These are techniques used by successful salespeople, the straw man. Create the emergency in your customers head then provide the remedy. Sex offenders are lurking in your park! We must ban them! Really? Been to the park lately? Look around next time. Do you see a number of random men lurking about? No. The fact is this is election year antics and legislation based on fear of the ridiculous. Ask the great state of Georgia. They just publicly had to scale back all the same laws because they are unconstitutional. The fact is most sex crimes happen out of relationships, not proximity. The victim is usually known by the offender. Stranger attacks are rare. Scour the news and see just how many children have been attacked in a park. It's not there. Let's stop exploiting the people's fears for political gain and start passing sensible laws that will be efficacious in keeping our children safe, spend more money on prevention and awareness.

Over the past two decades, a definitive pattern has repeated itself in our culture and media which has led to our current state of “Predator Panic.” Mass media offers round-the-clock coverage of a tragic rape-murder, almost always of a white female child . Through the victim’s family or through legislators, a new bill is introduced or an existing law is expanded. Most, if not all, sex offender laws pass without dissenting votes or even debating the laws in question; facts and studies about the true nature of sexual abuse are ignored in favor of harsher post-conviction sex offender laws. These laws are justified by such myths as “sex offenders are highly likely to re-offend” and “all sex offenders are ‘predators’ or ‘pedophiles’” coupled with the generalization all sex crimes are similar to the high-profile sensationalized cases used to justify the passage of these laws. This issue is not a matter of sympathy for those convicted of sex crimes. In an ideal society, they would be punished and receive treatment for their crimes, but also given a chance to be productive members of society after serving their sentences. Thanks to a perfect storm of moral panic, a society willing to surrender Constitutional safeguards for security, a Big Brother bureaucracy, and a “Big Registry” industry willing to further erode our civil rights, we are no closer to sex crime prevention but closer to an Orwellian “risk-alone” society. For example, in vetoing a bill that would exclude teens from being put on the sex offender registry for having consensual sex with other teens whose ages are within four years of each other, Texas Governor Rick Perry stated it was to “protect young victims.” Texas has over 4000 sex offenders listed on the public registry who were convicted as juveniles, many for consensual sex with other teens! How much are we willing to sacrifice to “save one child?”