Kids on the Sex-Offender Registry: A Marie Claire Survey

frank rodriguez — (Image credit: Sarah Wilson)

Every state has a sex-offender registry, and there are now more than 650,000 registered sex offenders nationwide. Not all states register juveniles. Of the 34 that do, only 23 keep track of the number of juveniles on the registry. In those 23 states, there are an estimated 23,000 registered juveniles. No states monitor whether the number of juveniles is on the rise or not, but one state, Oregon, provided an estimate, reporting a 70 percent jump in that state since 2005.

To be sure, some of the juveniles on the registry are guilty of violent sexual crimes. The grassroots movement in writer Abigail Pesta's story is trying to help a different group of people: the high-school lovers who get labeled as sex offenders for behavior that may technically be a crime, but which, activists argue, should fall into a different category.

As of May 2011, here are the 23 states that register juveniles, along with the number of registered juveniles in each state: