Department of Justice Cleaning House with Nationwide Operation
You’ll be glad to know that the United States government is stepping in and doing something about the sex offenders here in the states, registered or not. Last week, the Department of Justice announced that they are launching their first-ever national strategy to crackdown on sex offenders in an effort to combat the ever-increasing problem of child exploitation.
According to an article in the Miami Herald, “Part of the strategy calls for the U.S. Marshals Service to launch a nationwide operation to target the 500 most dangerous, noncompliant sex offenders.”
And it looks like they’re already underway with the investigations. “One of the investigations – Operation Cybersafe – identified more than 200 children who were victimized by a group whose members often competed with one another for access to victims. One of the defendants, unnamed in the report, said he’d had sex with more than 500 children.”
Scary to think that these guys are out there, but there’s also a sense of relief to know that our government is actually, physically doing something about it. And when I say that they’re “physically” doing something about it, I mean it. For example, the Department of Justice is hiring 38 assistant attorneys to work on the child exploitation cases that result from the investigations.
Additionally, “the department will create a national database to allow authorities on the federal, state, tribal, local and international levels to share intelligence on dangerous offenders.” Hopefully this move will encourage other countries to do the same as not all sex offenders online come from the United States. And hopefully this will open doors to websites like Yoursphere.com to safely expand our services on an international level without necessarily forfeiting our ability to scan names through a registered sex offender database.
Though I think what the U.S. government is doing is fantastic and a huge step in the right directions, I agreed with James Hmurovich, the president and CEO of Prevent Child Abuse America, when he said that he’d like to see more preventive measures in the strategy. “I think it’s a great enforcement initiative, but what we would like to see, and what we would be willing to help with, is the prevention part,” Hmurovich said. “It would be better if (the abuse) never happened.” Very true, and that’s EXACTLY what we had in mind when we set the safeguards in the Yoursphere sign-up process. Now if we can just get every other social network on the same page…
Category: Editorials
Mary Kay is a nationally-recognized Internet safety expert and the founder of 
