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US Intensifies Fight Against Child Pornography
TechnoGuyRob writes "BBC News is reporting that the Bush administration has recently stepped up its measures against child pornography. From the article 'Sadly, the internet age has created a vicious cycle in which child pornography continually becomes more widespread, more graphic, more sadistic, using younger and younger children. [...] Mr. Gonzales also said that he is investigating ways to ensure that ISPs retain records of a user's web activities to track down offenders.'"
I don't think Whorley or his ilk are the best arguments for the importance and necessity of free speech, but Whorley's plight is of particular concern because the material he has been convicted of downloading was concocted from imagination. They were cartoons. In other words, Whorley has been jailed for what can only be seen as pure speech. Whether the current administration really is interested in protecting society from child pornographers is irrelevant. Whorley's successful conviction and extraordinary sentencing set the precedent that pure expression (which may have harmed no one) can be found illegal.
We live in dangerous times and I worry that it won't be long before critics of the US government and/or political opponents of the powerful find themselves in straits similar to Whorley's.
blog
http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/04/04/homeland.arrest/ index.html
I have no idea whether child pornography and predatory pedophilia is a problem which is getting better or worse with time-- but it surely is a real-world problem
No, it isn't. More children are harmed every year by ASPIRIN than are moslested by strangers. You can count the children molested and killed by strangers in the past few years on the fingers of one hand (there were 4). That's in the entire USA. The average is about 1.5 per year, contrast to the 9 kids hit by lightning and the 3 children killed by baseballs.
Virtually all children who are molested are molested by their parents and step-parents, not by strangers on the internet.
The "1 in 5 children solicited online" statistic comes from a study done in Feb 2001. And actually if you read the study (which the government is probably hoping we won't), it turns out HALF the solicitations were from other children, NOT adults. Kinda changes the whole context, doesn't it?
The report found that almost half of the solicitations reported did not come from an adult, but from other children: 'juveniles made 48 percent of the overall and 48 percent of the aggressive solicitations.' (9) The report also points out that only 'one quarter of young people who reported these incidents were distressed by them' (8). 'Sexual solicitations' between children in an internet chat room are the online equivalent of adolescent fumbling, a world away from the threat of paedophilia.
Article here, and more commentary here.
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
When do we start putting cameras inside the home?
"Most sexual abuse is committed by men (90%) and by persons known to the child (70% to 90%), with family members constituting one-third to one-half of the perpetrators against girls and 10% to 20% of the perpetrators against boys" (Finkelhor, 1994).
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
You can count the children molested and killed by strangers in the past few years on the fingers of one hand (there were 4). That's in the entire USA. The average is about 1.5 per year, contrast to the 9 kids hit by lightning and the 3 children killed by baseballs.
Citation, please. And "molested and killed" is unquestionably a poor metric, since I personally know two people who were molested, and not killed, by strangers. And I don't know very many people.
And on top of that we can add in the figures for child sex trafficking, for which the US has allegedly become one of the largest markets.
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Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
Restorative Justice isn't new, it's been around for a while in the field of criminology. People like John Braithwaite, Hal Pepinsky (Hal's a friend of mine), and Nils Christie have been pushing it for years. It's an interesting philosophy and it holds a lot of promise. Unfortunately it tends to be romanticized (empirical support is weak, but then this is not the type of theory or research that typically appeals to empirically oriented criminologists), and it's probably not perfect for every situation (One of my peers is an ex-probation officer that used to be involved in restorative justice meetings - sometimes it was very effective, other times it aggravated the situation).
Here are a few citations of articles you might want to look up, if you've got the academic database access:
Levrant, S., F. T. Cullen, B. Fulton, and J.F. Wozniak (1999) "Reconsidering Restorative Justice: The Corruption of Benevolence Revisited?" Crime and Delinquency 45:3-27.
Karp, D. R. (2001) "Harm and repair: Observing restorative justice in Vermont." Justice Quarterly, 18(4):727-757.
Daly, K. (2002) "Restorative Justice: The Real Story." Punishment and Society 4(1):55-79.
Since this is the real statistic we are dealing with, there is obviously many children being not only molested by relatives, but by strangers whom groom them either IRL or over the internet, by adults in authority positions over them, and so on.
To learn more about how bad the problem really is, you should go over to Perverted-Justice.com. They helped Riverside CA. police arrest 50 men in 1 night whom showed up to have sex with what they thought was a 12-14 year old child. The organization also can claim responsiblity for the successful convictions of 52 other predators caught within the last year.
Umm... In almost every sting operation I've heard of, the first thing the police says online is: I'm x years old. X being 13, 14, or 15.
The next thing that usually happens is the pedo says "what kind of underwear are you wearing, send me pictures of your boobs, i want to do [insert sexual activity here] to you."
Far far more often than not, when the police get their hands on these guy's computers & e-mail accts, they discover that it isn't the first time. I can't cite you chapter and verse, but it is well understood that certain types of sexual predators are repeat offenders, even with counseling/therapy/whatever (example: Catholic Priests).
Anyways, to suggest that unless the act was consummated, the thought is not illegal, is to ignore almost all the 'contributing to the [legal term here] of a minor' & 'child endangerment' laws.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Child porn was mentioned in this week's Savage Love. Point was made that, whereas there used to be a clear distinction between children who were in such porn and the adults who made it, those lines has become blurred, what with the recent myspace arrests and such. I can't come up with a good way to disentangle that. Our current system of laws leads to some ridiculous outcomes (take naked pictures of yourself when you're underage, grow older, be arrested for exploiting... yourself?), but anything I can think of isn't much better.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Oddly enough, these numbers appear to have changed significantly since 1994. In later work by the same author, the rates of sexual assault per 1,000 juveniles have dropped by 56% (p.9), but all of that change has come from lesser victimization by persons known to the victim. In other words, the number of random pervs has stayed a more-or-less constant fraction of the population, but the number of abusive parents/clergy has dropped drastically.
In particular, though, that means anyone braying about how the Internet has made child abuse more common or made the world more dangerous for children is either completely ignorant or is out-and-out lying. "Think of the children" should not mean "ignore the truth".
>When do we start putting cameras inside the home?
The February 2006 Houston plan for police surveillance cameras in private homes has been postponed, so I don't know the answer to "when".
If you're not outraged you're under general anesthesia.