Sex Offender Laws in Alabama: Justice, Or Too General . . . What Do You Think?

I was scanning the local news stories today, and I came across an op-ed piece from a recent edition of the Tuscaloosa News. In this piece, it appears that a mother of a young man who is in jail wrote an article about her son. In this piece, the mother talks about the number of young men in jail with the charge of statutory rape. Technically, this is a Rape II charge. In the state of Alabama, this charge is about a person of a certain age who has had sex, consensual or not, with a person of another age. In this particular situation, her son was over a certain age and had sex with a girl under a certain age. From all appearances, this sex was consensual, and seemed to be between boyfriend and girlfriend. I make this distinction for a reason. In our state, those who had this kind of sex are viewed exactly the same as those who molest children. In essence, child molesters and those who have consensual sex with their underage girlfriends are all considered sex offenders, and ALL HAVE TO REGISTER AS SEX OFFENDERS FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES! That is how generalized our sex offender laws are in the state of Alabama.

What do we, as social workers, think about these laws . . .

There are no correct answers . . . just wondering what everyone thinks about these sets of laws and what they mean to our practice . . .