Act to Require Colleges To Name Sex Offenders

College students and employees nationwide will soon have access to the names of convicted sex offenders on their campuses, thanks to the Campus Sex Crime Prevention Act recently passed by Congress.

Two years after President Clinton signs the act into law - as he is expected to do in coming weeks - UNC and other universities will be legally obligated to tell students and employees how they can learn if individuals convicted of sex crimes are enrolled at or employed by the school.

The act, which is supported by Security on Campus, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing campus violence, requires every state to gather information from registered sex offenders about whether they are currently affiliated with a college university.

The state governments must then provide that information to the campus or local police departments, which in turn must make it available to students and employees each year.

But each institution will determine how the information is revealed.

Mary Sechriest, associate University legal counsel, said the act, which passed the Senate on Oct. 11, will benefit the campus community by informing students and allowing University officials to give out names of convicted sex offenders without violating the 1972 Family Educational Right to Privacy Act.

At UNC, the information will probably be made available through the annual Campus Security Report, Sechriest said. The security report, available to students and faculty online at http://main.psafety.unc.edu/securityreport, provides information regarding how to report campus crimes, crime statistics and other safety issues.

In North Carolina, every convicted sex offender is registered on the Internet by the N.C. Sex Offender and Public Protection Registry. The information is available at http://sbi.jus.state.nc.us/sor.

Sechriest said the state, not UNC administrators, will take on the majority of the responsibility for recording additional information about sex offenders. "It seems like this will be something where the University will not feel the burden, but instead it will be on the state registry," she said.

Crime experts doubt the bill will have much effect in North Carolina. "My first impression of the legislation is that it will not considerably affect North Carolina because the information is already on the Internet and available for public access," said Don Roberts, N.C. State Bureau of Investigations Division of Criminal Information supervisor.

But Security on Campus Vice President S. Daniel Carter said the legislation would make it easier to identify sex offenders within the university community. "People don't know whether sex offenders are enrolled or employed at an institution, and this will provide that information on the Web," he said.

The Security on Campus Web site states that the act is part of a larger legislative package, also passed earlier this month, that will provide $10 million annually to colleges and universities over the next five years to prevent campus violence against women.

Security on Campus was founded in 1987 by the parents of Jeanne Ann Cleary, a Lehigh University student who was beaten, raped and murdered by a fellow student.

The State & National Editor can be reached at stntdesk@unc.edu.