'Excuse me, are you Brooke?" I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to find an anxious Target employee holding a walkie-talkie.
Apparently, somewhere in between the time I entered and exited the fitting room, another customer's daughter had gone missing. She was 12 years old with shoulder-length brown hair and a blue jacket. Employees kept hoping they'd found her each time they saw me. Normally, I'd be annoyed to be repeatedly mistaken for a middle-schooler, but in this case I just sadly shook my head "no" each time.
People were frantically searching the aisles and calling her name. The look in their eyes showed that they were all hoping for the best -- maybe she was still in the store or looking at kittens at the nearby PetsMart -- and dreading the worst.
After I left the strip mall, I listened to the radio hoping not to hear an Amber Alert broadcast. Later, I checked online and couldn't find any mention of a missing girl in Pittsburgh on GoogleNews.
No news is good news, right?
The experience was unnerving and brought to mind some things that have been bothering me for a while. Anyone in this generation can remember the wave of kidnappings in the 1980s, or at least the extreme fear that came with it. Our childhoods were full of lectures about never straying from the backyard or talking to strangers. Hell, I was one of those stupid little kids on a leash -- a curlicue, rainbow-colored elastic leash -- but a leash nonetheless.
Recently, concerned parents have taken things a step further, believing that new measures will help to protect their children even more. Earlier this year, several counties around Philadelphia passed ordinances to ban registered sex offenders from living, working or sometimes even walking the streets in the area. This has had a domino effect: neighboring counties are working on similar legislation to prevent displaced offenders from moving into their towns.
In the case of areas where sex offenders can still live, parents' advocacy groups say that Pennsylvania's version of Megan's Law does not do enough. The federal law requires that states actively notify residents of sex offenders and sexually violent predators living in the area but states get to choose how much information they release.
A little over a year ago, the law was altered to make all the information available online to provide greater access. However Pennsylvania's database, unlike those of some other states, only gives the street address of sexually violent predators and does not give a physical profile of the offender or general information about the offender's victim.
In the future, sexually violent predators could possibly be required to wear global-positioning devices for the rest of their lives if the bill written by state Sen. Jane Orie passes. At the moment, the only way to find out whether there is a registered sexually violent predator living nearby is by doing a general county, city or zip code search. Then you have to click on each individual name that is listed.
For example, I now know that there are about 40 registered sex offenders living or working in the three square miles that make up the 19104 zip code. None of them are sexually violent predators. There are a lot of things I still don't know and one of them is how this information will help me or a parent at all.
With this additional information and restrictions, parents will either be under the impression that sex offenders can't live in their neighborhood or that they know of all the ones that do. Yet when an offender goes unregistered, or merely visits another county, that sense of safety and control is false. Knowledge may be power but only up to certain point.
The thought of losing a kid is a scary one. That I don't deny. As the frightened children of the 1980s grow up, I'm afraid that we will support even more reactionary laws and ordinances without considering their level of effectiveness. Unfortunately, even with the strictest ordinances, the most informative databases or the tightest leashes, it will always be possible for a child to go missing. After all, I'm still a little worried about Brooke.
Amara Rockar is a junior political science major from St. Louis. Out of Range appears on Tuesdays.
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