NJ child porn kingpin pleads guilty, experts say Megan’s Law cannot prevent sex abuse

By Sulaiman Abdur-Rahman
Trentonian
March 10, 2018

http://www.trentonian.com/article/TT/20180310/NEWS/180319993

Anthony White

An Ocean County man who possessed over 36,000 videos and images of child pornography pleaded guilty Tuesday to distributing child pornography online.

Anthony White, 31, of Lakewood, is facing a six-year recommended prison sentence and will be required to register as a sex offender under Megan’s Law, but two New Jersey experts warn that sex offender registration and notification laws do not prevent sexual violence.

Psychology professors Elizabeth Jeglic of Cranbury and Cynthia Calkins Mercado of Union City dispute the conventional wisdom of Megan’s Law in a new book.

Do sex offender notification laws work?

“Not really,” Jeglic and Calkins Mercado say in their 176-page book, Protecting Your Child from Sexual Abuse: What You Need to Know to Keep Your Kids Safe. They say that “these laws have unfortunately done little to lower rates of sexual violence.”

The authors mention how Megan Kanka, a 7-year-old Hamilton Township girl, got raped and killed in 1994 by a twice-convicted sex offender who had recently been released from prison. Jesse Timmendequas, 56, is now serving a life sentence at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton for his deadly crimes on Megan.

Her violent death led to Megan’s Law notification systems being implemented nationwide. These measures require public notification on any convicted sex offenders living in the community. More recently, former President Barack Obama signed an international version into law on Feb. 8, 2016.

The International Megan’s Law to Prevent Child Exploitation and Other Sexual Crimes Through Advanced Notification of Traveling Sex Offenders is intended to protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation, including sex trafficking and sex tourism, by alerting foreign governments whenever a registered sexual offender travels abroad. Under the law, the United States also requests foreign governments to notify U.S. authorities whenever a known sex offender is seeking to enter the United States.

U.S. Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, the longtime Republican congressman who represents Hamilton Township, has played a leading role in advocating and establishing the domestic and international Megan’s Law notification systems.

Placing convicted sex offenders on public registries and subjecting them to strict residential restrictions among other sanctions is a standard practice in law enforcement, but Jeglic and Calkins Mercado suggest the get-tough approach is an unwise way to manage paroled sex offenders.

“By preventing those who have committed sexual offenses from finding employment, obtaining affordable housing, facilitating prosocial connections, and maintaining ties to the community, laws such as these may inadvertently increase the risk that offenders pose,” the authors state, citing a multistate study.

The research presented in their book shows the large majority of sex offenders are known to the victim and that only a small percentage of released sex offenders will reoffend sexually. The book also suggests that most sex offenders will not commit another sex offense once they have been identified.

The authors acknowledge national survey data that one in six boys and one in four girls are sexually abused before the age of 18. “Sexual violence prevention is not easy or simple,” Jeglic and Calkins Mercado write in their book, “but research shows that there are things we can do.”

For starters, the authors say that parents should talk to their children about body parts and sexual abuse using accurate names and proper terminology. “Communication between parent and child,” they write, “is integral to sexual violence prevention.”

The professors are both mothers who teach psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which is affiliated with the City University of New York. They emphasize that victims of sex abuse usually are not abused by strangers. “Throughout much of this book,” they concede, “we’ve tried to urge you to relax your fears and allow your children to play in parks and be provided with age-appropriate independence. As we have discussed, the risk of a sex crime happening in a stereotypical ‘stranger danger’ situation is much lower than most people assume.”

Their book, published Feb. 13, also talks about the child abuse sex scandals that have rocked the Roman Catholic Church in recent years, mentions convicted pedophile Jerry Sandusky of Penn State University football shame and highlights President Donald Trump’s controversial “locker room talk” from 2005 that emerged during the 2016 presidential campaign in which the billionaire real estate mogul talked about grabbing women by the genitals.

Protecting children from sexual abuse remains a top law-enforcement priority in the Garden State.

New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal on Tuesday announced the guilty plea of child porn kingpin Anthony White, who was one of 40 men arrested in 2016 in “Operation Statewide,” a child pornography sweep by the New Jersey Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.

“Each time we arrest an offender like White with thousands upon thousands of files of child pornography, it highlights the alarming scope of this problem and the number of children who are cruelly victimized and re-victimized in the creation and distribution of these abhorrent materials,” Grewal said in a press statement. “This plea reflects our resolve to use New Jersey’s tough child pornography laws to seek lengthy prison terms for those who participate in these crimes.”

Authorities say White will be required to register as a sex offender under Megan’s Law and will be subjected to parole supervision for life, but the psychology experts Elizabeth Jeglic and Cynthia Calkins Mercado warn that the biggest threat to children could be a sexually abusive family member or acquaintance unknown to authorities.

“Many of the most famous cases you have heard about in the media, such as the sexual abuse within the Catholic Church and Jerry Sandusky,” Jeglic and Calkins Mercado write in their book, “involved grooming tactics used to build connections with the victims and gain the support of the parents to avoid detection.”