Sex offender registry
A sex offender registry is a system in various countries designed to allow government authorities to keep track of the activities of sex offenders, including those who have completed their criminal sentences.
Sex offender registration is usually accompanied by residential address notification requirements. In many jurisdictions, registered sex offenders are subject to additional restrictions, including on housing. Those on parole or probation may be subject to restrictions that do not apply to other parolees or probationers. These may include restrictions on being in the presence of underage persons, living in proximity to a school or day care center, owning toys or items targeted towards children, or using the Internet.
Sex offender registries exist in many English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. The United States is the only country that allows public access to the sex offender registry; all other countries in the English-speaking world have sex offender registries only accessible by law enforcement.
In offense-based systems, registration is required when a person is convicted under one of the listed offenses requiring registration.
Sex offender registries by country
Australia
The Australian National Child Offender Register is a web-based system that is used in all states and territories.Authorized police use ANCOR to monitor persons convicted of child sex offences and other specified offences once they have been released from custody, or after sentencing in the event a non-custodial sentence is imposed.
An offender is required to register as a sex offender within seven days of release or sentencing, and thereafter report all relevant details to police for:
- eight years, if convicted of one Class 2 offence;
- 15 years, if convicted of one Class 1 offence or two Class 2 offences;
- the remainder of their life, if convicted of two or more Class 1 offences, three or more Class 2 offences, one Class 1 offence and one or more Class 2 offences, or of one or more offences of persistent sexual abuse of a child.
These above periods are maxima in Tasmania, which allows for any lesser reporting period as is fixed by the court.
On 1 March 2011, there were 12,596 registered offenders across Australia.
On 31 December 2025 Queensland legislation establishing the state's first public child sex offender register, Daniel's Law. The law is named in honour of Daniel Morcombe, a 13-year-old Sunshine Coast boy abducted and murdered in 2003 by a convicted sex offender. The register was introduced to Queensland Parliament in August 2025 and launched by the state government in the end of 2025.
Canada
Canada's National Sex Offender Registry came into force on 15 December 2004, with the passing of the Sex Offender Information Registration Act. The public does not have access to the registry.Since 2001, the Province of Ontario operates its own sex offender registry concurrently with the federal registry. Unlike the federal registry which has an opt-out provision if an offender can convince a judge they are not a threat, the Ontario registry has no such provision. As a result, individuals who have been convicted of a designated offence at any time after 2001, and relocate to Ontario, are obligated to register for a period of at least 10 years. The registration period begins on the day the ex-offender relocates to Ontario.
China
Since 2019, China announced plans to build national database of sex offenders against minors and issued new guidelines for educators, those found sexually harassing students may face a lifetime ban from teaching. Minhang, Shanghai introduced its own sex offender registration system by 2020.In 2021, China announced mandatory reporting system. Plans to create nationwide sex offender registry for schools and universities in China are currently under consideration.
India
India began its sex offender registry in September 2018. The registry is administered by the National Crime Records Bureau.Since its inception its reported to have over 450,000 people to begin with. It can be accessed only by law enforcement agencies and has names, addresses, photographs, fingerprints, DNA samples, and PAN and Aadhaar numbers of convicted sex offenders.
Ireland
Under the 2001 Sex Offenders Act and amended in 2023, all those convicted of certain sexual offenses in Ireland are obliged to notify the Garda Síochána within 3 days their name and address. They must also notify the Garda of any changes to this information or if they intend to stay somewhere other than their registered address for more than 3 days. Individuals are subject to these registration requirements for varying durations, based on a sliding scale of the severity of the sentence they received. This scale is as follows:| Sentence | Notification period |
| Suspended or non-custodial | 5 years |
| 6 months or less | 7 years |
| 6 months to 2 years | 10 years |
| More than 2 years | Indefinitely |
South Korea
South Korea implemented sex offender registry system by 2000 and managed by the Ministry of Justice. In addition, South Korean government has also implemented more measures such as mandatory electronic monitoring for convicted child sex offenders and disclosure of their information upon release.New Zealand
The New Zealand Government planned to introduce a sex offenders register by the end of 2014. It is managed by the New Zealand Police and information is shared between the police, Child, Youth and Family, the Department of Corrections, the Ministry of Social Development, and the Department of Building and Housing—government agencies which deal with child safety. Like the Australian and British registers, the New Zealand sex offenders register is not accessible to the general public but only to officials with security clearance. It also includes individuals who have been granted name suppression. This proposed register received support from both the Fifth National Government and the opposition Labour Party. However political lobby group the Sensible Sentencing Trust criticised the register for its lack of public access.On 4 August 2014, the New Zealand Cabinet formally approved the establishment of a sex offenders register. According to the Minister of Police and Corrections Anne Tolley, Cabinet has agreed to allocate $35.5 million over the next ten years for the technology component of the register and initial ICT work is underway as of 14 August 2014. The sex offenders' register was expected to be operational by 2016 once enabling legislation ws passed and changes were made to the Corrections Act to enable information sharing. On 14 October 2016, the New Zealand Government formally established the Child Sex Offender Register under the Child Protection Act 2016. The CSO Register is administrated by the police with the support of the Department of Corrections. The general public does not have access to the CSO Register. Only Police and Corrections personnel monitoring convicted child sex offenders have access to the database.
South Africa
The National Register for Sex Offenders was established in terms of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 2007. It records the details of anyone convicted of a sexual offence against a child or a mentally disabled person. The public does not have access to the registry; it is available to employers of people who work with children or mentally disabled people, to authorities responsible for licensing institutions that care for children or mentally disabled people, and to those responsible for approving foster care and adoptions. People listed on the register are prohibited from working with children or mentally disabled people, from managing institutions that care for children or mentally disabled people, and from being foster parents or adoptive parents.Trinidad and Tobago
The Sexual Offences Act Chapter 11:28 Part III provides for Notification Requirements for Sex Offenders. This Sex Offenders Registry is only accessible to the Police Service and other branches of government. There are several gaps in this policy noted by members of the Caribbean Committee against Sex Crimes, most notably that the registry only deals with offenses committed within the Jurisdiction of Trinidad and Tobago. Persons who are registered Sex Offenders from other jurisdictions are not registered when they immigrate or are deported to Trinidad and Tobago.On 13 September 2019, Trinidad and Tobago passed THE SEXUAL OFFENCES BILL, 2019 which will allow the High Court discretion to sentence sex offenders to be placed on a public registry available on a website.
Section 48 of the amendment provides for public access to an online sex offenders registry, the court under section 49c may make an order providing for a sex offender to be published on the website established in Section 48.
Trinidad and Tobago is now the smallest country in the world to adopt any form of Public Sex Offender Registration law.
United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom the Violent and Sex Offender Register is a database of records of those required to register with the Police under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, those jailed for more than 12 months for violent offences, and unconvicted people thought to be at risk of offending. The Register is managed by the National Crime Agency and can be accessed by police, National Probation Service and HM Prison Service personnel.United States
In the U.S. federal system, persons registered are put into a tier program based on the offense they were convicted of. Risk-based systems have been proposed but not implemented.In the United States, the vast majority of the states apply offense-based registries, leaving the actual risk level of the offender and severity of the offense uncertain. The few U.S. states applying risk-based systems are pressured by the U.S. federal government to adopt offense-based systems in accordance with Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act. Studies have shown that actuarial risk assessment instruments consistently outperform the offense-based system mandated by federal law. Consequently, the effectiveness of offense-based registries has been questioned by professionals, and there is evidence suggesting that such registries are counterproductive.
Some aspects of the current sex offender registries in the United States have been widely criticized by civil rights organizations Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, professional organizations Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers and Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, reformist groups Reform Sex Offender Laws, Inc., Women Against Registry and USA FAIR, and by child safety advocate Patty Wetterling, the Chair of National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. There are virtually no studies finding U.S. registries effective, prompting some researchers to call them pointless, many even calling them counterproductive, arguing that they increase the rate of re-offense.
In 2022, despite opposition from the Department of Justice, many states' attorneys-general, and NCMEC, the American Law Institute approved a revision to the Model Penal Code which included elimination of the registry for most offenses.
Sex offender registries in the United States consist of federal and state level systems designed to collect information of convicted sex offenders for law enforcement and public notification purposes. All 50 states and District of Columbia maintain registries that are open to public via sex offender registration websites, although some registered sex offenders are visible to law enforcement only. According to NCMEC, as of 2015 there were 843,260 registered sex offenders in the United States. Registrants have to periodically appear in person to their local law enforcement for purposes of collecting their personal information, such as photograph, fingerprints, name, scars, tattoos, living address, place of employment and vehicle information.
Information pertaining to names, addresses, physical description and vehicles are made public via official websites. In addition, registrants are often subject to restrictions that bar loitering, working or living within exclusion zones that sometimes cover entire cities and have forced registrants into encampments, such as the Julia Tuttle Causeway sex offender colony.
Anthropology professor Roger Lancaster has called the restrictions "tantamount to practices of banishment" that he deems disproportional, noting that registries include not just the "worst of the worst", but also "adults who supplied pornography to teenage minors; young schoolteachers who foolishly fell in love with one of their students; men who urinated in public, or were caught having sex in remote areas of public parks after dark." In many instances, individuals have pleaded guilty to an offense like urinating in public decades ago, not realizing the result would be their placement on a sex offender registry, and all of the restrictions that come with it.
Depending on jurisdiction, offenses requiring registration range in their severity from public urination or children and teenagers experimenting with their peers, to violent predatory sexual offenses. In some states non-sexual offenses such as unlawful imprisonment may require sex offender registration. According to Human Rights Watch, children as young as 9 have been placed on the registry for sexually experimenting with their peers. Juvenile convicts account for as much as 25 percent of the registrants. The federal Adam Walsh Act pressured states to register juveniles by tying federal funding to the degree to which state registries comply with the federal law's classification system for sex offenders.
States apply differing sets of criteria dictating which offenders are made visible to public. Some states scientifically evaluate the future risk of the offender and hide low-risk offenders from public. In other states, offenders are categorized according to the tier level related to statute of conviction. Duration of registration vary usually from 10 years to life depending on the state legislation and tier/risk category. Some states exclude low tier offenders from public registries while in others, all offenders are publicly listed. Some states offer possibility to petition to be removed from the registry under certain circumstances.
A majority of states apply systems based on conviction offenses only, where sex offender registration is mandatory if person pleads or is found guilty of violating any of the listed offenses. Under these systems, the sentencing judge does not sentence the convict into sex offender registry and cannot usually use judicial discretion to forgo registration requirement, even if they think the registration would be unreasonable, taking into account mitigating factors pertaining to individual cases. Instead, registration is a mandatory collateral consequence of criminal conviction. Due to this feature, laws target a wide range of behaviors and tend to treat all offenders the same. Civil right groups, law reform activists, academics, some child safety advocates, politicians and law enforcement officials think that current laws often target the wrong people, swaying attention away from high-risk sex offenders, while severely impacting lives of all registrants, and their families, attempting to re-integrate to society.
The Supreme Court of the United States has upheld sex offender registration laws twice, in two respects. Several challenges to some parts of state level sex offender laws have succeeded, however.