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How To Stay 30 Feet Away From KidsBecome a hermit or face jail.

By Michelle TsaiPosted Monday, Aug. 6, 2007, at 7:06 PM ET

A judge in California imposed a temporary restraining order Friday on a self-professed pedophile who had been posting pictures of what he called LGs, or little girls, on his Web site. According to the order, Jack McClellan, who has no arrests or convictions, must not come within 30 feet of anyone under the age of 18 in the state of California. How do you stay 30 feet away from all kids?

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You can't, at least not for any extended period of time. McClellan apparently lives out of his car, but he won't be able to drive anywhere, since there might be a child in another car. Trips to kid-dense areas like grocery stores are also out. Short of setting up a tent in the desert or leaving the state altogether, it's likely that McClellan will eventually violate the restraining order.

Related in Slate

Dahlia Lithwick asked whether child molesters are too sick for punishment and reported on the Supreme Court's debates on the sex offender next door. Daniel Engber learned how psychologists figure out which pedophiles will strike again. David Tuller diagnosed Rep. Mark Foley as an ephebophile.

This California case is highly unusual, since McClellan isn't a registered sex offender, and the sweeping order covers all 10 million children in the state. But convicted offenders usually have to contend with similar restrictions. Over the past decade, 27 states and hundreds of cities have passed laws to restrict where convicted sex offenders who have served their sentences can live. Usually, they're barred from residing within 1,000 feet of places like schools and playgrounds. Some states are especially strict. Certain cities in Florida call for a 2,500-foot buffer zone, while Georgia throws bus stops and pools into the mix. In Cincinnati, the law effectively leaves at least 60 percent of the city's housing units out of reach. Offenders are forced to find new homes, often in rural areas, where jobs are scarce and where authorities have a harder time monitoring them. (Tracking should get easier in California, where sex offenders are supposed to be outfitted with GPS units.) In Florida, five men who were all convicted of child abuse ended up living underneath a highway. Iowa found that offenders stayed in motels, and, more worryingly, that more offenders are going underground as cities have tried to outdo each other with restrictions since the state law passed in 2002.

Individual sex offenders on parole are often prohibited from living with a child or having unsupervised contact with children. Talking to a kid on the sidewalk would be a big no-no unless a chaperone accompanies the offender.

To comply with these rules, many sex offenders tend to venture outside only when they are accompanied by some kind of supervisor. They watch out for places they should avoid and when they should avoid them. For instance, someone might shop at a Gap store that doesn't feature a Gap Kids next door, or buy ice cream at a gas station rather than a Dairy Queen. They brainstorm escape strategies for emergencies, like how to respond if a neighbor needs to go to the hospital and asks them to watch their kid. Or what to do if they find themselves trapped in a public place where there are children. In these situations, counselors advise offenders to offer to drive the neighbor and the child to the hospital instead, or, in the latter case, to pretend they're about to vomit.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks David D'Amora of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, Jeff Stein of California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, and Sara Totonchi of the Southern Center for Human Rights.

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Michelle Tsai is a Beijing-based writer working on a book about Chinatowns on six continents.

Photograph of kids on swings on Slate's home page by John Foxx/Stockbyte.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

While pointing out that McClellan is not a convicted sex offender, Ms. Tsai might have mentioned what McClellan *has* done: not only has McClellan taken pictures of "LGs," but, as I understand it, McClellan has written a blog on which he rates public places and events based on how well stocked they are with little girls.

The fact that McClellan is not a convict is no trivial distinction, that's true. But he is not a convict for the sole reason that the legislature never imagined this crime. How many pedophiles has McClellan informed? Spurred on?

I wouldn't go as far as to call Ms. Tsai an apologist, but by omitting the gruesome fact of McClellan's blog, she flirts with the line more than I imagine she--or anyone--would want to.

--Hopscotch

(To reply, click here.)

With nearly breathtaking rapidity, we are becoming a nation that simply shrugs off the concept of individual rights,

I am not familiar with the laws used to issue a temporary restraining order against this McClellan creep, but I would be surprised if the law was not bent, twisted, burnt, and otherwise fouled in order to make this order a reality.

I am not surprised that many of us, perhaps most of us, accept this, in this particular case, as a necessary evil, nor that others of us do not consider this an evil at all. We are, after all, protecting our children, are we not?

In the final analysis, the issue here is the same one we confront when people write about killing others on their blogs or in term papers for English professors, when preachers post their beliefs about the imminent coming of the Apocalypse and what followers need to do to prepare: when does this move from personal expression to a danger to the community?

It is, in fact, typically presented as an argument between practicality and idealism.

What is legislated and enforced on behalf of common sense is often the product of corrupt or irrational idealism, more often the bastard child of a compulsion to expediency in the name of righteousness.

As always, the individual loses. As always, the majority of individuals revel in the loss, for a bit more sense of security, for one more night of dreamless sleep.

--Soccerfreak

(To reply, click here.)

The hostility felt towards pedophiles, rapists, and the like is a manufactured phenomenon, as surely as is the demand for name-brand soft drinks. This hostility is a phase, and it will pass. A responsible and scientific cost-benefit analysis of the harm vs benefit for torturing sex offenders is overdue, and it will come soon. When it does, the ridiculously long prison sentences, harmful psychological and drug therapies, ridiculous stigma, and preposterous conditions on release faced by these people will go away.

On a personal note, when I attended high school, one of our teachers was a very motivated, caring, generous, happy and attractive young woman. She made the mistake of getting sexually involved with a male student, a senior, who was arguably one of the most intellectually capable students at the school. A few years later he grew angry at her for some reason and had her charged with statutory rape. After a multiple-year prison sentence, she now is registered as a sex offender, can never teach again, and she looks absolutely awful. She can't even live where she wants to live. It is disgraceful what was done to this woman, and such acts cannot long continue in a free country with free exchange of ideas and legitimate scientific research.

--sedimentary rock

(To reply, click here.)

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