The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

All across the nation it is like this. Laws passed in blusters of well-meaning. Laws failing, because so rarely do the notifications work and so much of the burden falls on already burdened parents. You could make yourself sick worrying about who was on the registry and who’d moved into your town, you could drum those people out of your town or under a highway overpass, and half the time you’d be worrying about someone who had gay sex a few years before it was legalized in an area, or someone who slept with his underage girlfriend when he was barely of age himself, or someone who did something awful thirty years ago and had been all right since. In some places even prepubescent children will end up on the registries, gone too far in schoolyard games of doctor. And even then you’d only be worrying about the people you knew to worry about. About those someone had called the law on. Not the coach, the best friend, the babysitter, the stepfather, the uncle. The grandfather. Twenty years after these laws begin, sexual abuse rates won’t have dropped at all.