Opinion

Don’t believe the fearmongering about perverts using Pokémon Go

Parents, it’s time to panic: Kids who venture outside to play Pokémon Go are going to end up in the clutches of sex offenders, unless we do something pointless, political and pathetic.

We must fearmonger!

Gov. Cuomo and two other politicians bent on scaring their constituents, Sen. Jeff Klein (D-Bronx) and Sen. Diane Savino (D-SI), are doing just that: Cuomo announced Monday he’s banning paroled sex offenders from playing Pokémon Go, and last week Klein and Savino held a press conference announcing their intention to pass legislation banning all sex offenders from playing Pokémon Go (and other games like it) and requiring these games to eliminate any Pokémon within 100 feet of residences of registered sex offenders.

These politicians are creating a problem out of thin air and then pretending to solve it.

In The Post, Klein made this ominous prediction, which sounds straight out of an episode of “Law & Order”: “A sexual predator who downloads this game holds a guide in their hands — a virtual road map to hunt down their prey.” Similarly, Cuomo announced: “We must ensure these advances don’t become new avenues for dangerous predators to prey on new victims.”

These initiatives fly in the face of the actual facts we know about child safety.

The last thing parents need is another reason to worry, and the last thing our kids need to do is to spend more time inside. Child sex abuse is a serious problem, but decades of solid and consistent research tell us that prevention isn’t about keeping kids away from strangers, including those with prior sex-offense convictions.

These grandstanding efforts aren’t based on the evidence we have about child sexual abuse; sex offenders have very low recidivism rates for new sex offenses; specifically, in New York, about 95 percent of sex offenders are first-time offenders. (And therefore not on the registry!)

This law is about terror and puritanism: Kids are outside having fun, and let’s make that a problem. The reality is that sex offenders aren’t a homogenous group of child predators, with many on the registry convicted of non-violent or non-contact offenses (like flashing, or sexting), or “Romeo and Juliet” offenses. What’s more, about a quarter of children are sexually abused by other minors.

Far from making our kids safer, this kind of boogeyman legislation undermines any efforts to develop rational sex-crime policies that actually would prevent sex offenses and help victims.

Public shaming and draconian punishments only make it harder for those convicted of sex offenses to rebuild their lives; research tells us that the best way to decrease recidivism for any group of offenders is to provide stability and support after incarceration. Demonizing sex offenders over and over at any excuse, for airtime, does the opposite — it actually ensures instability and insecurity.

In fact, we’ve known for years that the registry doesn’t reduce sex offenses or make us any safer — and recent studies, including one in New York, replicate this. In fact, child-sex-abuse rates have been declining since the early ’90s — prior to the implementation of the registry.

Holding a press conference to announce that Pokémon Go turns kids into sitting ducks is worse than pointless grandstanding. It makes parents afraid — very afraid — of something that has never actually happened.

The politicians are following the playbook that politicians used in creating Halloween legislation that bars sex offenders from doing things like wearing costumes or turning on the lights in their homes on the chance they’ll attract trick-or-treaters.

These prohibitions were ostensibly introduced to keep kids safe … despite evidence showing that they were already safe: There is no increase in sex offenses on Halloween. So the laws were either based on ignorance or, worse, scapegoating.

As crime rates continue to drop and our communities are safer than ever, it’s irresponsible for politicians to make us more afraid than we already are. Let kids go outside and play Pokémon Go.

Emily Horowitz is a professor of sociology at St. Francis College and author of “Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us.”