The thing about the protesters in Ryde worrying about pedophile Dennis Ferguson is that they’re completely right to be worried. Or any pedophile.
How do I know this? Because years ago, I worked for the Perth CIB for three months (temporary job) and spent all day microfiching criminal records. Zillions of pages. The thing was, we were given the major responsibility of selecting what to record and what to throw out – though the “throw out” bins were examined and thoroughly checked to make sure we didn’t do anything wrong.
So we’d have to quickly read through the records – some had hundreds of pages – and pick out the key pages and put them on a photocopier-type machine that microfiched them. I can tell you, the ones that had done sex offences did them all through their lives. An offence at 18; still doing it at 90. Long breaks between offences, maybe cause they got married or didn’t get caught for a while. But if I found a major sex offence in old age, there were usually ones earlier in about 98 per cent of cases.
That’s anecdotal from the thousands of pages I copied. If someone wants to do a study, I bet they’d get the same results.
The SMH recently published about elderly people still having a sex drive, it doesn’t wane for everyone: “About 40 per cent of men aged 75 to 79 who replied to the survey said they were sexually active, and almost 30 per cent of men aged 80 to 84 had had sex in the past 12 months.”
Also, last year, I was at a community event where I wasn’t allowed on the same huge bus as children because I “didn’t have sex offender clearance”. I’d just wanted to get a bus ride to the next venue. And I couldn’t interact with the children playing in a park or at lunchtime – there were hundreds of people there. A 14-yr-old girl had been forced to come along to the event because “she was young enough to not need to get a clearance” and they’d desperately needed extra people to help look after the children.
It staggers me that people who don’t have a criminal record and are not recorded on any sex offender’s list are not allowed anywhere near children – to help out where there’s a shortage of child minders. I’d have to walk around with a permanent and up-to-date ”clearance” to ever volunteer to help out.
Cotton Ward 