Three Cheers for One Strike

THIS WEEK, nearly 300 Catholic bishops are gathering in Dallas to discuss whether parish priests who behave as pedophiles should lose their clerical collars after the first offense or be given one or more chances to repent and reform before being demoted, disgraced, or defrocked. Some bishops reportedly oppose any one-strike policy in favor of having each diocese use psychological evaluations in deciding, case by case, what to do with known perpetrators. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to hear arguments concerning Megan's laws, the neighbor-notification policies in 20 states named for Megan Kanka, the New Jersey child who was kidnapped, raped, and killed in 1994 by a paroled sex offender who had moved in across the street. Some justices are reportedly warm to the idea that, rather than automatically putting released child molesters on public sex-offender registries, they should hold individual hearings to determine which freed sex predators still pose a risk and which do not. Whatever either Catholic canon law or U.S. constitutional law may be interpreted to require in such cases, there is no firm empirical basis for the bishops' and justices' shared assumption that we know how to reform sex offenders or can predict which victimizers will harm children again and which will not. A few things we do know. Most sex offenders favor young prey. From the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics and other solid sources, we know that, of all sexual assault victims, an estimated 67 percent are under age 18, a third are under age 12, and 1 in 7 are age 6 or younger. Of all persons in prison for sexual assault, about 80 percent victimized a minor, and about 40 percent victimized a child age 12 or younger. Over half of sex offenders admitted to prisons have violated parole.