Last Friday I posted an email interview with Meghan Fagundes, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) who works with juvenile sex offenders, about what Josh Duggar's parents should've done and what parents who find themselves confronting a similar crises should know and what they should do. I sent her a followup question on Friday that didn't make it into the interview. It's a question most parents who discover that one of their children is sexually abusing younger children will want to know the answer to:

Do juvenile sex offenders who are taken in for treatment—or reported to the authorities—wind up on sex-offender registries for the rest of their lives?

Generally speaking, no. The overall sentiment is that juvenile registries are more harmful than anything, and some sexually abusive youth never go through the legal process, so that would not be the outcome for them. However, there are some that do have to register. This is another one of those things that depends on so many factors, one of them being that different states have different laws about who is required to register as a juvenile: http://www.csom.org/train/juvenile/7/7_4.htm.

That said, even if you live in a state without juvenile registration requirements, if you are adjudicated for a sex offense as a juvenile, but don't complete your probation requirements by the age of majority, you are often then required to register as an adult. I've known kids who sexually abused someone at the age of 14, who, by the time they went through the legal process, found an opening at a treatment facility and completed the program, and/or served their time in a detention facility, were well over the age of 18. At that point, if they were still on probation, and then, for example, violated their probation requirements (even with an unrelated charge), it would be possible that they would have to register for life as an adult sex offender.

My entire conversation with Meghan Fagundes is here.