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Monday, June 17, 2019

Links - 17th June 2019 (3) ("Protecting" "children" from "pedos")

A public register of child sex offenders will do more harm than good - "international research shows that it is likely to lead to vigilantism, have no impact on rates of offending and in fact could increase the risk of reoffending by those on the register. Most importantly, it offers no real assistance or support to people who are the victims of sex crimes... A 2011 paper by JJ Prescott of the University of Michigan and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia University, published in the Journal of Law and Economics, analysed previous research that “shows there is evidence that these laws create financial and psychological costs for the neighbours of registered sex offenders”. This includes “declines in property value for households living close to registered offenders” and the authors noted that previous research shows there is little evidence “that notification alleviates the concerns of the community members who have been made aware of an offender’s presence”... A recent paper from Connecticut and New York based researchers Michelle Cubellis, Douglas Evans and Adam Fera points to acts of vigilantism against registered offenders and the fact that 10 per cent of the vigilante events they examined involved the wrong individual. In other words, because of inaccurate information or misidentification of individuals, innocent citizens have been physically and verbally attacked by vigilantes. This research concludes that “the stigmatisation that convicted sex offenders experience is so pervasive that it extends even to individuals suspected of having committed a sexual offence”... “that convicted sex offenders are more likely to reoffend when their personal and offending information is made public due to the psychological and financial costs on offenders”... “research has found that being placed on a public sex offender registry can result in exclusion from neighbourhood or residence, job loss, anxiety and other psychological problems, all of which are counterproductive in terms of reducing reoffending”... We also need to remember that the vast majority of child sexual abuse perpetrators are known to the victim. As the AIC notes, Australian Bureau of Statistics work from 2016 shows that “83 per cent of child victims of sexual assault aged 0–14 years are assaulted by someone they know”... A public sex offender register will be expensive, is likely to be as counter-productive as its US counterparts and will not achieve Dutton’s professed aim, which is to keep children safe."
Of course those who rage against "pedos" will just say that they all need to be executed, which will make the recidivism rate 0

Paedophile hunters 'destroying people's lives for Facebook likes', police chief warns - ""they've also led to people being blackmailed, people being subject of GBH (grievous bodily harm), the wrong people being accused, people committing suicide as a result of interventions, family lives being completely destroyed; in the name of what? Facebook likes. Mr Bailey, who is Norfolk Police's chief constable, said one referral from a paedophile hunting group can take a working day to investigate, time that could be spent identifying half a dozen offenders."So many of these groups' drivers are about seeking infamy through the number of hits they get, the number of likes they get, the number of people that view their live streams""
He'll just be condemned as a pedophile himself

In America you can almost bet that the loud... - Nicolai Gamulea Schwartz - "In America you can almost bet that the loud voices against gay decadence and sin are closeted homosexuals waiting to be caught with some underage boy prostitute. The logic is really simple, I think: they're people living in fear of getting caught who want to establish for themselves a virtuous public identity that would put them above suspicion.
In the UK, there are forum regulars posting on tabloid articles on old men collecting child porn, and asking for the castration and death of paedophiles. Those folks too, like other paedo justitiaries, seem obsessed with sinners and eager to build for themselves a virtuous identity. I wonder if they follow a different logic, or they're just the British counterpart to the American anti-gay activists."
Just like Democrat lawmakers have more tax irregularities, and liberals are more racist

The Unjust, Irrational, and Unconstitutional Consequences of Pedophilia Panic - ""Sounds like you enjoy sex with kids," a reader tweeted at me after seeing a blog post I wrote about former Subway pitchman Jared Fogle. It was 2015, and Fogle had just signed a plea agreement in which he admitted to looking at child pornography and having sex with two 16-year-old prostitutes. "You also look like [a] pervert," the reader added.That's the sort of response you can expect if you write about the broad category known as "sex offenders" and suggest that not all of them are the same or that some of them are punished too severely... The fear and disgust triggered by this subject help explain why laws dealing with sex offenses involving minors frequently lead to bizarre results, including wildly disproportionate sentences, punishment disguised as regulation or treatment, and penalties for committing unintentional crimes, recording your own legal behavior, or looking at pictures of nonexistent children... In 2011, a Florida judge imposed a sentence of life without the possibility of parole on Daniel Enrique Guevara Vilca, a 26-year-old with no criminal record who was caught with 454 child pornography images on his computer. "Had Mr. Vilca actually molested a child," The New York Times noted, "he might well have received a lighter sentence."... One reason it is so hard to figure out an appropriate punishment for looking at child pornography is that it's not exactly clear why looking at child pornography is treated as a crime in the first place... When the Supreme Court upheld a state law criminalizing mere possession of child pornography in the 1990 case Osborne v. Ohio, its main rationale was that the government "hopes to destroy a market for the exploitative use of children." In other words, punishing consumers is justified because their demand drives production, which requires the sexual abuse of children. Now that people who look at child pornography typically obtain it online for free, that argument carries much less weight... Once images of sexual abuse have been viewed 1,000 times, Justice Samuel Alito wondered aloud during oral argument, is it even theoretically possible to assess the damage caused by the 1,001st viewing?... The fact that federal law treats virtual child pornography the same as the real thing suggests the essence of the crime is not the injury inflicted on actual children by looking at pictures of their abuse but the message communicated by such images... While Fogle may have known how old the girls were, that is not always the case when adults have sex with teenagers. The difference between a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old (or a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old) may not be obvious, especially when the teenager claims to be older than she is. State laws nevertheless assume that someone who has sex with an underage adolescent should have known better. Generally speaking, "mistake of age" is no defense against a statutory rape charge... Although sex offender registries and the restrictions associated with them are supposedly intended to protect public safety, the evidence suggests they are mainly a way of imposing additional punishment on people who have already completed their sentences. The rationale for publicly accessible registries is that they will protect children by alerting parents to the presence of potential predators. But the Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey indicates that more than 90 percent of sexual offenses against children are committed not by strangers but by relatives, friends, or acquaintances. Furthermore, nearly 9 out of 10 sex offenses are committed by people who were not previously convicted of a crime that would have put their names in a registry. Justice Department data also indicate that sex offenders are much less likely to commit new crimes than commonly supposed—less likely, in fact, than most other kinds of offenders... A 2013 study funded by the Justice Department found those restrictions were associated with an increase in recidivism. A 2011 analysis in the Journal of Law and Economics likewise found evidence that publicly accessible registries have a perverse effect on recidivism... laws targeting sex offenders will be upheld as long as supporters of those laws claim to have good intentions"
Just like those who support gay rights are gay

FBI ran website sharing thousands of child porn images - "the FBI operated what it described as one of the Internet’s largest child pornography websites, allowing users to download thousands of illicit images and videos from a government site in the Washington suburbs.The operation — whose details remain largely secret — was at least the third time in recent years that FBI agents took control of a child pornography site but left it online... That approach is a significant departure from the government’s past tactics for battling online child porn, in which agents were instructed that they should not allow images of children being sexually assaulted to become public. The Justice Department has said that children depicted in such images are harmed each time they are viewed, and once those images leave the government’s control, agents have no way to prevent them from being copied and re-copied to other parts of the internet... "At some point, the government investigation becomes indistinguishable from the crime, and we should ask whether that’s OK”... When the FBI first realized it could break through Tor, Hosko said the agency gathered counterterrorism investigators and intelligence agencies to see if any of them had a more pressing need for the software. “It was this, exponentially,” Hosko said."

The Feds Would Rather Drop a Child Porn Case Than Give Up an Exploit - "Evidence in United States v. Jay Michaud hinged at least in part on information federal investigators had gathered by exploiting a vulnerability in the Tor anonymity network... In other words, the feds are letting an alleged child pornographer free so that officials can potentially catch other dark-web using criminals in the future"

Child Porn Laws Aren't As Bad As You Think. They're Much, Much Worse. - "If you film a police abuse situation to get evidence and show it to the world so the power abusers can get caught, you’re a hero to the level that your film can cause riots.
If you document a genocide in enough detail that your evidence can bring perpetrators to justice, you’re a worldwide hero.
If you film wartime killings, people will risk their lives – and sometimes die – to bring your evidence and documentation to news studios.
If you risk being beaten up by covertly filming a street battery and assault, you’re welcomed with open arms by the police when you hand over the evidence you produced. (I personally did this, for the record.)
If you film something as serious as a presidential assassination, people will watch the film over and over and over again and your name will go down in history for centuries.
If you film a rapist of a minor to get evidence in order to bring the sick, twisted bastard to justice, you’re the bad guy and will get a worse sentence than the rapist you attempt to bring to justice and jail...
These laws weren’t primarily written to help children at all... these laws were constructed by Christian-fundamentalist pressure groups with the intent of shaming and criminalizing normal teenage behavior, and the side effect of protecting child molesters from prosecution, under the pretext of protecting children... Even the police argued publicly against the law banning possession of child abuse imagery here, arguing – from their viewpoint – that it protects child molesters, as they are forced to hunt comics fans instead of real crime... The man was eventually acquitted because manga images weren’t realistic enough – the eyes were too big – and not because the imagery as such wasn’t criminally culpable child pornography. The Supreme Court basically bent over backwards to acquit in a highly political verdict, seeing the nationwide attention of the case... In the Nordic countries, there is a secret censorship list maintained by the police that most ISPs follow about which domains you’re not allowed to visit. It’s supposed to be strictly CAI only, but has been found to be less than 1% such material, 9 out of 1047 censored domains: in reality, once leaked, it was discovered to be mostly ordinary porn with age certs and all, but also completely unrelated sites like Bonsai gardening that’s on the list of censored sites (koreabonsai.com)... When a Finnish activist published the secret censorship list to criticize this wrongdoing and abuse of power, their site was itself immediately added to the censorship list... Christian von der Weth has an additional writeup about the toxicity of “possession” as such, when applied to computers – most users have no idea about what files they have on their computer, and it is trivially easy for a webpage to plant images on a computer"

Three Reasons Possession Of Child Porn Must Be Re-Legalized In The Coming Decade - "Our current laws treat the video of a seven-year-old being brutally raped, on one hand, and two seventeen-year-olds who have eyes for nothing in the world but each other making consensual passionate love, on the other hand, as the exact same thing. This is mind-bogglingly odd... Technically, most people growing up today lose their virginity through rape... Just daring to talk back will take many people completely by surprise. They won’t understand what’s going on and won’t have a script to follow. You won’t have to defend against “defending pedophiles” – you can refer to many others that take the same stance, like the Swedish Association of Journalists, who demand the ban on child porn to be repealed"

Is This Child Pornography? - "The ruling, issued by the Supreme Court of New South Wales, affirms that a cartoon can be prosecuted as child pornography... Apparently, more people are now arrested for using the Internet to solicit cops posing as kids than for using it to initiate relationships with real kids... I understand why we do this: We’re afraid that if we don’t prosecute cyber-perverts, they’ll move on to the real thing. But the danger runs both ways. How far will we extend felony prosecution into the realm of the private, the fake, and the abstract? If the Simpsons count as child pornography, what’s next?Actually, the Australian court has answered that question. Under the relevant child pornography laws, says the court, “a stick figure … might well depict a representation of a person. No bright line of inclusion or exclusion can be sensibly described.”"

Iowa Prosecutor Who Threatened to Treat Girl’s Selfies As Child Porn Backs Down - "one photo showed the girl "from the waist up, hair entirely covering her breasts and dressed in boy shorts." The other picture showed her "standing upright, clad in the same boy shorts and wearing a sports bra." The statute defining "sexual exploitation of a minor," the charge that Bull threatened to bring, requires "a prohibited sexual act," which includes prurient nudity only when it involves exposure of breasts, genitals, or buttocks."

Colorado Cops Say Sex With Teens OK So Long as There’s No Sexting - "Local authorities defended their position that sexting is worse than actual sex, contending that even if there is no indication a person intends to share or distribute such images—they could, some day"

The Year in Teen Sexting Panic - "the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted in favor of a bill that could subject teen sexters to 15 years in prison... Our desire to protect children has turned into perverse performance of protection in which certain members of the vulnerable class are sacrificed for the sake of arrest goals, sensationalist news, and political theater."

Dick Pic Makes Teenager Guilty of Sexually Exploiting Himself, High Court Says - "Gray's conviction on that charge, which makes him a perpetrator as well as a victim, guilty of exploiting himself... The court's reading of the law, she notes, "means that a child who texts explicit depictions of himself or herself can be punished more harshly than an adult who does exactly the same thing" and that "a 12-year-old girl who is groomed or lured into taking and then texting explicit depictions of herself to an adult can be prosecuted for succumbing to that grooming.""

A teen sexting case revealed how judges let police invade children's privacy - "Whether the police have the right to force your teenage son to masturbate in front of them in order to incriminate himself is a legal question few parents would think they’d have to consider.And yet Trey Sims’ legal guardians had to do exactly that. In an effort to prosecute the 17-year-old for sexting his 15-year-old girlfriend, Manassas police detective David Abbott obtained a search warrant authorizing him to take “photographs of [Sims’] genitals,” including “a photograph of the suspect’s erect penis.”... Abbot then ordered the minor to masturbate so that he could take a picture of his erection. Sims tried but failed to comply with the officer’s orders; Abbott later threatened Sims’ lawyer that, if police couldn’t get a picture of the teenager’s erection by forcing the kid to masturbate, he would obtain a photo of the teenager’s engorged genitals by subjecting him to “an erection-producing injection” at a hospital... the fact that Sims’ initial conduct was criminalized at all speaks to the staggering breadth of substantive overcriminalization. The activity for which Sims was charged was a consensual, mutual exchange of nude pictures and videos between two teenagers in a lawful relationship (in Virginia, it’s legal for a 17-year-old and 15-year-old to have sex). Sexting between teenagers is commonplace, and often an innocuous part of flirtation and sexual expression in the digital age. If the taking of or delivery of pictures were non-consensual, or if one party was of the age of majority, that would be a legal issue to address; for parents, such behavior might well be concerning, if not deserving of some proportionate punishment. But to brand Sims a child pornographer under Virginia law is to say that a teenager’s consensual, (mostly) non-harmful conduct merits one of our society’s most severe punishments and social stigmas."
The perils of "protecting" "children" from sex

Cop Who Sought Photos of Teen’s Erection in Sexting Case Commits Suicide Moments Before Arrest - "Authorities now believe Abbott was a pedophile. He had inappropriate contact with two young boys, ages 11 and 13, according to patch.com. Police attempted to arrest him at his home earlier today, but he refused to surrender and eventually shot himself."

Treating Pedophiles: Therapy Can Work, But It's a Challenge - "A 2004 study, which included 109 convicted sex offenders who completed therapy and 37 who dropped out, showed "non-completers" were six times as likely to commit another sexual or violent crime, compared with those who completed therapy. But the researchers, who published in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, noted that sex offenders who completed therapy were not any more likely to show empathy toward their past victims.In the late 1980s, Berlin tracked 406 men convicted of sex crimes against children in Maryland. Five years after they were discharged, 2.9 percent of men who completed therapy had been arrested for another sex crime. Men who didn't complete therapy re-offended at a rate of 7.4 percent, according to the article, published in the American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry."On average, there is a 40 percent reduction of recidivism (or re-offending) by treatment in studies""

Alabama Approves Chemical Castration for Child Sex Offenders - "If we could put ethical considerations about nonconsensual medical treatment aside, it still wouldn’t be clear whether this approach will have the desired effect on recidivism. Most research in the area puts sexual desire low on the list of reasons people assault children. The best predictor of sexual assault is not libido, research has shown, but “an early and persistent general propensity to act in an antisocial manner during childhood and adolescence.”... In addition to lowering libido and causing sexual dysfunction, the sudden removal of androgenic hormones has been known to impair performance on visual-motor tasks and cause declines in bone density, increased rates of fractures, and depressive symptoms... Some ethicists argue that child offenders are diseased, and it is only humane to treat them—even sometimes without consent. This is predicated on the basic idea that assault is a result of an imbalance of hormones, whereby too much testosterone leads to rape. On the whole, however, sex offenders do not have higher levels of testosterone than the average male. A recent meta-analysis of research found “no evidence to suggest there is anything chemically wrong with sexual offenders.”... Research has found small reductions of recidivism among convicted sex offenders when they request chemical castration in conjunction with other therapeutic measures. Small studies have found that recidivism decreased when offenders received antidepressant medications, not anti-testosterone medications... Some legal scholars believe mandatory chemical castration violates the Eighth Amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishment. The University of Florida law professor John Stinneford has called the practice “maiming” and “impermissibly cruel.”"
Incidentally, the negative side effects also apply to trans mania
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