Cabinet awaiting recommendations for amendments to Sexual Offences Act, Sex Offender Registry

 

Minister of National Security Dr Horace Chang says Cabinet will shortly receive recommendations for review of the Sexual Offences Act, including the Sex Offender Registry. 

 

There have been renewed calls for the review of the law governing the registry to expand the categories of people who may access the information following the murder of nine year-old Kelsey Ferrigon at her home in St Catherine last Friday. 

 

Dr Chang, speaking Tuesday on Radio Jamaica's Beyond the Headlines, said the legal department of the Ministry of Justice is wrapping up its review of the law, and the recommendations should be received in "one of the next two Cabinet meetings."

 

He said one important new consideration relates to those sexual offenders, including deportees, who committed the crime outside of Jamaica.

 

"We do not have in the law the ability to register them; we have to make that amendment; that is crucial because those are defined sex offenders who would be slipping through the cracks," he noted. 

 

He added that there has to be a balance between the community's need to know and protecting the individual against the possibility of being attacked based on the knowledge of that person's history, but conceded that, "if we don't have easy access, what happened in St. Catherine (to Kelsey Ferrigon) could be repeated and that's the kind of horror that we cannot afford to have." 

 

Executive Director of Eve for Life Joy Crawford, who also spoke on Beyond the Headlines, called for expanded access to the Sex Offender Registry, with victims and those at risk given priority.

 

Noting that "relatives of the offender have access but victims and persons at risk don't have access," she said that should be corrected in the amendments being contemplated.

 

She also suggested that the risks to offenders on the Registry are being overstated, aruing that "not every John, Tom is going to look at a registry that has no relationship to them, and that's just how human beings are..."