Parents of both the abused and the accused are seeking to reform policy on juveniles who sexually offend. Illustration by Geoff McFetridge

One morning in 2007, Leah DuBuc, a twenty-two-year-old college student in Kalamazoo, began writing an essay for English class that she hoped would save her life. She knew that people like her had been beaten, bombed, shot at, killed. The essay aired details about her past that she’d long tried to suppress; by posting it on her class’s server, where anyone who Googled her name could find it, she thought she might be able to quiet the whispers, the threats, and possibly make it easier to find a job. Her story, she warned, “is not a nice one, but hopefully it will have a happy ending.”

DuBuc had grown up in Howell, Michigan, a small town of berry and melon farmers. In high school, she had thrived. She had earned straight A’s, written for the school newspaper, led Students Against Driving Drunk (she voted to change the name to Students Against Destructive Decisions, she says, to stress that “there are lots of bad decisions that can get you killed”), and performed in “Grease” and “Once Upon a Mattress,” while working part time as a cashier at Mary’s Fabulous Chicken & Fish. “High school was bliss for me,” DuBuc said recently. “I tried not to dwell on the stuff that wasn’t good.” But, as she was about to start her freshman year at Western Michigan University, she got a call from a close childhood friend, Victoria, who asked, “Did you know you’re on the public sex-offender registry?”

Her friend, who had just given birth to a baby girl, had logged on to the Michigan Public Sex Offender Registry Web site to search for local predators. She had entered her Zip Code, and there was Leah’s face—her copper bangs, her wide cheeks, her brown eyes staring blankly from the photograph. Her name, weight, and height were listed; so was the address where she’d grown up, playing beneath tall pines and selling five-cent rocks that she’d painted with nail polish. Something DuBuc had done at the age of ten had caught up with her. Victoria knew the story, which DuBuc described as “play-acting sex,” in elementary school, with her younger step-siblings. Online browsers would see only the words on the page: “CRIMINAL SEXUAL CONDUCT.”

A senior in college now, DuBuc was tired of hiding. She wanted everyone to know what it was like to join the many thousands of people across the country who are on the registry—often decades into adulthood—for crimes they committed as children. “After reading my very condensed life story,” she wrote, “I am convinced you will agree that I am a strong, determined young woman, who has risen above the obstacles which have been set in my path.” On an April morning, she published the essay, titled “So, Who is Leah DuBuc Anyway?,” and prayed for relief.

When I visited DuBuc in Howell last summer, I had already spoken to a number of people who had been accused of sex offenses as juveniles and ended up on a public registry. Some, like DuBuc, had been placed on the registry for things they’d done before they reached their teens.

In Charla Roberts’s living room, not far from Paris, Texas, I learned how, at the age of ten, Roberts had pulled down the pants of a male classmate at her public elementary school. She was prosecuted for “indecency with a child,” and added to the state’s online offender database for the next ten years. The terms of her probation barred her from leaving her mother’s house after six in the evening, leaving the county, or living in proximity to “minor children,” which ruled out most apartments. When I spoke to the victim, he was shocked to learn of Roberts’s fate. He described the playground offense as an act of “public humiliation, instead of a sexual act”—a hurtful prank, but hardly a sex crime. Roberts can still be found on a commercial database online, her photo featured below a banner that reads, “PROTECT YOUR CHILD FROM SEX OFFENDERS.”

New technologies in the hands of teens are another route to the registry. In Prince William County, Virginia, two years ago, a seventeen-year-old high-school junior sent a sexual video to his teen-age girlfriend, and found himself charged with manufacturing and distributing child pornography. The county prosecutor obtained a search warrant to photograph “the erect penis of the defendant.” (Pursuit of the photo was abandoned only after there was a public outcry.) In Fayetteville, North Carolina, a sixteen-year-old girl faced multiple felony charges for “sexting” a picture of herself to her boyfriend. According to the county sheriff’s warrant, she was both the adult perpetrator of the crime at hand—“sexual exploitation of a minor”—and its child victim. Her boyfriend faced similar charges.

Most juveniles on the sex-offender registry pose a more daunting public-policy challenge: they have caused sexual harm to other children, through non-consensual touch and other abusive behaviors. Childhood sexual abuse is troublingly widespread. According to the Centers for Disease Control, as many as one out of every four girls and one out of every six boys have experienced some form of sexual abuse before the age of eighteen, and in a third of such cases, the National Center on the Sexual Behavior of Youth says, the offenses were committed by other juveniles. “The single age with the greatest number of offenders from the perspective of law enforcement was age 14,” a study sponsored by the Department of Justice notes.

Often, these incidents go unreported. But the devastation that may result from childhood sexual assault can last a lifetime, fuelling depression, addiction, suicidal thoughts, and other signs of post-traumatic stress. Compounding the original trauma is the fact that victims’ voices are often silenced, sometimes by those in positions of trust or power.

Kids who sexually harm other kids seldom target strangers. A very small number have committed violent rapes. More typical is the crime for which Josh Gravens, of Abilene, Texas, was sent away, more than a decade ago, at the age of thirteen. Gravens was twelve when his mother learned that he had inappropriately touched his eight-year-old sister on two occasions; she sought help from a Christian counselling center, and a staffer there was legally obliged to inform the police. Gravens was arrested, placed on the public registry, and sent to juvenile detention for nearly four years. Now, at twenty-nine, he’s become a leading figure in the movement to strike juveniles from the registry and to challenge broader restrictions that he believes are ineffectual. He has counselled more than a hundred youths who are on public registries, some as young as nine. He says that their experiences routinely mirror his own: “Homelessness; getting fired from jobs; taking jobs below minimum wage, with predatory employers; not being able to provide for your kids; losing your kids; relationship problems; deep inner problems connecting with people; deep depression and hopelessness; this fear of your own name; the terror of being Googled.”

Often, juvenile defendants aren’t seen as juveniles before the law. At the age of thirteen, Moroni Nuttall was charged as an adult, in Montana, for sexual misconduct with relatives; after pleading guilty, he was sentenced to forty years in prison, thirty-six of which were suspended, and placed on a lifetime sex-offender registry. In detention, the teen-ager was sexually assaulted and physically abused. Upon his release, his mother, Heidi, went online in search of guidance. “I’m trying to be hopeful,” she wrote on an online bulletin board, but “I wonder if he even stands a chance.”