Last week, a 34-year-old man pleaded guilty to coercing a 13-year-old girl he met at a 2010 anime convention.

It’s a sad story, and to some fans, a shocking one. Many fans think of conventions as a safe space, sometimes the only space, where they can truly be themselves. This case reminds us that anime conventions are just like the rest of society: not everybody present has your best interests in mind.

When a tragedy happens, everybody wants to place the blame somewhere. In true samurai fashion, Katsucon, the convention where the offender met his victim, has taken this moment to fall on its sword. They’re planning to “make every effort to check our pre-registration attendee list against local and federally published sex offender registries.”

I love Katsucon and attend every year, but I have a history of disagreeing with their policies. This one, while well intended, puts a huge burden on the convention, one I don’t think they need to bear. For one thing, I don’t think it, or any convention at which a coercion happens, should be held responsible.

A good anime convention needs to provide many services to its attendees. It should have a variety of activities and a logistics team to manage them. It should have an active security staff comprised of professionals as well as volunteers that makes every effort to keep attendees safe inside the convention area.

But it shouldn’t have to police attendees once they leave the area. (It’s important to note that no coercion took place inside the convention.) And Katsucon shouldn’t have to check each of their 7,264 attendees against a sex offender registry. While it’s a noble effort, it’s a huge job. Plus, there are all kinds of snags that can come up, like attendees having common or similar names to sex offenders and being wrongly left out of the con.

Katsucon’s statement says, “Even [with] all of these measures, many times persons of a predatory nature are difficult to identify until it is too late.” This is absolutely true. While this incident was a tragedy, it was not the convention’s fault. The blame lies squarely on the sex offender himself. As attendees, we can start to keep more incidents like this from happening simply by choosing not to coerce fellow attendees.

This is a complicated topic, so I asked my Twitter followers to weigh in on the question: Do anime conventions have a responsibility to screen their attendees for sex offenders? Here are some of the answers:

 

 

 

Thanks to everyone for weighing in. I wish I could have posted every response. It is now clear to me that, well, there is no clear answer to this question. Feel free to add to the debate in the comments.