The Cayman Islands Government had already instructed a working group to recommend how to set up a Sex Offender Register months before Parliament voted unanimously last week to call for one, the Minister of Social Development and Innovation told the House.

Responding on Thursday, 1 October to Private Member's Motion No. 12 of 2026-2027, moved by Deputy Speaker Pearlina McGaw-Lumsden MP and seconded by Roy Tatum MP, Isaac Rankine MP said that when Cabinet approved a multi-agency working group on sexual offences legislation in April, "part of the approval by the Cabinet at that time was for the working group to make recommendations for the implementation of a sex offenders registry in the Cayman Islands". He called the motion "a happy coincidence" because "the work is already underway", and said Government would accept it.

The motion passed on a division of 18 ayes with one Member absent. On Monday, 5 October, a companion motion from Dwayne Seymour MP calling for a review of all legislation on sexual offences against children, higher maximum penalties and mandatory minimum terms for the most serious offences passed on a division of 17 ayes with two absent. In both cases the Deputy Speaker asked for the division after the voice vote had carried, so that every name would be on the record.

Parliament has not yet published the Official Hansard Report for either sitting. The quotations in this report are taken from the Government's broadcast of the proceedings.

A confidential register, by design

The register motion is explicit on its form. It resolves that the register be "established as a confidential law-enforcement and safeguarding mechanism that protects victims, safeguards personal data, and respects constitutional and human rights obligations" and "maintained strictly as an administrative tool, ensuring that it does not constitute a publicly accessible or searchable database". It asks Government to consult, taking account of the Consultation Draft Sex Offender Register Bill, 2009, and to return within twelve months with a legislative framework and timetable.

Mrs McGaw-Lumsden MP told the House she was "not proposing a public database" but "a confidential law enforcement and safeguarding mechanism that can sit alongside the tools we already have", and that "a public database could create serious risk of misidentification, harassment, vigilantism, and the unnecessary exposure of families and victims". She distinguished a register from Sexual Harm Prevention Orders, which the courts have been able to impose since 2017: "an SHPO and a sexual offender registry are not the same thing. They serve different purposes."

She also told Members why the matter was personal to her, describing her own experience of an attempted sexual assault that "was not carried through" but "left me with mental and physical scars". She said she was "not asking this honourable House to support this motion because of what happened to me. I'm asking you to support it because of what could happen to someone else."

By Monday she had heard the objection. Speaking on Mr Seymour MP's motion, she said that "over the weekend I received queries about the purpose of the sex offender registry, particularly the question of why the proposed registry will simply not be an open, publicly searchable registry", adding that "after more than two decades of discussion about a sex offender register in the Cayman Islands, Caymanians are entitled to expect meaningful action, not simply the appearance of progress". She said the question of "an open register, closed register or a system where certain information is made available" where there is "a legitimate safeguarding need" could be considered in consultation, and that "we must not confuse visibility with effectiveness. That doesn't mean I'm opposed to public access." The Speaker then stopped her from reviving the register debate and directed her to the motion before the House.

Mr Tatum MP, seconding, said "a sex offender register is not a silver bullet", but that with SHPOs and the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangement in place since June, a register was "the missing link" because "it creates the mandatory notification regime". The three, he said, "should function as one coherent integrated safeguarding system". He cited RCIPS figures of 89 recorded sexual offences in 2023, 104 in 2024 and 125 in 2025, "an increase of approximately 40 per cent in two years", and noted "those figures are recorded offences, not convictions". Government, he said, would also have to settle how a new regime applied to people already in prison, under supervision or subject to an SHPO when it came into force, as the UK had to when its scheme began in 1997. Registered offenders in the UK, he noted, must confirm their details with the police every year even if nothing has changed, and must report any change of name or address the moment it happens.

What the working group is doing

Mr Rankine MP first announced the working group on 30 April, when he told Parliament that Cabinet had "approved a working group to be established to review the existing legislative landscape to address sexual offences, including offences in the digital and online spaces and for necessary bespoke legislation to be developed", and that the Attorney General "will ultimately be tasked with bringing the draft Bill to Parliament under the remit of his Portfolio". The Hansard of that statement did not record who sat on the group.

On Monday the Minister put its membership on the record "for the benefit of the listening public": the RCIPS, the Department of Community Rehabilitation, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Attorney General's Chambers, the Ministry of District Administration and Home Affairs, the Ministry of Education and Training, the Ministry of Health, Environment and Sustainability and his own ministry. He said he was "reliably informed that the group is considering whether the maximum penalty currently available adequately reflects the seriousness of sexual offences, including the most serious offences against children, and whether there are circumstances in which mandatory minimums of imprisonment should also be considered".

On Thursday he had cautioned that the group's recommendations "are still being developed and will be for Cabinet's consideration once they are completed", that "putting names into a database does not itself protect or safeguard the public from harm", and that the 2009 draft "is being considered and evaluated by the working group", although "we would not be well served simply adopting a 17-year-old legislative proposal as it is". He said the consistent pattern in the UK, Bermuda, Jamaica and Canada was that registers "are held by law enforcement and are not publicly available except for specific permissions through controlled disclosure". Confidentiality mattered particularly here, he added, because "in a small jurisdiction, information about an offender can sometimes inadvertently reveal information about a victim", and measures meant to protect victims must not "expose them to further stigma or potential retraumatisation".

The Attorney General, Samuel Bulgin, confirmed on Monday that "there's a task force looking at the Penal Code and all the related legislation. Mr Speaker, my Chamber is a part of that working group." On Thursday he had told the House that the register "was something that was mooted perhaps 17 years ago", when "there was no commitment, there was no clear commitment to move it along", and that "I was privy to some of the discussions and some of the questions that were being asked". Since then, he said, "the population has almost doubled" and experience had shown that offenders in positions of trust "if they are called out or identified in one place, they somehow later on pop up somewhere else. They don't go away. So it is quite important that you have something like a register." He said he hoped to speak on the eventual bill "before I take my leave".

The 2009 draft

The Sex Offender Register Bill, 2009, a consultation draft dated 22 January 2009 and, according to the motion, tabled on 16 February 2009, would have required anyone convicted of or cautioned for a scheduled sexual offence to report within 24 hours, giving names and aliases, date of birth, address, properties regularly visited and employment, with photographs, fingerprints and a buccal swab taken. Registrants would have reported annually and on any change, and before travelling abroad or spending more than a day away from home within the Islands. Registration periods ran from five years for a non-custodial sentence to life for anyone imprisoned for more than 30 months. Access was restricted to the registry and to authorities approved by Cabinet, with five years' imprisonment for unauthorised disclosure. The draft left open whether the police, the Department of Community Rehabilitation or the then Portfolio of Internal and External Affairs would run it.

Penalties and the second motion

Mr Seymour MP opened his motion late on Thursday night and the debate resumed on Monday. He told the House "I see far too many five-year sentences or less" and, in reply on Monday, "can we all agree no more five-year sentences". Without a register, he said, offenders "just move from area to area hoping that no one would recognise them. They grow a beard. They cut their hair."

Minister of District Administration and Home Affairs Nickolas DaCosta MP said mandatory minimums "would not be an entirely new concept in Cayman law", citing what he said was the Penal Code provision on abuse of a position of trust involving a child, which already carries minimum terms of five years on a guilty plea and seven years otherwise, with a court able to depart from them in exceptional circumstances. He said the review should also examine why the law draws its age lines at 16, 17 and 18.

Minister of Finance Rolston Anglin MP recalled seconding a private member's motion on 22 June 2001 that sought to raise the then seven-year term for carnal knowledge of a girl under 16. "When courts hand down sentences that shock the conscience of good people is when we put in place mandatory minimums," he said. "I know they're very blunt instruments." Christopher Saunders MP, seconding Mr Seymour MP, recalled his own motion in the 2017-2018 session seeking minimum sentences of 15 and 10 years for defilement, which he said was not accepted because "the courts needed the flexibility in sentencing".

Mr Rankine MP told the House on Monday that "the overwhelming majority of referrals of child abuse and neglect have come from government entities, whereas private sector schools, hospitals and organisations that service children report to MASH at significantly lower rates". On 30 April he had given Parliament the RCIPS figures of 125 sexual offences in 2025, up 20 per cent, with 58 per cent of victims children, and then Deputy Governor Franz Manderson had reported 2,773 child safeguarding reports to the Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub in 2025, up from 490 in 2017. On Thursday the Minister said 226 of the 2025 referrals related to suspected child sexual abuse.

What happens next

The register motion gives Government twelve months to return with a framework and timetable. Mr Rankine MP said on Thursday that the regulations needed to commence the Children (Amendment) Act, 2024 would be laid during this sitting, and the Order Papers show eight sets of Children Act regulations laid on 1 and 2 October, including the Children's Homes Regulations, 2026 and the Children (Advisory Panel) Regulations, 2026. The Children (Amendment) Act, Mr Seymour MP's motion notes, was passed on 16 December 2024 and "has not yet been brought into force".