Study seeks balance in managing release of sex offenders

The key to managing the return of former sex offenders to the community is to focus on risk assessment, monitoring and helping them to reintegrate, according to University of Waikato researcher Jingchun Cao.

She says it"s a highly emotive topic and a difficult area for lawmakers and police to deal with.

"We all feel worried if we have released sex offenders living in our community," says the law student who"s three years into her doctoral research on this topic. "But we shouldn"t take for granted that the public interest always overrides the personal interest: there"s got to be a balance between public safety and the privacy rights of the released offenders."

Cao has recently been awarded a $3,900 Claude McCarthy Fellowship by the Public Trust and the New Zealand Vice-Chancellors' Committee and a $1,000 New Zealand Postgraduate Study Abroad award for a study trip to China. This will further her research comparing the way legal jurisdictions in New Zealand, the United States and China balance the public interest and sex offenders" privacy.

"These are all very different systems, but we all face the same problems in dealing with releasing sex offenders into the community after they've served their sentences," says Cao.

Cao has also been awarded a scholarship by the Waikato Police, for whom she will be writing a separate report on practice and precedent in New Zealand law as basis for informed decisions on cases involving released sex offenders.

"I became interested in privacy issues after the 2006 Brown case in Wellington where a former sex offender was awarded damages for the invasion of privacy," says Cao. "I"m interested in finding a better balance between public and personal interests."

The New Zealand Police"s National Intelligence Application, introduced in 2005, contains important personal information about every citizen, such as criminal record. The police have the ability to flag high-profile offenders on this database, but Cao says this information is not available to the general public, and police have to decide on a case by case basis what information to release in the public interest.

The US system, by contrast, leans heavily towards the public"s right to know. "Since the 1990s, the United States has had a comprehensive national database of violent sex offenders and those whose victims are minors. Anyone can access it and type in a name or even a postcode to find out who might be living in their neighbourhood."

In China, information about criminal records is held in the national Household Registration System which - like in New Zealand - is not publicly accessible. Cao says anyone with a criminal record is required to inform their employer, but there is no legislation governing personal information either in the public or private sectors although China is currently considering plans for laws to protect personal information.

Cao says unlike New Zealand and the United States, the big worry for parents in China is possible child abduction by kidnappers seeking a ransom, so the issue of released sex offenders is not a major public concern.

Cao will make a research trip to China in early 2009 to collect more data for her doctorate. She will spend a month at the prestigious Renmin University of China working with the key authority in this field, Professor Zhang Xinbao.