Neighboring Sex Offenders
Do you know who your neighbors are? No? I didn’t either…
My Grandma stops by early in the afternoon on Monday with a piece of paper. She looks a little disturbed, and shows us the paper. To our amazement, it was a printout from her computer that identified one of our neighbors as a registered sex offender. He’s not our next door neighbor, but we can see his house from our front porch, and that is a little too close for comfort.
I looked at her and said, “Do you browse the Internet often for creepy people?” She looked at me like an I had morphed into an animal and said, “Well, yes! I check things out about once a year.” I more than deserved that bizarre look because it is something I should be doing on a regular basis. I think that it is something that we need to add to our semiannual to do list. When we reset the clocks, and change our smoke alarm batteries, we need to spend a few minutes checking for sex offenders near our homes.
Here are a couple of websites to get you started on protecting your family from sex offenders.
National Sex Offender Public Website
National Sex Offender Registry
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14164614
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14165460
Wow that’s creepy and scary. As far as I can tell the public is not allowed to access the National Sex Registry in Canada where I live. After reading this post though now I kind of wish I could access it.
It’s really scary what you can find out there. I’ve signed up for email notification whenever a sex offender moves into our neighborhood. This was prompted last year when I was curious and found that a sex offender was (illegally) living in our apartment complex. Needless to say, I was very upset since I know our complex has a zero tolerance policy for that, and I let them know. It turned out he wasn’t on the lease, and the front office had no idea he’d moved in with the woman living there. It’s a scary world out there. There really are “monsters” to be scared of, and it makes me scared and sad.
On that note, I would like some comments on what else I found on the sex offender site.
It is a woman who works for my neighbor who has several employees working for him. I do not know if this woman is still working there or not and do not know how to find out.
She was convicted in 2002 for indecent liberities with child by custodian in Staunton, VA which is 25 miles away and lives here in Rockbridge county now.
She is considered a violent offender but I do not know what that means, exactly.
My dilemma……….do I tell him? I can find arguments on both sides of disclosing this information to him and just don’t know what to do. Your input will be helpful.
Grandma Pam
There is also an iPhone app that lets you keep track of sex offenders – I had an unpleasant surprise after recognizing some local men who we see out and about regularly near the playground across the street from our place.
Ignorance is bliss, they say — but in this case… I’ll take cold hard facts.
Scary world out there. Time to go hug my kiddo.
xo