House Subcommittee investigation on “Sex Offenders on Dating Sites” is an exercise in Moral Panic

House Subcommittee investigation on “Sex Offenders on Dating Sites” is an exercise in Moral Panic
By: Derek W. Logue of OnceFallen.com

Derek Logue is an Anti-Registry Activist and founder of oncefallen.com, an informational site for people convicted of sexual offenses.

While America is suffering from arguably the largest political rift in our nation’s history, one subcommittee of the US House of Representatives Committee of Oversight and Reform banded together on January 30 to for a common threat both political parties can exploit in a show of solidarity. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy, announced they are conducting an investigation, but not into political corruption, the scam phone call epidemic, or on any issue you expect a committee that works on business laws to tackle. Instead, they announced they are investigating the use of online dating apps by people accused or convicted of sexual offenses.

This subcommittee relied heavily upon media reports that cited a single 2019 report written by a joint effort of three reporters and credited by ProPublica, Buzzfeed, and Columbia Journalism Investigations. While that may initially sound impressive, none of the three reporters credited with writing this report (Hillary Flynn, Elizabeth Naismith Picciani, and Keith J. Cousins) have any criminal justice experience, and two of the three had no actual reporting experience; both women were recent Columbia University graduates. These reporters also cited Carole Markin, a self-described online dating activist who wrote two books on dating disasters and ran an online organization addressing online dating complaints before claiming she also was assaulted by a registrant she met on a dating app.

The report itself lists around 150 cases of people who were either accused or convicted of sexual offenses committed against someone met through an online dating service. Of the 150 cases, only 10% of those involved anyone previously accused or convicted of a sexual offense, and of that 10%, the article focused on four particular individuals. Despite this report being anecdotal and dubious in nature, the mainstream media has been eager to report these findings without question, and criticism of this report has been routinely ignored. Millions of people use these sites daily without incident, so focusing on a handful of cases is a waste of resources.

Since the announcement, news media outlets across America are covering this story as a pandemic spreading farther than the coronavirus. The likely result is a symbolic bill designed to exclude, or at least humiliate, lonely Registered Persons seeking to meet a future partner online.

This would not the first time that legislators have responded unnecessarily to Internet Predator Panic. In 2008, both Presidential candidates John McCain (known for his computer illiteracy) and Barack Obama sponsored the “Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act of 2008”, a bill that required Registered Persons to turn over Internet Identifiers. Congress must have known outright banning Registered Persons from the Internet would be eventually declared unconstitutional, as it was in the Packingham v North Carolina SCOTUS ruling in 2017. Instead, they have circumvented the Constitution by placing the burden of removing registrants from online services on corporations. Facebook, for example, went from protecting the rights of Registered Persons to use their services to excluding them from services; last year, it was reported Facebook had even written exclusions in their terms of service that allowed death threats against people accused or convicted of sex crimes.

Finding ways to increase restrictions of the lives of Registered Persons is truly a bipartisan effort. On many keys issues in the US, the two political wings have similar goals (like balancing the budget) but have vastly different means to achieve them. When it comes to Predator Panic, both main political wings have something to gain from sex offender laws; right-leaning people gain their “tough-on-crime” and sexual morality agendas while left-leaning people gain their perception of “justice” for sex crime victims and punishment for offenders. It is a win-win for politics but not for public policy.

We’ve had over two decades of bad sex offense policy starting with the Jacob Wetterling Act, which itself was fueled by a campaign of misinformation about the number of kidnapped children in the US. John Walsh once stood before Congress proclaiming the country was “littered with mutilated, decapitated, raped, strangled children.” In reality, what we believed about “stereotypical kidnappings” was untrue; in reality, children are more likely to die from choking to death on hot dogs than from being raped and murdered by a stranger previously convicted of a sex crime. We now have a bloated registry nearing a million names, with children as young as age 9 plastered on this government blacklist; even the US Department of Justice admitted in 2009 over 89,000 registrants publicly listed were juveniles.

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we have justified the Sex offense Registry on the false belief that “the rate of re-offense is frightening and high,” as Justice Kennedy wrote when SCOTUS upheld the use of the public registry in the 2003 Smith v Doe decision. Despite studies showing that residency restriction laws have no impact on sex crime rates, many states spend millions fighting to keep these bad laws on the books. We continue to exclude people of sexual offenses from being productive members of society. We pass laws dictating where Registered Persons (and their families) can live, work, eat, go on vacation, or even who they can date.

People today still seem oblivious to the fact that most sex crimes occur in the home, by someone already known to the victim, and that most sex crimes are committed by a person with no prior sex offense conviction. Furthermore, few people convicted of sexual offenses commit subsequent sexual offenses. These low re-offense rates have been known for decades, but people choose not to believe dozens of scientific studies conducted by numerous states and the US Department of Justice.

I have been listed on this government blacklist for seventeen years; I have also used free online dating services. I had been on a few dates, too. I was always honest with my dates about my past if we liked each other enough to have more than a couple of dates, and all but one took it well. I had a few casual encounters with consenting adults. I never dated anyone under 30 because I do not feel I can relate to the younger generation. As of today, I’ve been in a relationship for three years with someone I met online, though it was not from a dating site.

This subcommittee action is the latest in a quarter-century of moral panics espoused by a government and fueled by bad media reports and anecdotes accepted by evidence. I have fought back against the myriad of punitive laws because I have not been allowed to become a productive member of society. While Congress has not given a Registered Person like me to testify before them, I still intend to fight any actions taken by this House subcommittee. I have every right to use online services as any other American, and I have no intention of sitting by while this subcommittee seeks to use me as a political football.