CALDONIA

JerryM:

Well said. I guess the doctrine, "Hate the Sin, love the Sinner" doesn't apply here, as far as "society" is concerned.

NZAmoeba

I think Totalitarianist is an example in of himself about how children ARE NOT able to handle sex, and i hope he eventually outgrows his current ideas.

I've watched a couple of series about child development, how kids under a certain age cannot comprehend the idea that something they know, another person doesn't know. Untill they figure that out, they can't lie. They also, before a certain age, don't know the difference between a living thing, and an inanimate thing. It's a physical limitation.

Even the teenage years are a grey area, a lot of people look back and laugh at how stupid they were back then.

As for the main topic, 200 years is excessive, but possesion is just SLIGHTLY under actually commiting it. for him to possess it, someone had to have commited the act, and his purchase of it creates a market demand for MORE abuses to occour to MORE children.

As for the priest, burn the !@#$er

CALDONIA

The doctrine that "possession" of a depiction of an act or idea is equal (or even 'slightly' below) the advocation or carrying out of that same act or idea is very troubling to me.

I presume that there may be studies that indicate that possessors of child porn show that these people are potential predators. But where do you draw the line?

What if for some reason a large segment of a population developed a sudden interest in Satanic ritual, including animal and/or human sacrifice. Has this interest created a "market" or endorsement of those who participate in such rituals (let's for argument's sake accept that they occur)? When you mix punishment for actions with possession of depictions or descriptions of actions (or ideas) you open the door to infinite culpability.

If humans are so succeptible to the visual or printed image or suggestion, then why is so much advertising ineffective? Why is the crime rate so low in countries that find our violent Hollywood films so enthralling? Why is it that some of us who discovered porn (or Playboy) at an early age not rapists any more than those who were "protected" from such images until 18? (Unproved assumption).

B.F. Skinner's simple dogma has been discredited; we are more complicated creatures than can be manipulated by conditioning.

NZAmoeba

I did not say that if you possess it, you're likely to commit the act.

I said that if someone has sold his pictures of himself commiting the act, and so has made a profit from his crime, he's more likely to do it again, to a different or same person, to make more pictures to make more money.

Hence, by purchasing the pictures, you're funding a kiddy rapist, and encouraging them to do it again. THAT is where the crime is.

The Naked Mage

The "kiddy rapist" is more than likely a family member. No one's gonna want to out ol' Uncle Ernie and have it be known that he's a sexual predator of the worst sort, and even if they do, he'll probably get off with mandatory counseling.

Meanwhile, the person who just looked at the end result gets to go to federal ass-rape prison for longer than most murderers.

To say that child porn fans encourage pedophiles is, to me, the equivalent of saying that gore hounds encourge homicidal maniacs to murder more than they might have just to have pictures to post on the web or sell to the highest bidder. The people who do the shit depicted in kiddy porn probably would have done it anyway; the only difference is that now it's on camera.

slh

This thread went in a couple of different directions. As far as the point first put out, there is no way, shape, form, or fashion that the teacher should have gotten 200 years with no parole.

Having an image, or images of child pornography his hard drive is a FAR cry from the criminality of the actual producers of the images.

The article did not get into any of the specific circumstances of this case, but there are just too many ways kiddy porn images can show up on your PC.

The back door trojan programs have already been mentioned, as well as html embedded emails. Due to the nature of electronic images, it's just too easy to get one or even a lot of illegal images without the person knowing about it.

Case in point.

My fiancee is a tattoo artist who designs her own flash pages based on certain themes or whatever. Every now and again, she asks me to look up certain images for samples of whatever kind of art, or art subject she is interested in at the time. So, I went to the mecca of free digital images - alt.binaries newsgroups. I set up my attachement downloader with the relevent newsgroup subject material and let it fly. Over 2000 images later, I check out what was downloaded to get rid of any spam and other non relevent material and discover that there is a plethora of obviously kiddy porn photos mixed in with the butterflies, cherubs, and dragons I was looking for. So I deleted all the child porn without really batting an eye. At the time I regarded it as just unwanted spam along with many other images there.

It kinda frightens me to think that at the moment those images were downloaded, I coulda been busted and sentenced for life for just having them on the hard drive. Again, the article didn't mention if the jury could consider circumstances. If I had stumbled onto some sort of police sting, I woulda been screwed.

I abhor child porn as much as the folks posing here do. The people in the chain of that crap should be punished to the full extent of the law. But I pause a bit for the end user not because I feel any empathy for his sexual preference, but because if I condemn him, then I have to condemn a person for thought crimes of all other types that may be illegal, or not of my own tastes.

winstonjen

Now THAT is a selfish act. What right does society have to stop people from doing things that harm NO ONE in the privacy of their own home because it is 'undesirable'? None, I say. And it would be impossible to police and regulate, in any case.

Pat Kelly

The far greater majority of publicly accepted conclusions regarding child pornography are based upon the original premise that sex is harmful to children in the first place. If this premise is flawed and it is discovered children are in fact not harmed by sex then the justification for prohibiting child pornography would not make much sense.

In a joint study between the University of Hawaii, John A. Burns School of Medicine, Department of Anatomy & Reproductive Biology (Pacific Center for Sex and Society) and the Japanese National Research Institute of Police Science, (Juvenile Crime Study Section) which was published in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 22(1): 1-22. 1999, it was concluded that countries where pornography was openly permitted and easily accessible had lower incidents of sex crime rates in general and more specifically within the juvenile population. In Japan, know for its acceptance of child pornography the study noted a dramatic decrease in sexual crimes most notably among youngsters as perpetrators or victims.

Milton Diamond, Ph.D. summarizes the study as follows: “The concern that countries allowing pornography would show increased sex crime rates due to modeling or that adolescents in particular would be negatively vulnerable to and receptive to such models or the society would be otherwise adversely effected has not been vindicated. It is certainly clear from our data and analysis that a massive increase in available pornography in Japan has been correlated with a dramatic decrease in sexual crimes and most so among youngsters as perpetrators or victims.”

Needless to say, the above study would certainly indicate many people have it backwards regarding the best way to protect children from becoming victims of sexual abuse. In spite of commonly held beliefs pornography leads to child abuse it seems pornography could more aptly be described as a social vaccine against violence related sex crimes. Dr. Diamond’s study is but one in a very long list of highly respected published works that support concepts that we need to become more open and accepting towards our sexuality instead of the other way around.

yguy

Excuse me??

Pat Kelly

Pictures and other means of recording human behavior play an important role in helping us better understand one another. To threaten someone with prison because they are curious or interested in learning more about their own childhood sexuality or the childhood sexuality of others is human ignorance in full bloom.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in the US and elsewhere on attempts to wipe out child pornography that could have easily been put to more effective uses in protecting and bettering the lives of today’s children. Thousands of people have been jailed whose only crime was to download pictures of children engaged in sex over the internet. Such people have become social scapegoats for the real culprits who physically and mentally abuse children. And while the focus remains on child pornography, children continue to be harmed by the unaddressed realities that do not get our attention.

In the name of protecting children through government intervention, many families have been destroyed, children have been placed in foster care and even prison, adults have received extended prison terms, had their lives ruined and some have even been forced to commit suicide. And while all this is being done to protect children, few if any children are actually any safer. In fact, a certain number of children have lost their lives as a direct result of the harsh penalties related to adult/child sex while countless others have suffered debilitating socially induced guilt that wouldn’t exist at all if current social attitudes towards sex were a little more realistic.

Children as young as three years old are regularly being referred to state and private funded counseling to modify or prevent the behavioral expressions of their sexuality. Many seem to have accepted the concept that children aren’t supposed to be sexual and define any sexual behavior displayed by children as abnormal. And when child sexual behavior involves more than one child it is even viewed as abuse with the older child seen as the abuser and the younger child seen as the victim.
A nonprofit United Way agency, the Children's Advocacy Center in Florida prides itself on being dedicated to preventing and treating all types of child abuse through a variety of direct services. “Our agency's mission is to break the cycle of child abuse," says Darlene Stewart, director of counseling at the center. “Which is why specialized counseling services are made available to child sex offenders as well as to the child victims of sexual abuse.” “About a tenth of our caseload is child-on-child,” says Stewart. “We have 20 or so open cases at any given time, with the young abusers ranging in age from 11 to as young as 3 years old.”

In January of last year, a nine year old girl in Manchester Connecticut USA was arrested and charged with forth degree sexual assault and a felony of three counts of risk of injury to a minor for engaging in sex play with her friends. One of the other kids happened to mention the event to their parents some months later who became alarmed and notified police. Police sergeant John Matson said the girl is in denial and that the local police want to show her the seriousness of what happened. According to Maston, the alleged incident occurred in the fall, when the girl and three other children, a 3-year-old boy and two girls, 4 and 5 were playing in a bedroom. The girl is charged with initiating sex between the younger children and then with her, Maston said. If convicted on all counts, the nine year old girl faces up to 4-years in a state juvenile facility.

At this point the girl has undoubtedly been exposed to several court appearances as well as rides in the back of a police car. In addition to the enormous trauma for both her and her family she will likely suffer a lifetime of confusion and regret regarding her sexuality. One can only imagine how difficult it would be for a 9-year old girl to return to school and face her friends after being labeled a sex offender by the police. The girl lives with her mother who has agreed to put her in therapy. If her mother is in a position to do so she should launch multimillion dollar lawsuits against state and local officials for damages done to her daughter and family. If any party in this case is guilty of risk of injury to a minor it is the officials who agreed to bring charges against a 9-year old girl for exploring her sexuality with some other children. If no one is willing to come to the aid of this little girl now, hopefully when she gets older she will be in a position to seek restitution from both the individuals and government agencies that exploited her and exposed her to traumas that could only be described as the public rape of a little girl.