Two articles in the last week have raised the question of how colleges should treat students who are registered sex offenders. The first concerns a proposed Missouri law that would bar registered sex offenders from living in on-campus housing. The second concerns a man convicted on multiple counts of rape who was taking classes at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee this semester. (He has since dropped out.)
Apparently there are several states that already bar registered sex offenders from living in college dorms, and on the face of it that seems like a reasonable law to protect people. The trouble comes, as it always does, with blanket prohibitions that may hurt people they really weren’t meant to apply to.
A friend forwarded me a link to this recent article on public urination in New Hampshire. Apparently, given current New Hampshire state law and the new federal law determining who must be registered as a sex offender, someone who is cited for public urination twice in three years would be registered as a sex offender. In one of the more ridiculous twists such a conflict of laws could produce, someone who was urinating publicly because they were homeless and had nowhere else to pee could then end up permanently barred from homeless shelters. Legislation has been put forward to separate public urination from the kind of indecent exposure that the sex offenders registry is meant to cover, and hopefully New Hampshire will get this particular issue sorted out.
The example does raise some concerns around the Missouri law, however. I have to side with the dean of students at Missouri Southern State University, “There probably ought to be some way to appeal if a person feels like they should be excluded (from the list). There are exceptions to every rule.†One of the reasons I work with SAFER is that I appreciate their belief that schools should establish formal procedures, with appeals, for handling allegations of sexual assault and that such procedures should be fair to both accused and accuser. The sex offenders registry is different, in that everyone on it has been convicted of a crime, but it does seem like there should still be some leeway given around non-violent crimes where a student can demonstrate extenuating circumstances.
When it comes to a convicted rapist, however, I can see why there was public concern about whether he should be attending classes on campus. Deciding yes or no gets into difficult debates about whether people can change and how much we are willing to risk on that belief. I don’t have any answers there (other than the belief that it probably all depends on the person, and therefore no opinion should be ventured on the basis of a few hundred words from a news website), but these articles raise important questions about your own campuses. What are your state laws around sex offender registries? Your school’s policies? Are they fair? Do they protect those they were intended to protect?
