From Outside the Box

I have shared this article with a number of people across the country. (We Have It All Wrong. Shunning Offenders is Not Working: A Reaction to the Woody Allen Story
http://www.the-broad-side.com/we-have-it-all-wrong-shunning-offenders-is-not-working-a-reaction-to-the-woody-allen-story)

One of those who doesn’t want her name mentioned Sent some information back to me After a short conversation with her I’ve added a title and changed a couple words around. She said that I could share it with anybody And I think it is a good enough perspective that it needs to be shared with a lot of people.

From Outside the Box

I have seen a small portion of the hurt that the registry can do to families and friends of the registrants. I am sure the small portion I have seen and experienced can not be compared to the hurt that those who are related to the registrants must feel. When I was 12 years old my best friend was a ‘victim’. The entire town knew about the case before the ‘guilty man’ even had a chance to speak with his attorney. It was front page news of the local small town newspaper, her name and her father’s name were there with the description of how the police took the ‘guilty man’ to jail. I recall how the poor girl was called names, shunned and blamed by her peers, school teachers, neighbors and many others. Because I stood by her side many of my friends then shunned me. Before my best friend and her brother were taken from their mother, she took me aside in the girls’ restroom at school and told me, between tears and sobs, that she would never be able to see her daddy again. While we sat on the cold hard floor I remember asking her why and she said that it was because the judge said so and even though her daddy loved her very much the judge said he was an awful man. I spoke to my mother about the situation when I got home that afternoon, I asked her how the judge could do something like that when he didn’t even know my friend or her father. My mother tried to explain it to me but no matter how she tried all she could say was that she didn’t understand all the laws and that there were many more that seemed confusing and even unfair to her, more than she could count. I found out later that the state had decided that her mother was also an awful person for not protecting my friend. The next day in our math class two people came in the room and asked my best friend to leave with them, at first she refused trying to use the excuse her mother had told her to never go somewhere with a stranger. The teacher then stepped in telling her that leaving with these people was the right thing to do and she was perfectly safe in doing so. I plead with her not to go, it had to be wrong somehow, I just knew it was. That was the last time I saw my Best Friend.