'Call For a Ban On Child Sex Robots' (bbc.com)

An anonymous reader shares a BBC report: There should be a ban on the import of sex robots designed to look like children, the author of a new report into the phenomenon has said. Prof Noel Sharkey said that society as a whole needed to consider the impact of all types of sex robots. His Foundation for Responsible Robotics has conducted a consultation on the issue. Only a handful of companies were currently making sex robots, said Prof Sharkey. But, he added, the upcoming robot revolution could change that. The report, Our sexual future with robots, was written to focus attention on an issue barely discussed at the moment, he said. The report acknowledged that finding out how many people actually owned such robots was difficult because the companies that made them did not release the numbers. But, said Prof Sharkey, it was time society woke up to a possible future where humans and robots had sex. "We do need policymakers to look at it and the general public to decide what is acceptable and permissible," he said. "We need to think as a society what we want to do about it. I don't know the answers -- I am just asking the questions."

Comments

There is much, much worse!

[Frosty Piss]

Sure, I know this is a serious issue because, well, it has to be: Children and Sex are in the same headline... But I want to bring your attention to another, more despicable, more disgusting, more heartbreaking, and damn right more obscene perversion that is just out of control in our society: Robotic Sex Horses. When will these stallions be unchained and set free? God almighty, I need to go take a shower

Re: There is much, much worse!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't we just instead destroy Noel Sharkey instead? It's cheaper to just destroy one pointless human than bother with its attention seeking behaviors.

Re:There is much, much worse!

[jellomizer]

If only people could get past their middle school snickering when ever sex is brought up.
Western society is currently expanding its view on sexuality and acceptance of different forms of sexuality as legally and socially acceptable. We are now realizing that sexual preference is not a choice but part of the person.
Now we have the problem with pedophiles. They have a sexual attraction to kids. There isn't much we can do about that, we can't change them. But unlike many other sexual preferences this leads to dangerous behavior. Because the children who are the object of their affection are not in a position of power to consent, and haven't learned or even considered learning stradigied to avoid unwanted attention. That is why any action can get them in jail and labeled as a sex offender for life.
However there are a lot of these people who are not in jail, and due to their moral compass they choose to repress their sexual tendencies as they know the harm is in it.
But that is where the problem is sexuality is a core instinct. We can will off an instinct however it is a lot of work, and a lapse could cause a problem.

Re: There is much, much worse!

[Anonymous Coward]

A rubber doll is not a person. It doesn't have feelings, or pain, or sex organs. It's a piles of plastic. This is like banning soda bottles because someone probably put their dick in one.

Re: There is much, much worse!

[Anonymous Coward]

But why ban a robot that looks like a child?

I'd certainly rather have a person having sex with a robot than a child.

I think the GATEWAY mentality of drugs and sex has been shown to be false. It isn't like a child sex robot is going to convert a person with no interest in children into a pedophile.

It isn't like shooting up one marijuana is going to make you drink heroin.

Re:There is much, much worse!

[AmiMoJo]

There isn't much we can do about that, we can't change them.

Actually, there are some successful treatments. Not for all of them, and not like those "gay conversion camps". It's basically a form of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, where they learn to recognize the patterns of thought that lead them to sexualizing children and alter them.

Similar treatments are available for people with a sex/porn addiction, and related addictions like exercise. Those things are addictive because, like drugs, they make you feel good for a while and you start to crave that feeling. The only real difference with paedophiles is that it's much harder for them to get treatment, because few people are willing to go to their doctor and admit that they are attracted to children.

Re: There is much, much worse!

[Anonymous Coward]

We wouldn't ban sex with bottles - only sex with underage bottles.

Re: There is much, much worse!

[alexgieg]

gateway drugs are real - almost nobody start injecting heroin from day one.

Actually, it's been shown that social isolation is the trigger for drug addictions. That drug usage developed as a survival mechanism so that brains (not only human one) who would otherwise commit suicide remain active for as long as the condition of isolation remains, until the conditions causing their need are solved, at which point the addiction begins to recede.

The interesting part is that this applies even to heroin. Many people who get into intensive care while suffering from severe pain receive what amounts to "heroin with another name", sometimes for many months, as an analgesic. And the majority of those, when they leave the hospital and stop using the drug, suffer almost no physical withdrawal symptoms, and no psychological ones. The reason for that is that they have a full life to go back to: family, work, friends, sports, hobbies, church etc. As such, the addiction survival mechanism isn't active and no addiction happened.

Now, what happens with "gateway" drugs is that the person who doesn't have a full life to keep them addiction free remains in survival mode and needs more and more to keep active, and the brain dead solution of removing the drugs doesn't fix the causes of the issue, it only makes the person more and more and more miserable, until the person dies or suicides.

Here's the true solution to drug addiction then: care for these people. Care enough that their brains shut the addiction survival mechanism down. Once that's done addiction rates will begin doing down, until all that remains are the few people whose brains have a defective addiction survival mechanism that remains active despite the lack of the environmental triggers. Then treat those few people medically.

Focusing on the drugs themselves is thus treating the symptoms, and poorly, while ignoring the causes of the illness.

Re: There is much, much worse!

[ShanghaiBill]

And in the good ole USA it is always "Think of the Children!!

It should be "Think about the data". These child-sexbots are legal in Japan, and many psychologists there believe that they help pedos to avoid interactions with real children. But, so far there is no published data.

In a free society, anything should be legal by default, and the burden should be on the advocates of a ban to provide evidence of harm.

The moral panic in TFA is justified with some severe cognitive dissonance. It says adult sexboxs will cause "social isolation" as people use them as substitutes for interaction with other people ... yet child sexbots will do the exact opposite, and cause more interaction with children. That makes no sense.

Re: There is much, much worse!

[BronsCon]

It isn't true pedophilia if it's an inanimate object, it's rather similar to jacking off to "underage" hentai.

That's a gray area and not one I'm going to discuss, but I will say that banning "Underage" robots (dolls, really) or hentai is as idiotic a move as was making mere possession of child pornography illegal.

If the availability of these "robots" prevents even one pedophile from seeking an actual child, they're a not positive for society; the same applies to hentai. As for photos and videos, yes, please go after the people who make and distribute them -- go after them with a vengeance -- and hold for questioning anyone caught in possession, so you can find the people who make and distribute them, so you can go after them with said vengeance.

But, society needs to consider the effect of having similar punishment for acts which actively harm children and acts which merely depict actual harm someone else has perpetrated upon children; if the guy you nab wit ha couple of photos knows he's gonna get shanked in prison whether or not he tells you where he got them, you're not getting that information from him. If those photos were what was keeping him from harming children himself, his possession of them was already a net positive; if we can turn his being caught with them (and released for cooperating) into an intelligence gathering tool to track down the people who actually harm children (and photograph themselves in the act), we can make it an even bigger net positive.

Of course, anyone caught in possession of it in the first place should, themselves, be investigated as the potential source. But mere possession should not carry the same get-shanked-in-prison punishment as production or distribution. That it does is a large part of the reason it's difficult to track down the producers and distributors in the first place.

Mind you, these people are all sick but, like we do not lock people up for having a cold, we should not lock them up for this illness. We could at least actually protect the children by not actively seeking to destroy the ones who seek help (pedophilia is an exception to patient confidentiality; therapists are not only allowed, but urged, to contact police if one of their patients seeks help to keep themselves from harming a child) and by allowing potential offenders other outlets for their urges. And, if they're caught with material depicting such despicable acts, we hold them until they give up the source (we make not doing so a felony), then we let them go. They'll find another source, they'll get caught again, they'll give up that source, lather, rinse, repeat. All the while they're not harming children because they have another outlet, and we're tracking down and locking up the people who actually are harming children. That would protect children.

To be clear, yes, lock them up (and throw away the key) for actually harming a child, or producing or distributing photos or videos of actual child harm. Use those who choose other outlets which don't directly harm children (again, the child was harmed by the abuser and whoever filmed or photographed the act) as resources to track down the vile trash who actively harm children and finally put a dent in the problem.

Enough stories of school teachers caught with child porn facing prison time; they got that porn from someone, compel them to reveal their source and lock them up if they don't (or if they lie and the source does not pan out), for impeding an investigation. They'll get the same death-by-shank punishment in prison once the other inmates find out what investigation they impeded. Police would be absolutely justified in further investigating whether he had any inappropriate involvement with students, and throwing the book at him for that; but not for mere possession. In any case the school would be right to fire them; those people need not be around children.

And that is how we protect children.

Re: There is much, much worse!

[sjames]

The thing is, we are really good at getting people through the physical withdrawal when we want to be. It can even be accomplished painlessly while the patient is in deep sedation if necessary. It's only done that way for people who can afford private clinics mostly because our society has a real punitive bloodlust just below the surface.

The psychological aspects are harder. That's the part that causes the now-clean addict to shoot up again anyway. Social connection and having the sort of life one looks forward to helps that part a great deal.

Re: There is much, much worse!

[Cipheron]

Also a large amount of research suggests that porn availability etc is negatively correlated with sexual assault, and this includes child sexual assault. I'd imagine that if porn is negatively correlated with rape than sex robots will be as well. It is no less than sexual supply and demand. Of couse not all porn viewers are would-be rapists, but *some are* and by denying porn to everyone, yo'du get more unhappy people and a *few* who turn to rape. (In the same way that if the supply of a product drops, prices rise and *some* people turn to stealing to get it, yet, this doesn't imply that all users of the product are would-be thieves).

Banning unpleasant depictions runs the real proven risk of backfiring and having people live out those fantasies in real life instead. It's the general outcome of prohibition laws, or outlawing prostitution for example. It gives a nice polite facade to the issue that the problem is "gone" but it in fact drves it underground. "Think of the children" arguments are really about protecting the sensibilities of the speaker, and they general reject actual evidence as to whether children will in fact be harmed more by the policy than otherwise.

Re: There is much, much worse!

[KGIII]

I have a neighbor, whom I count as a real friend, who went to prison for sharing what was classified as child pornography. Specifically, he dated someone who was legally allowed to consent to sex, but images of her nude were illegal.

He went to prison and was then obligated to do a bunch of therapy, lest they return him to prison. What amuses me is that he is still with the same partner and they have kids together. There is, as near as I can tell, zero chance of him having sex with someone who is not legally able to consent.

Again, she was old enough to have sex but the pictures the two of them took together were illegal, as was his sharing of those pictures online - even though she also consented to that. She was either 16 or 17, if you're curious. Legal to sex, illegal to take pics...

Anyhow, CBT was a big part of his therapy. Though, according to him, they aimed more at the grooming stage. You have to convince you, them, and find the opportunity. (Most aren't people snatching kids off the street.) So, they have three, at least, barriers to cross and warning signs for all of them. They concentrated there instead of starting at the point of changing their attractions/deviations.

IIRC, it was headed by a lady who is now deceased but the had consistently lower than average rates of recidivism and there are people continuing her work. I want to say her name was Tracy Morgan- Stanley, but it wasn't my job to remember it, though I did do some research when I first learned that they were an offender.

Let's do some research first

[religionofpeas]

First find out if having childlike sex dolls are a stepping stone to abusing real children, or if they are a good substitute so that less children are abused. Depending on the answer, either allow or ban them.

Re:Let's do some research first

[hawguy]

No. I am not saying one is right or wrong... just that they are. Aside from societal pressures, it's got to suck when one is in love with someone who they cannot create biological offspring with (ie 'cis' gay/lesbian)...

My wife and I seem to get along just fine even though we are biologically unable to conceive children, even if we wanted to. It turns out that there's more to a happy relationship than conceiving children. Homosexual couples have pretty much the same options as straight couples that want a baby (adoption, artificial insemination, etc). They may need to look outside of their relationship to find a willing uterus, egg or sperm, but many straight couples face the same problem.

Re:Let's do some research first

[hawguy]

You are going to hell if you have sex with your wife. According to the Catholics, the singular purpose of sex is procreation. Any other reason is a sin. You may as well turn gay.

Fortunately, we don't don't believe in mythical magical beings.

Re:Let's do some research first

[Big Hairy Ian]

Can you give a general outline of how to make such study that can demonstrate causality and get past ethics committee?

Take 2 groups of Paedophiles post release from prison give one group access to the robots and measure the re-offending rates in both groups.

Re:Let's do some research first

[Pfhorrest]

I'm not sure where this idea that sexual preference is inherent and unchangeable comes from. Well, some preferences seem to be, like being straight or gay.

From what I can tell, all these notions of sexual orientation and gender identity essentialism seem to stem from a defensive posture taken by the queer community, one that (as a genderqueer and pansexual person myself) has always seemed to have really unfortunate implications to me. It seems like the "it's not a choice!" mantra stems from a reaction to people saying that queer people are making bad (immoral, etc) life choices. But if something isn't a choice, so goes the folk notion of moral responsibility at least, then you can't be blamed for it, so to escape those attacks people take up the position that there's no choice involved.

I've always thought that had the unfortunate implication of ceding the attacker's claims that there's something wrong with the behavior/feelings/etc in the first place, and just claiming "I can't help it!" But if (as in most cases of e.g. trans or gay people, not with pedophilia here) there's nothing wrong in the first place, then there's no "helping it" to be done at all. Do you like any weird foods that other people think are gross? Why do you like them? Is that a matter of free choice, nature, or nurture? (It's probably a complex mix of all of them but) it doesn't matter, so long as we're not talking about killing people to eat their brains or something, because even if everybody else thinks your preferences are disgusting, you don't have to justify them to anyone but yourself.

Could I possibly avoid being attracted to who I'm attracted to? Maybe, I don't know, it's probably a complicated and difficult question to answer, and outside of idle academic curiosity I don't want and don't need to bother trying to answer it because it doesn't matter, I don't have to avoid being attracted to who I'm attracted to, because there's nothing wrong with it.

Maybe with pedophiles it is more important to answer that question. Or maybe it's just enough to make sure they know how to control their actions in spite of their feelings, like everyone should be able to anyway. (Most men's sexual attraction to women doesn't compel them to rape them, even most men who aren't able to find consenting partners usually manage to just go without, however much it might pain them to do so.) Which highlights the other side of the unfortunate implications the "I don't have a choice!" plea has. If someone has some psychological compulsion to do something terrible, like the aforementioned brain-eating cannibalism, that doesn't get them off the hook for it. The just purpose of punishment is not to inflict suffering on people for their bad choices, it's to protect other people from their bad behavior, if possible by reforming the perpetrators not to attempt those behaviors again, and to making them alone bear the cost of those behaviors, and if the perpetrators suffering is a necessary side-effect of achieving those goals, then so be it. If something is truly not a choice, then inflicting suffering won't be effective at reform, but that doesn't mean you just let the perps go because they couldn't help it. You still need to make sure restitution is paid to their victims and future victims are protected. However you can manage to do that. It doesn't matter that inflicting suffering won't accomplish that because they don't have a choice; a just society still has to do something about it. If that means locking them up for the protection of others then it doesn't matter one way or another that they didn't have a choice, because it's not about beating them over the head for their bad choices, it's just about protecting other people.

takes one to know one?

[ooloorie]

There should be a ban on the import of sex robots designed to look like children, the author of a new report into the phenomenon has said. Prof Noel Sharkey

I think Prof Noel Sharkey is perhaps a little too preoccupied with the dangers of "child sex robots".

Re:takes one to know one?

[Opportunist]

Remember: If you think of the children all the time, you're likely a pedo.

Re:takes one to know one?

[gweihir]

While this is funny, chances are that most violently anti-pedos are indeed closet-pedos. It works this way for every other sexual orientation. Sure, a pedo must never do it with an actual child, but what is the harm in doing it with a piece of silicon? Preventing that is just punishing people because of something they have no control over.

Seriously?

[Mal-2]

Take someone who is attracted to children and willing to channel that into fucking a childlike doll (robotic or otherwise) and ban their only harmless outlet. Oh yeah, that's thinking of the children all right.

What could possibly go wrong?

[Kokuyo]

In Switzerland, they consider loli manga to be childporn.

And I must ask, what exactly do they expect happens when they ban every single outlet a pwdophile might have that doesn't involve actual children?

Never mind that most child abusers aren't even pedos but that's different kettle of fish.

Re:What could possibly go wrong?

[fafalone]

Recently I came upon a case that's even more absurd than that. In New York, a man was arrested for 'manufacture of child pornography', when he was already on supervision for the same charge. Must be some child abusing monster right? No, it turns out all this clown did (both the new and original charge) is cut children's faces out of catalogs and glue them on pictures of an adult pornstars body. Sick yeah, but illegal, nevermind the same charge as someone recording sex with a toddler? You've got to be kidding me.

Obligatory Futurama reference

[Nutria]

Don't Date Robots!

Re:Make their USE/DISPLAY illegal...

[quenda]

Won't somebody please think of the robot children?!

Re:Make their USE/DISPLAY illegal...

[magusxxx]

I don't agree with Dog-Cow's take on this... But Anonymous, are you also going to call the FBI and have them investigate everyone that saw the Twilight movie? You know, the one where the 400 year old fart was trolling a high school for an underage girlfriend? Yeah, Bella was only 17 years old. And no federal law enforcement agency gave a crap about that.

There Ought To Be A Law

[mentil]

There should be a ban on [,,,]

Almost any time someone says these words, the response should be "No, no there shouldn't." Look at how many shitty, obsolete laws are still on the books that don't reflect modern societal values (e.g. Chicken Tax, alimony) that are unlikely to get stricken despite that, even if they're still enforced. We should be loathe to put new, poorly-thought-out laws on the books that are premised on tenuous social values, given this fact. Next year's headline: "After new study, sex offenders leaving prison given mandatory sexbots."

Re:Make their USE/DISPLAY illegal...

[stealth_finger]

Being a pedophile is not illegal (in sane countries, anyway). Like being gay, it's just the way you are. Masturbating with the aid of a robot is not illegal. Masturbating with the aid of a robot that looks like a child should likewise not be illegal.

I'd much rather a pedo fucked a robot that looked like a kid rather than an actual kid.

Re:Uhh... how about the opposite?

[Tranzistors]

If pedophiles are people who CAN'T control their natural impulses to have sex with children

That is not what paedophilia is. By that understanding, heterosexual man is a man that can't control their impulse to have sex with women.

Re:Make their USE/DISPLAY illegal...

[Dog-Cow]

You don't make any sense. Why would someone who is already attracted to children start raping them if he masturbates with a robot? If he's not raping them before the robot is available to function as an outlet, why would he start after?

Permission Based Society

[JimSadler]

There are always plenty of people who simply crave power and one way to do so is to create situations where permission or approvals are required. Who knows how many hundreds of millions have been wasted fighting pornography with zero good results. now we will have courts tried up with cases in which the judge and jury debate whether a blow up sex toy looks too similar to a child. Is there even a shard of proof that suggests that rubber doll users re made more likely to molest children? For all we know using those blow up dolls may be enough to keep them from reaching out and actually harming a child. We need to think in terms of the cost of passing some laws and the positive consequences that such a law causes to exist.

A bedroom is private

[angel'o'sphere]

From the summary:
"We do need policymakers to look at it and the general public to decide what is acceptable and permissible,"
The society, policymakers and who ever have no reason, right whatsoever to decide what a human is doing with himself in a bed room. Using his hands, or what ever tool he wants, a vibrator or a bigger thing, the "fucking robot" is a machine. Who cares how it looks, what it does?

Re:Make their USE/DISPLAY illegal...

[Gorobei]

This supreme court would probably agreed with you. In 2002, they struck down a ban of virtual child porn (from the NYT:)

"Affirming that free speech principles apply with full force in the computer age, the Supreme Court today struck down provisions of a federal law that made it a crime to create, distribute or possess ''virtual'' child pornography that used computer images or young adults rather than actual children.

The law, the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, ''prohibits speech that records no crime and creates no victims by its production,'' Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority in the court's latest decision upholding First Amendment protections online."

Absurdity

[Anonymous Coward]

What if I build a robot that looks like a child, and then wait 18 years to fuck it?

What if I build a robotic donkey to fuck? What if I build a robot that looks like Fifi La Fume?

What if I build a robot that doesn't resemble any creature in particular, but has plenty of vaginas? What if those vaginas look underage?

What if my "child sex robot" has the voice and personality of a 35-year-old smoker?

Banning imaginary abuse is silly. It's only going to get more silly the more you look into it.

Re: Make their USE/DISPLAY illegal...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you misrepresent his statement.

Being attracted to kids is not illegal. Having sex with them is.

Wanting to kill people and eat them isn't illegal. Killing people and eating them is illegal.

Do keep up.

Re:Another Orientation

[Oswald McWeany]

Just wait...people who are attracted to "sex robots" will be classified as yet another sexual orientation and will insist on marrying them, parading them around in public, and demand that the robot maintenance be included in their health benefits.

More likely than that, another group of people will actively persecute them for being different and having different interests than them.

The same people that bash homosexuality, transgenderism, and other cultures will have a new group of people to hate and discriminate against.