today to leading the attack on sex offender registries. No, this is not a show in defense of sex offenders; it is a show attacking the registry for reasons that you will learn. Lenore, welcome to the show this morning.
Lenore Skenazy: You know, I’m actually typing as you’re saying that because that’s the perfect slogan: “Not in favor of sex offenders or sex offenses, but against the public registry,” which is what I am. So thank you, thank you Bob for even taking this hour to talk about this topic. It’s not that popular, so thank you so much.
How Lenore Became “The World’s Worst Mom” [03:43]
Bob Zadek: Now Lenore, just because it’s such a wonderful story, tell our friends out there who may not have listened to my show several years ago when you and I chatted for an hour. Tell us very briefly how you became allegedly—allegedly, Lenore, don’t get nervous—the World’s Worst Mom.
Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom. Well, first I was just America’s Worst Mom, so it’s really an honor to be bumped up. But what happened is that literally 10 years ago, I live in New York City and we have two sons. Our younger son, aged nine at the time, started asking my husband and me—my husband who you never hear of as the World’s Worst Dad—if we would take him someplace he’d never been before and let him find his own way home on the subway. This was something very dear to our son’s heart. He really wanted to do it. We’re on the trains all the time. We see how safe they are—six million people ride them every day.
So we decided yes. And one sunny Sunday, I took Izzy—this is the nine-year-old—to Bloomingdale’s, which is where we didn’t normally go, and I left him there with a map for the subway and a MetroCard, which gets you on the subway, and basically a high-five. And off I went, and he had to find his own way home, which he did, or we’d be having a very different discussion.
I’m a newspaper columnist by trade, so I wrote a column about it after I’d been speaking to other moms who thought that their fourth graders were far too young to do this and they wanted to wait till their kids were like, you know, 37 or 38 to take the subway home. So I wrote “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone.” That was in the New York Sun—rest in peace, a wonderful newspaper that’s dead, like so many newspapers.
Two days after the column appeared, I was on the Today Show, MSNBC, Fox News, and NPR defending myself and eventually got the nickname America’s Worst Mom and now World’s Worst Mom because I said, “You know what? I believe in safety. I just don’t think our kids are in constant danger.” And it was by doing those interviews—and now it’s 10 years later, doing them for literally a decade—that I came to recognize this weird thing that’s going on in America that I think will segue into what we’re talking about today, which is the idea that if you’re not imagining your kid in terrible danger every single second, you’re not a good parent.
On so many of these conversations—and even one I had like just a month ago—asking, “Well, why would you let your son ride the subway?” the subtext, and sometimes literally said out loud, would be the question, “But Lenore, what if you let him take the subway by himself and he never came home?”
Yeah. And I always had a hard time answering that question, like, “Oh, you know, I said I have that spare son, don’t you remember? I’ve got an older son. Come on, two—how many do you need, really? Save on college.” I mean, I never knew what to say, and I would always sound either like a flippant jerk or flummoxed or whatever. It took me a long time to realize why. I finally realized that the reason I couldn’t answer that query is because it wasn’t really a question. Because you know how I would feel if my son didn’t come home. So I finally think I understand that the reason this question was asked was because it was not a question; it was an accusation: “How come you weren’t thinking about the very worst-case scenario before you let your child have any freedom whatsoever? You’re thinking the wrong way. You haven’t been trained to think the way good Americans think now, which is: if anything ever could possibly go wrong and I could even imagine it, I should immediately decide, ‘Okay, forget it, I’m not doing that.’” And really, that has become just a knee-jerk way we think of life. If anything could possibly go wrong, that means it’s even wrong to try it, even if it’s very unlikely to go wrong and very likely to have wonderful benefits.
The Myth of Halloween Danger [07:58]
Bob Zadek: And the list of things that are sources of danger are quite amazing. I didn’t realize until I was an adult that when I went out trick-or-treating alone with my friends, I could have been ingesting tons of razor blades in the candy. Remember the scare about razor blades in candy and in fruit? There wasn’t one example of it, but somebody imagined it, and thus all trick-or-treating became, “You better get shrink-wrapped candy from the neighbors, or else you’re going to be eating a razor blade.” So that’s just one tiny example that I remember reading about as an adult, but never quite experienced as a child going trick-or-treating.
Lenore Skenazy: Right. And when you say “from the neighbors,” that’s almost ironic now because the idea of kids going around the neighborhood is becoming a little less popular as towns start doing something called—have you heard of “Trunk or Treat”?
Bob Zadek: No.
Lenore Skenazy: Okay. So you start out with a myth, right? The myth is that your neighbors poison children on Halloween, which has happened how many times? How many times has a child been poisoned by a stranger’s candy on Halloween, Bob?
Bob Zadek: None.
Lenore Skenazy: Right, never. Never. One kid was once poisoned by a Pixy Stix with strychnine in it and he died. Because it was so unusual, they looked into what happened and they realized that this boy’s father had taken three insurance policies out on him. I’m sure the father thought that, you know, he’d read about it—“Oh, so many kids are being poisoned on Halloween, one more just added to the pile of dead bodies, who’s going to notice?” And so he poisoned his own child and they found this out and he was executed because it was Texas.
So there’s a case of somebody believing the hype to rather disastrous effect. But because we do distrust our neighbors, there’s so many things that have been changed about Halloween. One is that parents drive their kids around the neighborhood and wait outside to make sure that they’re okay and then drive them to the next one, which means that the biggest problem on Halloween is literally kids being hit by cars.
But another thing is this “Trunk or Treat” idea, which is that rather than have your kids actually encounter neighbors and get to know their neighborhood and get to interact with humans like a fellow human being, you have cars all come to a parking lot, like the church parking lot or the school parking lot, and they park themselves in a big circle with the trunk sides facing the inside of like the donut hole. And then they open up their trunks—and I always say “and throw the children in,” but that’s not actually it—they open up their trunks and they decorate them and inside is candy. That way your kids don’t actually have to get to know the neighborhood at all or experience anything about real life on their own—you know, learning to cross the street, learning to get up the guts to ring the bell at the spooky-looking house. Instead, there’s just this festival of food that they go and they grab the food and they go around in a circle.
The thing that I find so insulting about this idea is that it’s pretending that Halloween is only about getting the candy and this is the most efficient way to do it. Whereas Halloween is really kids dress up like adults, they go out at night like adults, they have a job like adults, which is to get candy, and they go around the neighborhood and they interact like adults. They have to actually talk to people and ring the doorbell and make their way through it. So the whole experience is really one about practicing adulthood. And even that—even that one night—has been taken away from children and replaced with “Here’s a bunch of candy, that should be enough, go home.” And it’s celebrated as a way to keep kids safe, whereas they weren’t unsafe on Halloween. So it’s a pretend fear and excess caution and it’s completely adult-supervised and it has nothing to do with kids becoming part of the real world. It’s all about keeping kids from the real world because you don’t trust anyone or anything.
The Criminalization of Parenting [12:06]
Bob Zadek: Now let’s bring in the governmental role. So now all of a sudden, lots of parenting activities have become, dare I say, criminalized. So now the government steps in, having identified a non-existent existential threat. So now tell us about the crimes of parenthood.
Lenore Skenazy: Well, I’ll just give you a couple of examples. If you think that kids are in constant danger, then you think that anytime a child is unsupervised—if a child unsupervised truly represents a child who has been thrown to the wolves, then of course you’re going to hate the parents because who puts a child in danger?
The possibly most egregious example I have is of a woman named Maria, lives in Connecticut. She’s a mom. She stayed up really late on one evening because her aunt was dying at Yale New Haven Hospital—in fact, died that night—and she sat by her side. So by the time she got home, it was six in the morning, and no surprise, she overslept. Maria overslept the time that she was supposed to get her eight-year-old up for school. But he gets himself up, gets himself breakfast, gets his backpack together, goes outside, misses the bus. Okay. So he thought, “Well, my mom’s asleep and I know the way, I’m going to walk there.” Maybe he felt embarrassed, I don’t even know, that he’d missed the bus.
But anyway, so he starts walking to school. And because, thanks to things like Trunk or Treat, it has become so unusual to see a child outside without a security detail, somebody called the cops and said, “There’s a child outside, I’ve never seen such a thing. They’re walking by themselves. It’s like seeing a lemur escaped from the zoo. It’s like there’s something weird out there, it’s moving, come save it or save me.”
So the cops, who obviously don’t have a lot to do, race over to this singleton walking to school and they stop and they say, “Hey kid, what happened?” and he said, “Oh, I’m walking myself to school.” “Why?” “Well, my mom overslept so I missed the bus.” “Well, hop in, we’ll give you a ride.” So they give the kid a ride to the school. Okay, fine. Then they turn the car around and they go to Maria’s house. They bang on the door. “Get out here, lady!” and she comes out, “Oh, what’s the problem, officers?” and they say, “Well, your child was seen walking to school.” She said, “Oh my God,” she looks at her watch, “I overslept, I can’t believe it.” And she says that the officer then said to her, “Your child was alone and you are despicable.”
And so they put her in handcuffs and they put her in the cruiser and they took her to the police station and they took mugshots, you know, facing the camera and sideways to the camera, and they charged her with—I can’t remember the exact charge, it was, you know, “potential danger to a child” or “child neglect and potential danger.” And it took her—it’s been actually over two years since that happened now and she’s been fighting them ever since and had to take court-ordered parenting classes and she had to change the house that she was living in because the social worker thought that the children shouldn’t have to live in the same room, that they should have different rooms. It’s been this enormous disruption—I don’t even want to call it a disruption; it’s been a complete overtaking of her life and her family simply because we’ve become convinced that an unsupervised child is automatically evidence of a bad parent.
And the only reason we’ve become convinced of that is because we’ve become convinced of the earlier myth, which is that anytime a child is outside, there’s so many predators who are going to pounce on them that it’s like throwing a kid into a Nambla convention. Let’s just put it that way. Everybody’s afraid that a kid walks outside, they’re going to be pounced on by a predator, we’re never going to see him again. What kind of parent does that to a kid? Let’s arrest the parent.
Bob Zadek: So what we have—notice the bigger symptom. We have first a non-risk manufactured as a real risk. That justifies governmental action, in this case denying a parent the natural right to raise your child, subject to certain limitations in the margin that we all know about—abusive parents and the like, but we’re not talking about that. Then we’re talking about deprivation of what everybody else has as core rights, all in the name of a manufactured fear. And so it’s all fear-driven, just like terrorism, just like drugs. They all create the fear, put government in the position as the only protector of the fear, and people like sheep are docilely permit the government to deprive them of their rights—in this case, the child’s right to a parent and the parent’s right to the child. It is so depressingly familiar.
Lenore Skenazy: It is. And you know, people will say, “Bob, it’s not that there’s no danger. There is danger.” And in truth, there is danger. I mean, you could get hit by a car, there are some horrible people out there, you know, once in a while there is a terrorist thing. But there’s also the—you know, if you’re going to wait until there is literally no crime ever again, no cars that could possibly hit your kid, you know, no person with a bad idea and a bomb somewhere in the world, well then you’ll never allow your kids or yourself—there will be no freedom for anyone.
And so what our country has a hard time dealing with is we can’t get to 0.0 threat. We are living in the safest times in human history. The Washington Post did this great story saying there’s never been a safer time to be a kid in America. So it’s really safe. It’s extremely safe. It’s statistically outrageously safe. But you can’t say it is 100% safe.
And there’s something going on these days where somehow if something isn’t 100% safe, it’s considered dangerous. And just to go slightly askew, but once again talking about the government for a second, if you go on the Consumer Product Safety Commission website, there are recalls of things like sweatshirts. Two years ago, they recalled 140,000 children’s sweatshirts because one sweatshirt—somebody had called the company and reported that the pull tab for the zipper had fallen off of one of these 140,000 sweatshirts. And that was reason enough to call a recall because that one pulled zipper thing equaled a choking hazard.
So you have something that is demonstrably safe—it was one out of 140,000—something bad happens to it, and it’s not even that bad, and it would be hard to—I think it would be very hard to choke on a zipper pull, frankly. But I suppose it could happen. So that’s where we’re at. We’re at the fact that like anything that is not absolutely perfect is considered too imperfect for a child to deal with, and any parent who says “nay” is negligent and doesn’t care about child safety. Zero tolerance for risk. What an absurd aspiration for a country to have.
The History of Sex Offender Registries [20:00]
Bob Zadek: Now Lenore, that circumstance that we now live in with children—by the way, I feel I should be wearing a t-shirt every day of my life which simply says “I survived childhood,” because I must have taken heroic measures. Because when I grew up in the late 40s and 50s, I happen to have 10 years of home movies of all the things I did. My parents would be sentenced to death if anybody saw those movies and my parents were still around. They would never see the light of day for the things they let me do. But somehow, by some miracle, I survived it and I became an adult and I am fairly functional as an adult.
Now, so we start with this perceived fear, this threat to children. So now Lenore, tell us the story of, first, the circumstance of sex registries: what they are, how briefly they came about, and how they are once again continuing the story of the depriving of rights to innocent—somewhat innocent, mostly innocent, maybe completely innocent—Americans. Tell us the embarrassing, infuriating story of sex offender registries.
Lenore Skenazy: Well, here’s the most important fact about sex offender registries. And we’re talking about the public sex offender registry, where people’s names, addresses, sometimes the job that they work at, all appear on maps, first of all, with little dots in your neighborhood. You can look up and see is there anybody on the registry living near me. And somehow that’s supposed to keep you and your family safer. And yet what it really is doing is making parents terrified to send their kids outside.
Because the sex offender registry has about 860,000 people on it now. And the assumption behind it—it’s really hard to figure out where to start. So we didn’t have sex offender registries for the most part until the 1990s. And they sort of came about after the whole sex panic in the daycare centers, where we were convinced that somehow not only were daycare workers sacrificing bunnies in front of children and having mass orgies and building tunnels and driving kids in planes to be raped by the Mexican army and back by circle time. But as my friend pointed out, the most amazing thing about these crazy beliefs at that time was that the children would all be, you know, naked and yet somehow put on the right clothing by the time their parents came to pick them up. Like, wow, does everybody get the right socks on? I mean, that would just be so hard.
But somehow we were convinced that this was pervasive, that there were all these Satanists running daycare centers. It’s since been disproven. People spent decades in prisons for crazy crimes like sacrificing babies in the graveyard and making the other children at the daycare center drink the blood and then coming back to the school. So we were really in a moment of hysteria.
And coming off of that came the sex offender registry, which was a way of, at first, privately making a list for police purposes only of anybody who had ever been convicted of a so-called sex crime in a neighborhood. And then after the murder of Megan Kanka in New Jersey—she was murdered by somebody on the registry—making that list public. And once you made that list public, it really seemed like we were living in hell because there’s all these dots in every neighborhood. And the dots seem to represent somebody as dangerous as the person who murdered Megan Kanka.
But in fact, it turns out that you can get on the registry for all sorts of “crimes” that do not pose any threat to children. You can get on it for peeing in public, for streaking. In a bunch of states, you can marry at 16 and you can have sex at that age, but if you are “sexting” anytime under age 18, that’s creating child pornography and that gets you on the registry. You can “play doctor” as a kid. There are children as young as nine and 10 on the registry. And in fact, the most common age that you get on the registry out of all the ages for so-called child molesting—do you know this, Bob, already? What is the most common age of people who get on the registry for so-called child molesting?
Bob Zadek: I’d be cheating; I heard your presentation at Cato.
Lenore Skenazy: Okay, yeah. So the age is 14. So there’s tons of 14-year-olds on this list. And that’s because young people have sex with other young people, and that is always considered not only a crime but an aggravated sexual assault just because of the age of the kids.
The Story of Josh Gravens [25:31]
Bob Zadek: Lenore, I just want to interrupt for one second. We’re going to go to a one-minute break in a second, but right before we do, notice again it’s the same profile. Number one, a threat, a very scary threat is created, unsubstantiated by any facts. Okay, now you have the threat. Now government goes in and takes away rights of individuals. The registry—we’ll learn about the prison and all of the evils that flow from sex offender registries. So the government now, armed with a non-existent threat that is hard for the public to disprove—it’s hard to prove a negative, that there isn’t a threat—but armed with the threat, the government now has yet another basis to deprive 850,000 people of their rights and to build dependency by us citizens on the government because only government can protect us from sexual offenders and protect our children. The horror stories will follow in one minute. You would not believe the anecdote Lenore is going to share with us. Please stay tuned. We’ll be back in one incredibly short minute.
[Commercial Break Omitted]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on air all weekend. Thanks so much for listening to my guest this morning, Lenore Skenazy. Lenore was America’s Worst Mom—not—but that was her label for a while. Lenore is here to share with us the evils—the evils of sex offender registries. Of course, we don’t have to spend an hour of the show on the evils of sexual offenders; that let us say obviously is a given. However, the reaction to a perhaps minuscule or non-existent threat, the reaction of the government and of our citizens is the topic of today’s show and the abuse and the deprecation of our natural rights.
Now Lenore, the sexual—as you have explained to us, sex offender registries were at first created in the late 1990s simply as a police tool. It was felt that if there was a sex offender in a police precinct’s jurisdiction, they ought to know about that so if another sex crime occurred, they had a starting point of who to check out, “where were you last night,” things of that nature. A pretty reasonably sensible tool. But that tool has now become a big red “A” on the sleeve of people’s clothing. It has become the most offensive of marks on somebody and it is destructive of the alleged sex offender’s rights, perhaps for the rest of their life. So tell us about the ugly growth of the use of sex offender registries. And Lenore, you have so many painfully accurate stories of how the sex offender registries have destroyed lives. Please share with us one or two of those stories.
Lenore Skenazy: Okay, let me talk about it because I’m going to talk about two things. One is people that we all agree should never be on any kind of registry, and then two, why we don’t need a registry even for people who have committed terrible crimes, which is a harder thing for people to sort of absorb, which I can understand.
But let me just tell you a couple stories about people who are on the registry. And the first one is some guy who called me out of the blue. His name was Josh Gravens. He lives in Texas. He’d been reading my blog about how come we’re so hysterical about children’s safety all the time, and he said, “Well, I want to tell you I’m a sex offender.” And I was like, [gasp], you know, I had never spoken to a sex offender before as far as I knew. And he said, “I just want to tell you what my crime was and what life is like on the registry.” And I was like, “Okay, let me know.”
So when Josh was 12, he touched his sister’s vagina twice. She was eight. And his sister complained to his mom, as she should. The mom called up a counseling center because she wasn’t sure what to do. The counselor was a mandated reporter, and a couple days later the cops came to Josh’s home and they arrested him for what they called aggravated sexual assault. And it’s called aggravated because when anybody that young—he was 12 and his sister was eight—it’s automatically aggravated because nobody can consent to sex.
So he was sent to what they called juvenile detention, but it’s actually prison, for three and a half years. And while he was in prison, they gave him “therapy,” but it’s not like you’re getting the ace—you don’t have Sigmund Freud there as your therapist. You have somebody who, you know, read something about the criminal mind and treats all these kids as if they are literally child predators as opposed to the whole gamut of young people who have had some sexual experimentation for one reason or another.
And so for therapy, Josh had to go to group. And in group, you were asked about all the other crimes you’d committed because once again this therapist has read a book about “Oh, all sex offenders commit many crimes.” And when he said he didn’t do anything else, it was just this—these two touchings of his sister—everybody jeered at him because they’d been there for years and they knew that that’s wrong. And the therapist says, “Well, you’re in denial. You’re in denial. You’ve got to tell me the truth.”
And so eventually Josh, like everybody there, starts to make up victims. “Oh yeah, I raped the whatever, and oh yeah, I did this.” And then, because the therapy is so stupid, the cure was for them to act out the crimes—these rapes—in front of the other kids in the group. So suddenly you’re pretending to be a rapist and you’re acting like a rapist in front of all these other kids and they’re doing the same to you. And when you go to be, you know, when it’s finally time to leave prison, you say, “Well, you know, I just made those up to satisfy the therapist.” Well, that means that either you’re a liar, right, because you lied about committing the crimes, or you really did commit the crimes, which proves that you’re a serial predator, or you’re still in denial of your actual heinousness and so you haven’t gotten any better.
So you emerge on parole as this lying, raping, in-denial predator, and so your name is out there for everyone to see. So Josh finishes high school and he gets to college. And at college, on a slow news day, some local reporter realizes, “Oh my God, there’s a kid on campus who is a sexual predator. Here’s his name on the sex offender registry. He did sexual aggravated sexual assault when he was 12.” And so they do a story on television and they show Josh’s picture.
And immediately the campus goes crazy. “We have a predator! We have a sex offender here! He’s on the registry!” And people start throwing things at Josh and screaming as they pass him by, and his friends desert him. And he’s in his room and a piece of paper appears slipped under the door by somebody on campus, and it shows a picture of what they plan to do to him if he comes out. And the picture shows Josh hanging upside down with somebody slicing off his balls.
So for the rest of the semester—because I don’t know why Josh couldn’t get home, but his mother didn’t come and get him immediately and he couldn’t leave—so for the next three weeks, he lives locked in his room and he only runs to the bathroom at about three in the morning because he’s terrified that if he is seen by anybody they will lynch him. And he gets water and he lives on ramen and tea and he doesn’t take a shower because God forbid he’s caught in the shower naked, forget it. And he leaves college, never to return again.
And he lives like that for a couple of years on the margins. He works in, you know, basically in farming. And then somehow—and I don’t even know how—he decided at one point, “You know, I’m not going to live in the shadows anymore. I’m sorry for what I did. My sister and I have talked about it. She’s forgiven me. I’ve spent three and a half years in prison. I’m on this registry. Let me reach out to the press to tell them to show at least what one scary sex offender looks like.”
And that’s when he reached out to me. We had a conversation on the phone. He lives in Dallas. I went to Dallas for a conference and I ended up meeting him and going with him to see what it’s like to register. Because when you talk about a registry, it means that people have to go and register their names and any other salient information about them either once every three months or once a year, whatever. He had to go, I think, every couple of months. I think it was every month, actually.
So I went with him to the Dallas registry, and the room there is like a waiting room. It’s like the doctor’s waiting room. There’s a television going on and there’s all these guys—they’re all guys. Actually, no, there was a woman who was a prostitute. But mostly it’s guys sitting in chairs, you know, cooling their heels. And I, you know, I’m a reporter by trade, I turned to the guy next to me and I was like, “Let me guess, you’re here because you were 17 and you had sex with a 14-year-old. Is that true?” You know, just guessing out of the blue. And you know, it looked like I was, you know, Melinda the Magnificent because he said, “Yeah, that’s exactly what happened.” He was 17, he hooked up with another girl, she was willing, it was fun, but this was considered rape because of the age difference. And so he, like Josh, was sent to a—in his case, a group home. And he said he hated it so much, even though it was supposedly not prison because this wasn’t a horrible crime, it was a consensual sexual act. But it was so horrible that he ran away. And for that, he was put in prison for six years.
So he’d served six years in the penitentiary for having had consensual sex when he was 14. And now he showed me and he lifted up the cuff of his pants and there was this, you know, GPS-ing bracelet that was around his ankle to track his every move because once you’re labeled a sex offender, you’re a terrifying criminal and you must be tracked by the government.
But I didn’t have a lot of time to talk to him because Josh was called in and he gave all the information he always has to give and he gave his address. And in fact, he’d just moved. He moved the Wednesday before. At which point a policeman came up behind him and said, “Josh, you’re under arrest,” because as a sex offender, you must alert the registry immediately if anything changes in your life—if you get a new job, if you get a new email address, if you get a tattoo, if you change your hairstyle, and if you change your address. And you have to alert them within a week. And from Wednesday to Wednesday, even though part of that earlier Wednesday he’d still been in his own home, that was considered eight days. And so he was under arrest for not alerting the registry soon enough, and for this, he was facing a possible sentence of 25 years in prison.
Bob Zadek: Now it’s very important that Lenore could run a—hey, anybody remember Jerry Lewis telethons? Lenore could run a telethon with stories like that or worse. So this is not an anecdote to get attention and to make a point that’s invalid. This is how it is in sexual registry statutes. So we have a mistake, often done by a young pre-legal adult, somebody in their teen years. And by the way, a mistake that for most of our life on Earth was not a mistake at all. But we have a mistake, and as a result of that, an otherwise regular citizen is deprived of a normal life, perhaps forever. And that is the abuse of sexual registry statutes. So just to, as they say, review the bidding: we have a non-existent fear created, and the creation goes back to protection of children. We then have a police tool, seemed sensible when it was created, to keep track of this type of criminal. It then becomes public because of a single criminal event. Then the registry becomes public. And then states fall all over themselves to make it more and more restrictive and punitive, basically sentencing this relatively innocent individual to hell for the rest of his or in some cases her life. That is the story of sex offender registries. It is an—and notice what happens: individuals, in this case almost a million of them, are deprived of the rights that everybody listening to this show takes for granted. They are deprived of their rights. Where is the proportionality? Where is any proof that the damage to the individual solves the problem? Now Lenore, you have done some work on how effective—or in this case ineffective—sex offender registries are in solving the alleged problem that they seek to fix.
Lenore Skenazy: Right. Well, here’s the deal. I mean, Josh and a lot of—I mean, an enormous number of people on the list have done things that nobody would consider criminal. But there are people on the list who have done things that were considered criminal and were criminal. I mean, you know, there are child rapists on the list too; they are not many, but they are on there. But the point of a public registry is that somehow this will make us safer.
And so in New Jersey, which is the state where Megan Kanka was murdered, they did a study of whether the registry is preventing crime. Is it keeping kids safe from sexual assault? And they found no difference before the registry or after the registry. So the thing that’s weird about the registry is that we don’t have registries for murderers, we don’t have registries for drug offenders, we don’t have registries for other people who have done things that were bad, that hurt children, that people served their time for. And that’s because we believe that those people, when they’ve served their sentence and finished probation, are proved rehabilitated.
But we don’t believe that anybody who committed any kind of sex crime, from Josh on up to whatever, can ever be rehabilitated. And that’s why we feel like it’s okay to keep a registry. But in fact, the number of people on the registry who do go on to commit another crime, a sex crime, is really very small. It’s—people think it’s large, people think that anybody on the registry is compelled to rape and pillage the second they have a chance. In fact, the recidivism rate—that’s the rate of doing another crime—is about 5%, which is the lowest of any criminals except murderers. So the assumption is we must have a list because these are insatiable monsters, and the reality is that they are people like the rest of us, some of whom have committed crimes, some of whom got—are like Josh—and most everybody ends up being okay and not a criminal after they’ve served their time. So we’ve just decided to turn into monsters one group of people, and we’re not making ourselves any safer.
Bob Zadek: And I have done a lot of shows over the years where the topic involved, in one way or another, lobbying and organizations such as NAACP, NOW, NARAL—organizations that have a certain class of citizens and these organizations fight to enhance and preserve the rights of their constituents. To my knowledge, there is no organization which says “We are here to protect the rights of sex offender registrants.” And so it is—they are—
Lenore Skenazy: Actually there are. There are a couple of organizations.
Bob Zadek: Ah, good. I feel better already. Tell us about them.
Lenore Skenazy: Yeah, no, I’m glad for them too. And I can only remember the names of two of them now and I’m sorry that I can’t remember the third. There’s the national organization—it’s called NARSOL (N-A-R-S-O-L) for National Association for Rational Sexual Offense Laws. And there’s a group called W.A.R., which is Women Against Registry. And they’re both great. I’ve spoken at both their conferences.
And it is a very downtrodden group of people. These are people who are considered pariahs by almost everyone. It’s hard for them to get a job because their name appears on this registry. So are you going to go to a store where you can see, “Oh my God, there’s a registrant who’s working in the shoe store, there’s a registrant at the Burger King”? And so those stores don’t hire them.
And there are all these weird rules, like you can’t live within a thousand feet of a school, a daycare center, a bus stop, sometimes a church. Because once again, based on this sort of fantastical idea that anybody on the registry walking by a school will immediately run into the playground and steal a kid and rape them. So it’s really this Law & Order: SVU idea of the world we live in, which has very little correspondence to the fact that we were talking about earlier—that we live in these very safe times—and also that people on the registry are there for something that they did do, not something that they’re going to do. And yet we act as if it’s a predictor. You know, we say we can’t have these people near us because they’re going to do something to a child, but the prediction rate is really wrong. It’s people who might have done something, but it’s not people who are going to do something for the most part.
Bob Zadek: I hope our friends out there can see how this scenario occurs so much. It occurred to me as you were speaking, of course Donald Trump when he was trying to persuade Americans that immigrants, mostly from south of the border, were evil and a threat—remember they were labeled as rapists and robbers and drug dealers and the like. So you take no data whatever, create a threat, and the threat and the scariness of it is what you use to generate public support for an otherwise untenable position. And all of this started, as Lenore pointed out at the opening of the show, all of this started with our fear that children were somehow at risk.
Let Grow and Childhood Independence [27:30]
Bob Zadek: Now Lenore, we have only a few minutes left, but tell us about—as you continue to efforts to show that children are at risk from not being at risk—that’s the source of the problem—tell us about in the few minutes we have left, Let Grow.
Lenore Skenazy: Okay, well Let Grow is a new nonprofit that I’m the president of. It just started a couple months ago and it’s really an outgrowth of Free-Range Kids, and Free-Range Kids started as an outgrowth of letting our son ride the subway and getting all this blowback because how dare you let a nine-year-old be part of the world.
So for 10 years at Free-Range Kids, I was lecturing and writing every day on my blog about how come we don’t trust kids to be part of the world, how come we think that they’re—there’s so much—how come, I mean insultingly, how come we all talk about this wonderful childhood we had: “I got on my bike and I rode it until the streetlights came on and I was always out with my friends and we drank from the hose and we had this great time, but my kids can’t do that.” How come we think that our kids are incapable of having the same kind of adventures and exercising the same kind of judgment—sometimes bad, sometimes good, getting themselves out of scrapes? How come we think they can’t handle any of the freedom we did?
And I think one of the reasons we believe that is because in our bones we’ve been told that the world is so dangerous, in part because of these sex offender maps, that we could be outside but it’s too dangerous for our kids. Well, I wrote about that and ruminated on it for a long time. But then along came the proposal from Jonathan Haidt, who wrote The Coddling of the American Mind, Daniel Shuchman, who is head of the organization FIRE which fights for free speech on campus, and Peter Gray, who wrote the book called Free to Learn. He’s a professor at Boston College and he really believes that kids learn the most when they have unstructured, unsupervised time.
And we decided let’s not just keep talking about the idea that kids deserve more freedom and when they have freedom as children they grow up as freedom-loving people and even on campus they can hear ideas that are unfamiliar to them, they can engage in conversations rather than thinking that they’re unsafe. How do we get kids to feel like they’re safe enough and resilient enough that they can engage with the world?
So Let Grow became sort of the “let’s get something started” arm of Free-Range Kids, where let’s figure out a way that we can make it easy for parents to let their kids walk outside again, for parents to let their kids have free time, for parents to say, “You know, this afternoon instead of being in Little League where you’re told what to do and some adult is telling you what position to play and whether the ball was in or out, we give that back to you. So you have to figure some stuff out on your own so that you build up this natural social-emotional intelligence and resilience that will allow you to engage with the world as opposed to looking to an authority to tell you always what to do and how to do it.”
And so Let Grow now is doing two projects that we think are going to sort of help parents do this again, because it really is hard to let go of your kids if you’ve been told that everything is dangerous. And one is the Let Grow Project, where teachers tell kids to go home and ask their parents if they can do one thing on their own—walk the dog, make dinner. And the other is Let Grow Free Play Club, where after school the schools stay open for kids to just play on their own. They have to organize their own games, they have to figure out what the rules are, they figure out what the rules are, they get used to democracy, they get used to building consensus, they get used to solving their arguments because these are real-world things that we’ve taken out of our kids’ lives. How do we give them back? Let Grow is the arm that puts these independent opportunities back into kids’ lives without parents freaking out.
Bob Zadek: And that’s LetGrow.org. I apologize for that, Lenore. We have only about 30 seconds left to go. How can our friends out there follow your work with Free-Range Kids?
Lenore Skenazy: Well, it’s the same thing now basically. Free-Range Kids will direct you automatically to LetGrow.org. And try to get your schools to do the Let Grow Project. Your kids will thank you and so will democracy.
Bob Zadek: Thanks so much for a wonderful hour of conversation, Lenore. Enjoy the rest of the weekend as well to all of my friends out there. I’ll be back next Sunday with another hour of liberty. Thanks so much, have a good Sunday.