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In
July 1994 seven-year-old Megan Kanka was brutally raped and murdered by
a convicted child molester in a New Jersey suburb. The resultant
legislation based on her case, federally enacted in May 1996, is
entitled Megan’s Law and addresses sex offenders. It requires all sex
offenders convicted of sex crimes against children in the United States
to register with local law enforcement agencies, as well as the
community notification of the presence of a child sex offender in the
neighborhood (1). In addition, many extensions of this law at the state
level include a geographic component: that sex offenders be restricted
from taking up residence within a specified distance of sites deemed to
be child congregation areas (i.e. parks, schools, day care centres,
community centres, libraries, etc.).
Megan Kanka
It is within the geographic nature of Megan’s Law and its variations
that we situate our project. We wanted to examine what conditions such
legislation could hypothetically create in our own city. While
Vancouver officials seem to have no immediate intention of enacting
such laws, and none currently exist at the federal level (beyond a
confidential central database of all convicted sex offenders), we were
interested in analyzing the residential exclusionary zones that would
be created were such legislation put into place.
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