Anti-Molester Activist Proves a Quick Study

With the ink fresh on her CSUN master’s degree in public administration last August, 50-year-old Jayne Murphy Shapiro got a crash course in activism.

A convicted child molester was moving into a Woodland Hills neighborhood, four doors down from one of his victims--the son of one of Shapiro’s friends.

Shapiro swiftly organized a protest in the neighborhood, and the molester chose to remain in Bakersfield.

“I decided, you know what? This is very easy, to get attention, to get the outrage from the community,” said Shapiro, of Sherman Oaks. And that led her to found Kids Safe, an organization that lobbies California leaders for stricter controls on sex offenders.

Less than a year later, Shapiro has testified before the state Legislature on sex crime policy and her organization counts Gov. Pete Wilson, Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-Santa Clarita) and Los Angeles City Council member Laura Chick on its honorary board of directors.

Shapiro said President Clinton’s recent signature of “Megan’s Law,” requiring authorities to notify residents when convicted child molesters move into their neighborhoods, is good news to her organization, which has submitted a list of 19 policy recommendations to the Legislature and California Department of Justice to carry out the federal law’s mandate.

One of Shapiro’s goals is to pressure California into toughening its notification laws, which currently require only that law enforcement officials, not neighbors, be alerted to a convicted molester’s whereabouts.

With Megan’s Law on the books, the state will probably start informing residents, too, she said.

“It doesn’t prevent [molestation] from happening,” Shapiro said of notification. “But it keeps them in check.”

And she dismisses worries of civil libertarians that public notice invades a molester’s privacy. “Once someone has touched a child inappropriately he has lost his rights,” Shapiro said. “One time is too much.”

After the protest last summer, Shapiro, a registered nurse, began researching the state’s laws against sex offenses. “There were more rights for the molester than for the child,” she said.

In February, Shapiro held a conference on child molestation issues and was pleasantly surprised by the turnout. State senators, Assembly members and a representative of Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren joined Shapiro and other activists, including Richard and Maureen Kanka of New Jersey, whose daughter Megan’s death led to the federal law.

The outcome was a 26-page report which is currently making the rounds in Sacramento. The authors--a former prosecutor, a UCLA psychology professor and Shapiro--urge several reforms that go beyond expanded notification laws.

The recommendations include creating multidisciplinary teams to handle molestation cases in order to cut down on the trauma to victims, special training for judges and discouraging prosecutors from changing sex crimes to non-sex crimes in plea bargains.

The latest project is a billboard in West Los Angeles that will tell how to check the statewide registry of convicted molesters: Dial a 900 number (the registry is required by law to be self-funded).

It’s a particularly handy way for businesses like summer camps and day-care programs to ensure their staffs are clean, Shapiro said.