Life as a registered sex offender isn’t necessarily easy. There are places you’re not allowed to live near and places you’re not allowed to visit. Just recently legislation has tried to restrict whether or not registered sex offenders can even have access to social networking sites. I’m not here to debate whether or not sex offenders should be allowed onto Facebook or not, but they’re being restricted from more and more online activities – online gaming included.
New York state law requires convicted sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses, screen names, and other online aliases with the state. Companies including Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Blizzard, EA, Disney Interactive, and Warner Bros. are now using this information to block 3,580 users from their networks, according to an announcement made this morning by New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman.
They say the effort is the first of it’s kind to “ensure online video game systems do not become a digital playground for dangerous predators.” There have been cases where someone sexually abused a child after having first met them through something like the Playstation Network or Xbox Live, but does that mean we need to ban a swath of people from using the service? There have been people sexually abused at Ice Cream stores and Walmarts but that doesn’t mean we’re going to prevent registered sex offenders from visiting either of those places.
While acknowledging that current game consoles already have parental controls that could protect children from unwelcome advances, Schneiderman argued that “parents often do not realize that gaming consoles have these capabilities.” Should we instead focus more on informing parents that these capabilities exist or should we just keep adding on things that people who made mistakes aren’t allowed to do any more?
Having people out on parole with particular conditions one thing, but I think we’ve gone very, very far in the wrong direction when it comes to permanent, lifetime punishment. It seems like there’s an ever-increasing banning of prior sex offenders from any productive part of society. People over at Arstechnica have argued “You can’t participate in harmless activities just because kids might be nearby (never mind the fact that your offenses had nothing to do with children). You can’t even play video games online because you might be connected to a child and you might use that to lure them in. None of this is productive at all.”
What is your take on this?
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