Nicole Pittman

Nicole Pittman has worked exclusively on questioning the wisdom of placing children on sex offender registries since 2005, becoming a leading national expert on policy, litigation, legislation, and research in this area. In 2011, Ms. Pittman published, "A Snapshot of Juvenile Sex Offender Registration and Notification Laws: A Survey of the United States", a comprehensive reference guide on sex offender registration and notification laws applied to children adjudicated delinquent in the U.S. juvenile justice system.

As a 2011 Soros Senior Justice Advocacy Fellow at Human Rights Watch, Ms. Pittman interviewed hundreds of individuals raised on registries across the country to document the abuses that stem from subjecting children to sex offender registration laws. In 2013, Human Rights Watch published the results of her work in Raised on the Registry: The Irreparable Harm of Placing Children on Sex Offender Registries in the US. The report became the first comprehensive examination of the harm of placing children on sex offender registries and features first-person narratives illustrating the harrowing treatment of children, as young as 8, 10, and 12 years old, subjected to lifetime sex offender registration and public notification.

Ms. Pittman has been invited to testify on this issue before 37 state legislatures and the U.S. Congress. She has cultivated and maintained long-term partnerships with several key stakeholders, including juvenile defender organizations; criminal defense policy groups; members of Congress; state officials and legislators; the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children; the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency and Prevention (OJJDP) and various state chapters of organizations for individuals on registries.

Through her Stoneleigh Fellowship, Ms. Pittman is serving as the Director of the Center on Youth Registration Reform at Impact Justice. This national Center supports federal and state lawmakers and leaders working to make communities safer and eliminate the placement of youth on registries through technical, legal, and programmatic assistance. To advance this work, Ms. Pittman is actively collaborating with numerous stakeholders and thought leaders in the fields of sexual violence prevention, reentry, alternative sentencing, and restorative justice.

For seven years, Ms. Pittman worked as a specialist attorney with the Defender Association of Philadelphia. She is the recipient of the 2013 Distinguished Service Award, Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA) and the 2010 National Juvenile Defender Center Robert Shepherd Jr. Leadership Award of Excellence in Juvenile Defense. In 2015, she was named a “Rising Star” by Ozy.com for her work to remove youth from sex offender registries. Ms. Pittman received her JD from Tulane Law School and her undergraduate degree from Duke University.