One Survivor's Crusade Reveals a Plague of Errors in Sex Offender Registries Steve Friess - TakePart
go to original April 20, 2015

Estimates of the number of entries with crucial mistakes run into the tens of thousands. One man - and pretty much only one man - is trying to fix them.

Tim Fisher steps slowly up the driveway. With shoulder-length hair and a mustache, Fisher is 49, but in his mind he’s the cherub-cheeked boy with the sun-bleached bangs who walked this asphalt hundreds of times, every Saturday for seven years. Today he trembles with the same trepidation his boyhood self felt. This is the moment he has worked toward, that he has rehearsed countless times. By now, he has boiled it down to one question: “Do you remember?”

Fisher is one of the fortunate ones, if such a word can be applied to survivors of sexual assault. In California’s sexual offender registry, he found the address of the man who was convicted of abusing him as a child - all such ex-cons are required to provide the state with their current address. But a closer look suggests the nation’s sex offender registries are riddled with tens of thousands of mistakes, making it nearly impossible for victims, parents, or anyone else to track the whereabouts of sex offenders. And Fisher is pretty much the only one trying to fix them.

Read the rest at TakePart

Photos: Courtesy various state sex offender registries

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