True point. I'm still not sure how much practical use it is, rather than to help people feel better that "something is being done".
I don't think putting the 20-year-old whose seventeen-year-old girlfriend's parents hated him and got him busted on any list for the rest of his life is doing anyone any good. Whether or not it should be a crime, he's very unlikely to be doing it again, and I don't think he's any more likely to commit a serious crime than the average person on the street.
We've got to ask what the point of the registry, and the public part of it, really is. Since we don't have freed-murderer registries and burglar registries and mugger registries. The point of these registries, as they were originally sold to the public, was warning people about those with histories of molesting children, because sexual crimes against children are considered uniquely heinous in our society.
Thus, I think, crimes against non-children should not be on such a public list. If we want to have a public rapist registry or a public indecent-exposure registry, I think those should be separate issues, and I would be against them. We are, it is worth remembering, justifying an abnormal and unprecedented breach of fundamental principles of our justice system to have this at all; specifically, the one that says that extra terms cannot be added to a sentence at a later date, as well as the general principle that criminals, once they've served their time and done their punishment, should be allowed and encouraged to rebuild crime-free lives. We are justifying this in the very narrow area of child molestation because we believe it to be uniquely heinous.
Keeping it narrow keeps the focus on those who are actually the danger we're trying to protect against, and minimizes the harm on others.
I'd also specify that the definition of "sex crimes against children" is defined as being those against those younger than sixteen, and that an age-range exemption be in place so that we're not busting teenagers for having consensual sex with other teenagers within a couple of years of age. That is NOT child molestation and should not be classified as such even if it remains a crime.
So there's my version of what should be done. If we're supposed to be protecting kids, let's protect kids against those who actually have a known history of doing things against kids.