I think the target audience is people who read the daily mail / watch fox news etc.

The same people who are staying inside, petrified of catching swine flu and dying from it.

Are you saying that if you had a young son/daughter, and their walk-to-school route when straight past a sex offenders house you wouldn't consider taking another route? Theres something like an 8% rearrest rate for treated and ~15% rearrest rate for untreated offenders. That's a risk I wouldn't knowingly take.

The biggest threat for your children is their family and their friends. Only in about 10% of cases sexual abuse is commited by strangers. Instead of having them walk another route, why not forbid your relatives from seeing them?

That's like saying you shouldn't buy a lottery ticket because its unlikely you are going to win. Littlewood's law says we are likely to experience events that are one in a million relatively frequently.

So are you really saying that you wouldn't change their route to school, given that there is somewhere at least 0.8-1.5% chance of this sex offender reoffending with a non-family member? (Assuming a reoffence rate of 8-15%, with 10% of those people offending with non-family members)

>> "That's like saying you shouldn't buy a lottery ticket because its unlikely you are going to win."

Yes, which is why lottery tickets are largely just an unfair tax on the poor and uneducated.

I don't play the lottery for similar reasons I don't bother finding out the personal criminal history of everyone living in my town - waste of time. YMMV

They're more likely to get hit by a car.

How many sex offenders have offended random school kids walking to school past their house? I'd say it's likely to be miniscule.