If We Know Their Names, Are Women Safer?

Antigua and Barbuda wants to make its sex offenders registry public. For women, that could be significant. But it also raises a bigger question about what safety really looks like.

I saw the news about the Antigua sex offender registry this weekend and my first reaction was probably the same as a lot of women’s:

Good. Let us know who they are.

Antigua and Barbuda’s Prime Minister Gaston Browne has announced plans to make the country’s Sex Offenders Registry more widely accessible to the public, including photographs of people who have been convicted of sexual offences.

The registry itself isn’t new. Antigua and Barbuda passed its National Sex Offender Register Act in 2022, and the register has reportedly been operational since November of that year. What would be new is who gets to see it.

Right now, the information isn’t simply available for anyone to search. Access has to be sought through the Commissioner of Police. Under the proposed change, the public could have much easier access to information about convicted offenders. The Government has not yet announced exactly how that will work, what information will be published or when it will happen. (Today Antigua)

And, on the surface, I understand the appeal immediately.

Imagine being able to know. Being able to know that the person spending time around your children has previously been convicted of a sexual offence. Being able to know before someone takes up a role in a school, daycare or another space where they have access to vulnerable people. Being able to know something about the person you are allowing into your home, your family or your life.

Just weeks before the Prime Minister’s announcement, concerns were raised at Antigua and Barbuda’s National Child Protection Town Hall about convicted abusers potentially being able to work in sensitive environments because the register was not public. (Antigua Observer Newspaper)

So yes, information matters.

But the more I thought about it, the more another question kept coming up:

Does knowing their names make women safer?

A sex offenders registry can only tell us about the people who made it all the way through the system and were convicted. It cannot tell us about the person who was never reported. The person who was reported but never charged. The person everybody seems to have a story about, but nobody has ever successfully prosecuted. The person whose behaviour has been whispered about for years.

And that distinction matters.

A public registry could be one more tool women have to protect themselves and their families. But it cannot become a substitute for conversations about reporting, investigation, prosecution, survivor support and prevention.

There is another layer to this too: privacy.

Prime Minister Browne has already acknowledged that publishing the identities and photographs of convicted offenders could raise constitutional questions. (Today Antigua)

But in a small Caribbean society, there is another kind of privacy we should be thinking about as well: that of survivors.

If an offender is publicly identified, how easy might it be in some cases for people to work out who the victim was? If the offence happened within a family, could naming him effectively identify her? If the survivor was a child, what protections will be put in place?

These aren’t arguments against a public registry. They are questions worth asking before we decide that publication on its own equals justice. Perhaps this is where the conversation becomes bigger than Antigua and Barbuda.

Across the Caribbean, women understand what it means to live in communities where everybody knows everybody or knows somebody who knows somebody. That closeness can be beautiful. It can also make speaking out incredibly complicated.

What happens when the person accused is respected? When he’s somebody’s uncle, cousin, boss, church member, coach or friend? When reporting something means knowing there’s a very real chance that people in your community will know exactly who you are talking about?

A public registry addresses one part of that problem: what happens after someone has been convicted.

But women’s safety begins much earlier. It begins with believing women and children when they speak.  With making reporting feel possible.  With properly investigating allegations. With ensuring survivors have somewhere to turn. With teaching children about boundaries and consent. With institutions taking safeguarding seriously. And with communities becoming less comfortable protecting reputations at the expense of people who have been harmed. 

I still come back to my first reaction when I saw the headline.

Yes. I think people should be able to know.

Giving women and families more information about convicted sexual offenders could give them another tool with which to make decisions about their safety.

That matters.

But I don’t want us to mistake knowing a list of names for solving the problem.

A registry tells us who has already been caught and convicted.

The much harder work is creating Caribbean societies where sexual violence is harder to commit, easier to report, properly investigated and taken seriously when someone finally finds the courage to say:

This happened to me.