In order to prevent sexual exploitations and violences against juveniles, Korean government enacted the Juvenile Sex Protection Law in 2000. With the serious consequences of victimization as well as the public concerns on the protection of juveniles' sex, the National Youth Commission(NYC) has released the personal information of sex offenders against juveniles since August of 2001. Until now(March, 2007), there have been eleven public notifications of sex offender's personal information.
However, the Juvenile Sex Protection Law has raised various debates with regard to the unconstitutionality of the public notification policy. The issue of double jeopardy problem, the invasion of human rights, and the violation of equal treatment principle have been debated in the academic circle. The Constitution Court of Korea decided the public notification policy to be constitutional in June, 2003. Currently, the NYC tries to increase the effectiveness of the public notification policy by classifying the offenders into high-risk and low-risk offenders. The NYC notifies the personal photography, address, job information for the high-risk offenders. However, the low-risk offenders can avoid the public notification if they complete the treatment programs for the prevention of recidivism.
The ultimate goal of the public notification policy is to prevent sex offenses against juveniles. Even though there were several attempts to examine the effectiveness of this policy, there is no direct evaluation research on this policy with the reason of the lack of appropriate data. As an alternative approach to this problem, this research examines the sex offender registration and notification policy in the United States. Because the sex offender registration and notification policy in the U.S. has become a model of Korean sex offender notification policy, the evaluation of U.S. policy would give an idea on the effectiveness of Korean policy.
Texas has implemented the sex offender registration and notification policy since September 1, 1991 by the Sex Offender Registration Act. In order to see the impact of this policy on the trend of rape rates in the Texas, this research uses monthly rape crime data from the Uniform Crime Reports. For the analysis, this research uses the repeated measures ANOVA and Intervention Time-series Analysis.
The analysis shows that the sex offender registration and notification policy has resulted in the reduction of rape rates with the two-year lag. However, the clearance rate of rape has declined since the inauguration of the policy.