But nothing could have been farther from the truth. Mancuso seemed like her knight in shining armor. He visited Masha several times at the orphanage, took her to nice dinners, and bought her candy. After months of waiting, Mancuso traveled to Russia to meet his new daughter. He contacted a New Jersey adoption agency requesting information on 5-year-old Caucasian girls, and chose Masha from a videotape. Meanwhile, 41-year-old Matthew Mancuso, a divorced father in Pennsylvania, was looking for a little girl to adopt. Soon after recovering from her traumatic ordeal, Masha was sent to an orphanage where she prayed that a good family would come to rescue her. Her own mother tried to kill her when she was only 4 years old by stabbing her in the back of the neck with a kitchen knife. She was born in southern Russia to an alcoholic mother and a father she never knew. * The spelling of the filmmaker's name has been corrected.At 13 years old, Masha has already survived the unthinkable. These people are very unlikely to reoffend, so there's little practical reason to continue shaming them by maintaining a public list of their names. For every truly dangerous predator on the list, there are countless others who carry the "sex offender" label because they sexted a fellow teen or failed to realize they were hooking up with someone on the wrong side of the age-of-consent line. Shawna's story is just one more example of why sex offender registries are cruel and unjust. She struggles to explain to her kids why their mother faces so many restrictions, and she must deal with the pariah status afforded to people who have been branded with "lewd or indecent proposals/acts to child" on a national online database. Employers have fired her when they learned about her status. This is a woman who made a mistake as a teenager-with another teenager-and will be paying for it the rest of her life. I challenge anyone to watch the interview (embedded below) and not feel heartbroken for Shawna.
The Marshall Project recently released a short video interview with Shawna it's part of Untouchable, a documentary by David Feige* about sex offender laws. Now Shawna is spending the rest of her life on the sex offender registry, even though the mother of two is obviously no threat to children. A teen boy expressed interest in her, and they slept together. Years earlier, on her 19th birthday, Shawna and her friends were drinking and celebrating. Shawna is a 35-year-old woman who is legally prohibited from taking her kids to the park.
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