The system *is* in place to help protect the kids

That is simply not true. The system is not in place to help protect kids. If it were, they would have studied the problem and come up with a system that actually protects them. The system they have set up without any study or oversight, actually makes matters worse. It was a knee jerk reaction by politicians attempting to appease the masses who rallied behind the family of murder victim Megan Kanka. The system is not in place to protect kids, it is in place to make parents feel better.

If parents want to protect their kids, they need to put safeguards in place so that it doesn't matter if their neighbor is a known sex offender or not. Their security policy needs to be just as strong at protecting their children from known sex offenders as it is at protecting them from ones who've never been caught. If they treat known sex offenders differently from how they treat unknown ones, then there is a major problem in their security policy. A good security policy for protecting your children is one where if you did find out someone was a sex offender, you would not need to change anything at all about how your children are allowed to interact with him, because you had already taken that possibility into account and had safeguards in place.

That's the core problem with these registries. They promote bad policymaking in the part of parents. The safest policies are ones that would make knowing who the pedophiles are irrelevant because your children would be equally protected regardless. Yet, that's not the type of policy these registries promote. If your child is not allowed to be alone with an adult, then it is irrelevant if the adult is a pedophile or not because he is not allowed to be alone with them.