Yes, the average age of puberty is lower today than it was centuries ago. But it reached its current level in North America about 40 years ago, before they started pumping cattle full of hormones. The best guess is that earlier maturation isn't due to the hormones in beef, but to the beef itself. With better nutrition children grow taller and mature earlier.
Giving cattle hormones may be a Bad Thing, but not for this reason.
Yes, kidnapping a child for pornography is not only criminal, it's wrong. But removing your parenthesized remark leaves us with:
" By definition, pictures of naked children constitutes sexual assault."
You can't be serious about that. Are the pictures that my parents took of me and my sister way back when some kind of kiddie porn? We didn't feel "sexually assaulted" at the time, nor do we now. There was nothing prurient about those pictures, they're just cute.
Be careful about making sweeping generalizations. In times of moral panic, sweeping generalizations have a way of getting enacted into law. And innocent lives get ruined.
You're right. I have a friend who's a psychologist at the state prison, and she's opened my eyes on this. She's not a bleeding heart (she doesn't like Charlie Manson, and Charlie Manson doesn't like her), and yet she's had some positive things to say about the child molesters she's dealt with. It turns out that with treatment sex offenders have a lower recidivism rate than the general prison population, and that child sex offenders have a lower recidivism rate than other sex offenders.
You would think that people would want to hear this good news, that there really is hope. But people have such negative attitudes about child molesters that they don't want to hear any good news. So the facts get filtered out and all that gets propagated are the horror stories. As a result, people believe with all their heart things that simply aren't true.
Public policy based on mythology is bad public policy.
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Yes, the average age of puberty is lower today than it was centuries ago. But it reached its current level in North America about 40 years ago, before they started pumping cattle full of hormones. The best guess is that earlier maturation isn't due to the hormones in beef, but to the beef itself. With better nutrition children grow taller and mature earlier.
Giving cattle hormones may be a Bad Thing, but not for this reason.
Be careful about making sweeping generalizations. In times of moral panic, sweeping generalizations have a way of getting enacted into law. And innocent lives get ruined.
You're right. I have a friend who's a psychologist at the state prison, and she's opened my eyes on this. She's not a bleeding heart (she doesn't like Charlie Manson, and Charlie Manson doesn't like her), and yet she's had some positive things to say about the child molesters she's dealt with. It turns out that with treatment sex offenders have a lower recidivism rate than the general prison population, and that child sex offenders have a lower recidivism rate than other sex offenders.
You would think that people would want to hear this good news, that there really is hope. But people have such negative attitudes about child molesters that they don't want to hear any good news. So the facts get filtered out and all that gets propagated are the horror stories. As a result, people believe with all their heart things that simply aren't true.
Public policy based on mythology is bad public policy.