Daniel's Law to be Introduced in NT
Wednesday 22 October 2014 @ 11.47 a.m. | Crime
The Northern Territory is set to introduce a bill into parliament nicknamed Daniel’s Law. The law is named after Daniel Morcombe, the 13 year old boy who was murdered by sex offender Brett Peter Cowan, and will set up a sex offender public register.
Daniel’s Law - A Public Sex Offenders Register
The law will make most information regarding convicted sex offenders and paedophiles available online via a Northern Territory sex offender public website. The law is essentially modelled after the USA’s Megan’s law. The website would provide the offender’s name, image, physical description and regional location, but not a specific address. The idea behind the register is to allow parents to inform the authorities if there was an offender near their child’s school, or by single mums to check the history of individual men before they embarked on a new relationship.
The law’s open public registry system will be more widely available than the current Western Australian scheme of three-tier-access. The Northern Territory decided to establish the register despite the Council of Australian Governments meeting of federal, state and territory leaders originally knocked back the plan.
The bill will also be introduced despite the Australian Prime Minister’s rejection of the proposal. PM Tony Abbott announced that he was reluctant to single out any particular crimes for a register.
“I am disinclined to pursue such a thing nationally. We don’t have a national murders register. We don’t have a national thieves register. We don’t have a national white collar criminals register... I think if we have strong and effective police forces, strong and effective criminal intelligence, if we have got judges and prosecuting services that are taking swift action when criminals or potential criminals are arrested, I think that is the best way forward.”
The NT Attorney General, John Elferink, appreciates the PM’s opinion but stresses that he and the NT government believes this to be the appropriate legislation. Elferink said that:
"at the forefront of his government’s thinking were parents who are afraid that in their communities there are people who are known to the authorities to be paedophiles and serious sexual offenders, and they have no way of knowing.”
Criticism of the Law
A myriad of criticism has been lumped at the register and a great deal of research and investigation has tended to lean towards the ineffectiveness of such a scheme. The NT Criminal Lawyers Associations suggested a concern regarding the chances of rehabilitation in convicted sex offenders should such a system be implemented. The president of the association, Russell Goldflam explains that such laws have been tried in various incarnations over the last decades and have generally not resulted in anyone being actually safer nor has it resulted in a decrease in recidivism.
Britain’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, in a 2006 review of the US’s Megan’s Law, found that despite its popularity with parents:
“there is no evidence that open access to sex offender registers actually enhances child safety … However, there is some evidence that it may have unintended negative consequences for children.”
The Australian Institute for Criminology said research of Megan’s Law found the evidence base for the law was weak and it was “developed largely as a response to community agitation.”
Elferink casually dismissed these claims stressing that experts would give “all the reasons in the world” to not establish the register. He highlights the moral need for such a register when one is confronted with the victims of sex offenders and explains “the rights of parents to protect their children will take precedence in this governments view, over the rights of serious sex offenders.”
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