SOSEN.org went offline earlier this week, and it was almost like losing an old friend. A few weeks before SOSEN went offline forever, I wrote a eulogy that was thankfully captured by the Internet Archive as a final message from SOSEN. It has been reposted here for those times the Internet Archive isn't working.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240609153742/https://sosen.org/blog/2024/06/07/sosen-a-requiem.html
SOSEN: A REQUIEM
by Derek W. Logue • June 7, 2024 • 0 Comments
I spend about half of my childhood living in the small town in Moulton, AL, a community with a population about 3000 people. I moved away in 1990, and I returned for a brief visit in 2010 as I was planning to move away from that state forever. Even in a rural community like Moulton, things inevitably change. My mom worked a few months in a pizzeria; when I visited Moulton in 2010, it was a steak and seafood restaurant, and thanks to Google Maps, I can see the building is now acting as a food pantry. The skating rink across the street, however, is still in business as a skating rink. Next to it was Hill’s Auto Sales, where my stepfather worked until he finished his CDL training; by 2020, the lot had been abandoned, but the office shack and garage was still there, with the faded business sign sitting at the back of the open air garage. According to Google maps, it is still up, moved away from the road to make room for a body shop.
Just off AL Hwy 157, just a few hundred feet from these places, there was a beautiful two-story house next to a big oak tree. I had tamed a squirrel we named “Chipper.” When I returned in 2010, the house had long been abandoned; it was in disarray, with smashed windows and walls, and the process to recycle the bricks had begun. That house has since been demolished.
Change is always bittersweet. We have nostalgia for days gone by to some extent. Places die, just like people do, and we feel a bit of sadness to see a business we may have patronized or a home where we once lived altered or demolished.
It may hit slightly differently to envision the end of a website as opposed to driving past your childhood community. There are no bricks and mortar, no physical buildings, no signposts, and no physical roads to drive along to see the remnants as a monument to this nostalgia. But to those of us who patronized this virtual establishment, the bittersweet feelings are no less real. Such is the news that SOSEN will be shutting down around Mid-July 2024, just a few weeks from the day this article is posted.
It has been said. ”Necessity is the mother of invention.” From such necessity was born SOSEN. Founded in 2003, the “Sex Offender Support and Education Network” (SOSEN), as at first a Yahoo Group comprised of Registered Persons and their loved ones. There was also a sosen.org landing page which would also direct people to sign up for the Yahoo Group. There was a dispute with a group using a similar moniker; the other group known as the “Social Outcasts Support and Education Network (using the extension sosen.info). In the fall of 2007, the dispute was resolved, and sosen.org migrated to the extension sosen.us. The web extension was changed back to sosen.org in 2009, with the forums hosted separately on the sosen.us extension.
As noted in their “about us” page from 2009, “Though their numbers were small and organization loose, the group’s mission was profound. The members experienced firsthand a need for a place for the growing numbers of registered former offenders and their families to find comfort and support. They also saw firsthand that the direction legislators were taking regarding the laws being passed was counterproductive to the goals sought.
Between 2004 and 2005 the Yahoo Group was expanded and membership grew. New groups were added including creating separate state groups, among others. During this time of growth, as with any fledgling project there were differences of opinion and thus the need for strong, unbiased, committed leadership. As a step to providing a stable organization and effective leadership, discussions began on the topic of incorporation in the first quarter of 2006.
The discussions on the subject continued for the next year. Then in May/June of 2007, SOSEN was officially incorporated, making SOSEN the first among the RFSO groups to have this distinction. Also during this time bylaws were written, board positions defined, staff members recruited, and a new forum was created.
As with any great idea there were also bumps in the road. When SOSEN began to emerge as a leader in Sex Offender Issues, it caught the attention of hate groups. These groups deliberately and willfully attacked the SOSEN Yahoo group boards, so the Yahoo Groups were disbanded. The small victory of the vigilantes encouraged them to continue their attacks. Both through slander and outright attacks on the SOSEN website the vigilantes continued their illegal assaults which have included copyright infringement…
There are many stories where SOSEN has helped individuals and family members. Not to be forgotten are the many former victims among the SOSEN family who have found a loving, compassionate home among our widely varied membership.”
SOSEN racked up numerous accomplishments in their early years, including assisting Sarah Tofte’s 2007 Human Rights Watch report, “No Easy Answers: Sex Offender Laws in the US, participating Jill Levinson’s collateral damage study, working with other organizations in efforts of locating housing for former offenders due to residency restrictions across the country, sending reports to therapists, criminal defense attorneys, reporters and politicians upon request, and SOSEN members have spoken to many social justice students, law makers and committees.
SOSEN played a major role in the 2007 “Silent No More” rally in Columbus, Ohio. This rally was the Anti-Registry Movement’s first successful public awareness event, despite death threats and a counter-protest staged by members of a biker gang, an online vigilante group tied to the Dateline NBC TV show, and a vigilante who had made appearances on daytime talk shows of the era. The 2007 rally, in turn, helped form the Anti-Registry Movement into the modern structure that endures today.
In 2009, SOSEN changed the “S” in the acronym from “Support” to “Solutions” at the suggestion of those who had stated legislators and media would shut down on them if they explained that the S stood for support. As one member noted, “This was a great SOLUTION to the problem people encountered when talking with legislators and others and then saying we were with SOSEN. As soon as you said Sex Offender Support… the immediate mindset of the person you were speaking with changed as their immediate thoughts went to something like “these people are supporting the idea that it is alright to have sex with children?” or some similar negative idea. Using the work Solutions in our name allows us to not change SOSEN except by indicating in our name that we are working towards SOLUTIONS in the way our society is presently addressing sex offender issues.”
Kyle Sandusky, an advocate who passed away in the mid-2000s, had created a website called “Sex Offender Solutions – Network” (SOS-NET) when he was alive, so the name change from “support” to “solutions” was a dedication to his efforts.
SOSEN grew dramatically under the leadership of Mary Duval, a blind woman whose son landed on the registry for having consensual relations with a classmate. Mary Duval, with assistance of SOSEN members, had visited the Registered Persons forced to live under the Julia Tuttle Causeway in Miami, FL. Mary and a man named Kevin hosted a podcast on Talkshoe called “Americans’ Reality Check,” which had included guests from under the bridge, and even interviewed Ron Book, the mastermind of the law that forced Registered Persons to live under the bridge. Mary Duval made numerous media appearances during her life, and was among the first to bring the national media to the Anti-Registry Movement. The movement suffered a great loss when Mary Duval passed away in 2011, but she helped inspire a new generation of activists to step up their game. At one time, SOSEN boasted of nearly 800 active members, an impressive feat for the era.
Central to the longevity of SOSEN was the members’ forums, a private and protected forum where Registered Persons and their loved ones could speak to one another, share important news and legal commentary, or simply to share memes and stories with each other. SOSEN’s forums supported attachments up to 4MB and could support numerous file formats. It even contained “smileys” (emojis).
But after 21 years, the time has finally come for SOSEN to shutter its doors.
To paraphrase a modern expression. “SOSEN walked so that others may run,” The concept of a national group with state chapters had previously been tried with both SOSEN and SOHopeful, their early contemporary, but it was ReformSexOffenderLaws.org, the group that eventually rebranded into NARSOL, that had the greatest success with implementing the “state affiliate” system. This also made it difficult to attract people to SOSEN. SOSEN helped lay the groundwork for other groups to exist and thrive and surpass even the wildest dreams of the founders. But few of the early pioneers of this movement are alive today, much less have stuck around for over 20 years. Virtually all of SOSEN’s original staff have either passed away, moved on to head other groups, or have dropped out of anti-registry activism altogether.
The forum format utilized by SOSEN was innovative for its time, but eventually, other formats surpassed the abilities of the forum to share media. In 2008, the forum was sufficient to share info with fellow activists and encourage them to comment on articles. The MP4, the PDF, and other modern file formats grew too large for sharing certain files in the forums. Some activists wanted a “one stop shop” for all their online needs, so some activists decided they would rather create groups through Facebook, a social media platform that bans Registered Persons. In addition, news outlets also shifted to Facebook-only commenting, which led to a decline in participation from members joining in on calls of action to spread anti-registry comments. Ironically, even Facebook, the choice of many activists in the early 2010s, is also on the decline as a dominant platform as activists continue to move on to other platforms for sharing information or to engage in activism.
SOSEN has continued to provide information and the forums to those who needed it, but with the passing away of SOSEN staff members came the challenge of trying to retrieve control of meager resources left behind by those who passed on. SOSEN was (and is) still a repository for the thoughts, theories, and legal commentaries of the era in which it existed. In the mid-200s, as SOSEN was forming and growing, most legal commentary was merely prognostication and speculation on potential legal challenges to relatively new laws like residency restrictions. But today, there have been numerous challenges to post-conviction sanctions, so legal theories and commentaries no longer hold the same value it once did.
Twenty-one years is a long time. SOSEN was founded the year of my release from prison. A lot has changed for all of in those years. Unfortunately, in a crowded field, some businesses fall behind and eventually go out of business. It is not a condemnation of the product, but a simple fact of life. SOSEN helped get the ball rolling but it went as far as it could go as people left for greener virtual pastures. The fight for the rights of Persons Forced to Register to be allowed the opportunity to reintegrate and not endure draconian laws continues, but we are far better organized than when SOSEN’s journey began.
There will always be the Web archive for those who want to take a virtual stroll down memory lane or read some of the articles published in the later years of the site, but when the website goes offline in mid-July, the forums will no longer be accessible. Gone will be the conversations, the sharing of stories, and even the silly banter between members.
One off-topic conversation on the forums in 2009 began with a discussion on the then-new Star Trek movie. What followed was an exchange between a few members that only those attuned to anti-registry activism could truly understand and find both sad and silly simultaneously:
“I wonder if sex offenders have a 2000 parsec rule to follow by the time we catch up with the 24th century…”
“Nope, it’ll be 2000 LIGHTS YEARS, from any planet with LIFE on it!” (Note: A parsec is actually about 3.26 light years, so it would be longer than a light year.)
“If that’s the deal I am cutting a deal with the Romulians.” (thumbs-up smiley)
“Unfortunately, they will have passed the Intergalactic Megan’s Law bill by then and we won’t be allowed to leave the sector without our papers.” (Note: We may have predicted “International Megan’s Law” in this exchange)
“I will simply find an uncharted worm hole and abscond to the Delta quadrant.” (thumbs-up smiley)
“LOL!! Let’s see them follow us THERE!!! But we gotta watch out for the place that sucks ships in, where the ships feed off new arrivals….”
“Got to watch out for those Borg! Resistance is futile…..You will be assimilated…” (thumbs-up smiley)
“Now that could work. When they arrive we shove the politicians and media and idiots like Lunsford out first…Once they are assimilated… the Borg will be so STUPID they will be trying to assimilate EACH OTHER and leave the rest of us ALONE.” (Note: We may also have predicted the mid-2020s social and political climate, except for the leaving us alone part.)
“‘the place that sucks ships in, where the ships feed off new arrivals’… Do you mean the dreaded ‘Politico’ galaxy? LMAO”
“Great. We send Walsh and Lunsford and our politicos and media hounds out and they’ll simply exaggerate the amount of bullcrap going on here on earth and turn the whole federation into a bunch of intergalactic helicopter moms”
“The Lunsford Nebula located in the f*cktard galaxy ruled by Helicopter Borg?..LOL Now that’s a show I want to see”
SOSEN had a good run but eventually everything comes to an end. It may be the end of SOSEN’s story, but the fight to abolish the public registry continues. Those who experienced it will hopefully have good memories of the old website. Farewell, old friend. SOSEN, 2003-2024.
