Search for perverts leads to big surprises during myth busting night

Sure it's kind of creepy, but I've been looking for perverts in my neighborhood.

Lucky me. I have 14 within one mile of my home, thankfully none too close. The Review-Journal office has 64 within one mile. My folks in Sun City Summerlin have just three, although one guy looks real scary.

They're all men, of course.

There's a disgusting double standard for women perverts. A 30-year-old man having sex with a 13-year-old girl is a horrible crime. An older woman having sex with an underage boy is a plus for the boy in many people's minds and goes unreported as a crime.

By searching the Las Vegas police's new Sex Offender Registry at www.lvmpd.com, I can even see their faces. Some of them look quite pleasant; others are people you might be reluctant to chat with while waiting in line at the grocery store.

But the first thing I noticed from my search is that one offender lives on Scholar Lane near the Meadows School and that worries me. I'd seen Kevin Bacon in "The Woodsman."

But after attending the police department's First Tuesday meeting at the Northwest Area Command Center and listening to the discussion about sex offenders, apparently that shouldn't be much of a concern.

Social worker Angela Morgan told a crowd of about 80 that it's a myth that sexual predators lurk around schoolyards and playgrounds looking for child victims.

Morgan, along with Officer Craig Miller with state Parole and Probation, spoke on the highly topical subject of myths about sexual offenders. The program came at a time when a lot of us were thinking about villains who rape children, because of the ghastly assault on a Las Vegas girl when she was about 3. The pictures released by the Nye County Sheriff's Department in an effort to identify her showed an incredibly sad, troubled face that hinted of the horrors her mother now says the girl doesn't remember.

I hope it's true. And I hope her memory loss of that event is permanent.

The man shown raping her on the videotape is believed to be Chester Arthur Stiles, 37, a former animal trainer for Siegfried & Roy.

While it's hard to believe the girl, now 7, won't suffer psychological harm, her mother and police say she's a happy, healthy little girl. Morgan, who has a caseload of 80 men and two women in her practice, said she has treated victims as young as 2. With a strong support system, she said the very young can recover.

Since the girl's mother said she didn't know of the assault on her daughter, the child wasn't receiving any support, but Morgan said it's possible she is the happy child her mom describes.

The biggest surprise to me about the myth busting night was that Morgan encouraged people to ask offenders about their crimes. She encourages offenders to talk about their crimes when asked.

"These guys are just as afraid as you are," the social worker said. "Meet them. Take the fear away. I tell these guys to tell their neighbors about their crimes."

That would be a hard conversation to start. Hey, Mr. Stiles, welcome to the neighborhood. Tell me how you raped a 3-year-old.

Perhaps the Offender Watch registry plays into our paranoia, and there's a valid argument that some offenders (teenage boys having consensual sex with teenage girls) don't belong on the list.

One mother at First Tuesday asked about all the renters moving into her neighborhood. "We're getting a lot of suspicious looking people in my neighborhood," she said, admitting she's becoming paranoid about her daughter's safety. She'll do exactly what I did, look up every face and address and wonder if they pose a threat to her daughter.

She'll fret about the guys on the list, when the experts say the more likely threat is from someone you know, even a relative. Offender Watch is a source of information, but based on what the experts say, we need to look closer to home, even inside the home.

The real challenge is to stop looking the other way when you suspect child molestation by a family member and quit pretending it can't be true.

We've been looking for pervs in all the wrong places.

Jane Ann Morrison's column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call 383-0275.