Check your neighborhood for sex offenders

This site http://www.familywatchdog.us/ has just been forwarded to me. It was developed by John Walsh of 'America's Most Wanted'. It is somewhat similar to http://www.criminalcheck.com/ but it is a lot better. When you visit this site you can enter your address and a map will pop up with your house as the small icon of a house and red, blue, green, dots surrounding your entire neighborhood. When you click on these dots a picture of a person will appear with an address and the description of the crime he or she had committed. The best thing is that you can show your children pictures and see how close these people live to your home or school. In fact, there is one that lives only 1200 feet (about 1/4 mile) from our kids' school and 3 more that are less than 2 miles. Florida law states that no sexual offender can reside 1000 feet or less from schools, public parks, etc. and there are even exceptions to that. Nevertheless, studies indicate that proximity to where kids congregate is not really an issue to 'recidivism' of sexual offenders but of course it's good to know where they live.

We must take note though that knowing where they live in our neighborhood and even knowing how they look like doesn't guarantee safety for our kids from these kind of people so we must remain vigilant at all times and teach our kids how to be safe. We also need to lessen the risk by protecting them and just be responsible for their safety. This site is just for registered sexual offenders. There will always be 'unregistered' sexual offenders (look at the stats below) and people who have not commited a crime yet but may have a propensity to do the same.

You'd be amazed at the statistics which relate to sexual crimes. This is from this website.

1 of 5 girls will be sexually molested before her 18th birthday.
1 of 6 boys will be sexually molested before his 18th birthday.
1 of 5 children have been propositioned for sex over the Internet.
2 of 3 sexual abuses are perpetrated against teenagers or younger children.
90% of sexual assaults are committed against someone the perpetrator knows.
The median age for male molestation victims under 18 is 9.8 years old.
The median age for female molestation victims under 18 is 9.6 years old.
There are new 400,000 victims of sexual assault every year.
There are over 550,000 registered sex offenders in the US.
There are over 100,000 sex offenders that fail to register in the US.
76% of serial rapists claim they were molested as children.
Over 40% of male juvenile delinquents were molested as children.