First 'cyberflasher' convicted under UK's new law, gets more than 5 years prison

I don't think the first time or not distinction should change your sentence by more than... let's say a year.

So you think sending dick pics to a 15 year old is chill in other cultures?

I'll keep my western puritanism, thanks.

It’s not just “Western Puritanism” to recognize that a photo of genitalia usually has a sexual context – the point of cropping it so tightly is to focus on that aspect! – but it’s also distracting from the real reason this is a crime: a convicted sex offender did it, by his own admission, with intent to cause distress to an unwilling participant. No matter how body positive you are, lack of consent to be part of someone else’s sexual gratification matters a lot. Even if the images were totally non-sexual in purpose - say pathology case studies in a medical textbook – consent still matters and you don’t go shoving them in other people’s faces without asking first.

You’ve been conspicuously non-specific about the other cultures you’re claiming would be okay with this, perhaps you could give an example and explain why it’s better?

If your intent was to cause distress, then probably. If you’re sending it to a pal that might be hard to prove but to a stranger would be easier to prove I imagine.

> sending a photo of a steak to a vegan would get you 5 years in prison?

Two issues. The question is what was your intent. Proving that it was sent with the intent of causing distress or anxiety is much harder in that case. For example I don’t know a single vegan who would react with distress or anxiety to the image of a steak. That is just nonsense. They would just say “yuck”.

But if from the circumstances it is clear that that is the intent, perhaps because the vegan in question repeatedly expresses distress and the accused in question still keeps sending them then why would we not punish that? As in do you want that kind of behaviour in your society?

That was issue one. Issue two is about the 5 years. You say that as if that is the standard length of punishment a first time vegan abuser should expect. In reality this person has previously been convicted of a sexual crime and then commited infractions against multiple people. Surely these factors played a role in the lenght of prison sentence he received?

> Most statutes here in the US do, just for clarity.

Not a lawyer, so i can’t say if you are right or not but there is a very famous US Supreme Court ruling which basically said “I know it when I see it” about obscenity. That suggest to me that perhaps the definition is not as clear cut in all cases as one would imagine (or were not as clear cut back in 1964).

Quiting from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

The phrase was used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio. In explaining why the material at issue in the case was not obscene under the Roth test, and therefore was protected speech that could not be censored, Stewart wrote:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.