Exhibit A – the “child pornographer”

The book you reference appears to address post pubescent children and specifically mentions teenage sex being natural. It does not appear to address pedophilia.

OC made several claims about which respondent could be asking for a source. I'll assume it's the claim that the reactions of other people causes the "damage" since that claim's implications are most relevant. To which I wonder: Can respondent provide academic sources demonstrating that societal or cultural response doesn't exacerbate (or largely cause) victims' feelings of acute horror?

I have a couple of impressions about this. The average person isn't all that good at understanding where their feelings come from or separating whether they come from a specific event or the culture's evaluation of the rightness and wrongness of that event.

I also notice that academics often have a hard time getting funding for things that might have unpopular results. One only need to review the comments section of any article that mentions pedophilia to know that citizens are united on both sides of the aisle regarding how we should feel about it.

Unfortunately, most of our judgments in life still have to be made without the benefit of academic sources, simply because the number of such sources are rare and ambiguous signposts on the vast territory of decision-making we trek through. Instead we have to turn to other means of rationality.

I happened to come across an interview with one self-aware victim who was able to separate the event from society's reactions to it. This kid Jody Plauche was molested by his karate coach. Later, after the coach was in custody, his dad Gary Plauche shot him to death.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Plauche

ESPN had a good article about the case in which they interviewed Jody.

  And how did the boy feel? He was angry -- at his dad.
  
  "I didn't want him dead," says Jody Plauche, now 40. 
  "I just wanted him to stop."
  
  Jody went on to be a four-sport letterman in high school, 
  but the most important thing he's done is teach parents 
  how to reduce the risk of pedophiles such as Doucet and 
  Sandusky molesting their kids, through his work at a 
  victims' services center in Norristown, Penn.

  "I got a letter once from a woman, who wrote, 'I told my 
  daughter if somebody ever touches you inappropriately, 
  it's not murder. It's worse than murder. It kills a 
  child's soul.' So what's that little girl supposed to 
  say if she ever gets molested?" says Plauche. "She 
  doesn't want her soul to die. So she doesn't tell 
  anybody."
  
  Jody's dad made the same mistake.

  "My dad was absolutely too extreme," Jody said. "He used 
  to tell people, 'If anybody ever touches my kid, I'll kill 
  him.' I knew he wasn't kidding. That's why I couldn't tell 
  anybody. And that's exactly what he ended up doing."

That is probably the most disturbing thing I ever read. State and Federal legislatures unanimously condemned the study because it was used by a group they disagree with. I knew we were bad, but ... unanimously?

I have volunteered helping the victims of these people. When you have heard the desperation of a woman crying at 3:00AM calling to talk to a stranger on a hotline because of the horror show her life has become, you tend to take a dim view of the perpetrators. Every single call, and they are numerous, sticks in your head forever. All because some subhuman wanted to get his rocks off and didn't care who he hurt.

We live in a society where you can get an order of magnitude more prison time for distributing weed than for raping children. If that's not a sympathetic public, I don't know what is.

I see killing yourself being a crime is because society sees you as its slave over whom it can command; slave is worth some money, so why let that money go waste!?

[edit as I failed to answer the question] Incidence of paedophilia is estimated at under 5% by this paywalled review, http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.clinpsy...

In fact, the "temperament" thing is one of the most commonly invalid, as having the "temperament" higher at 16 than 25 is not really that uncommon, intellect basically stays the same until 30, just gaining experience (!). And yet your 16 year old is (most likely) going to be dependent on their parents, and people will treat the older partner significantly more seriously even if they're a drunken slob, because the younger one is "a child" (and despite the older one being perceived as creepy. Ain't society great?).

Fuck you.

If the beef is with religion in general, it begs the question of why focus on muslims?

I have friends who are practicing muslims, jews, christians, hindi and buddhist. They're good people.

I don't pretend to understand why.

The subject of Mohammed's child bride is frequently used to justify hate against muslims, and has a social context of islamophobia. If there weren't that social context it would be fine to bring it up randomly, but since there is, bringing it up is offensive. It's part of the discriminatory pattern muslims experience.

Fixed that one for you, if we're just going all in on senseless religion hate at this point.

If you want to take random encounters with people on the street as representative of a philosophy, you have to at least go to a place where that philosophy is practiced. To talk to the 'average scientist', you'd better at least be looking for him on a university campus -- better at a conference somewhere. To talk to the 'average Christian', you had better at least be looking in a church.

It's not just a sampling issue; those groups also police their membership. What you want to take an average over is not people who declare themselves 'hackers', but people who the community of hackers agrees are 'hackers'. Best way to do that is go to where they meet.

According to the latest Gallup poll, 46% of Americans are sufficiently fundamentalist (christian or otherwise) that they believe that "God created humans in present form".

32% think that "Humans evolved, with God guiding", which is still a lot of the religious in America, but far fewer than many seem to expect. Fewer than those who reject evolution completely.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intel...

To describe fundamentalism as modern is flat-out bizarre.

Then, when they win, say, a House seat on the strength of a single district (a small part of a single state), they automatically have a national platform they can parlay into a global platform if they say something batshit crazy enough, thanks to the global 24-hour news cycle and the endless linking and repetition in the blogosphere.

It's a classic case of a very loud minority making the uncritical thinkers of the world believe "They're all like that".

Of course, here you are:

"Historians have demonstrated that peasants married at significantly later ages than aristocrats. Whereas members of the nobility usually married between age 14 and age 20, peasants probably married in their mid- to late twenties. It is likely that new families could not form until the parents of the potential couple were either dead or old enough to retire, so that they could turn over their land and dwelling to the new couple." [Linda Mitchell, Family Life in the Middle Ages, Greenwood 2007, p. 40]

"Reliable statistics are rare for the Middle Ages, but the evidence suggests that the typical age of marriage among the peasantry was the late twenties for men, the early twenties for women; similar ages probably applied for the urban laboring classes. The ages decline, particularly for women, further up the social scale. Among prosperous urban families, the marriage age for women was typically the late teens; the age varied widely for men. In the aristocracy, ages in the mid-teens for women and early twenties for men seem to have been common." [Jeffrey L. Forgeng, Daily Life in Medieval Europe, Greenwood 1999, p. 27]

[The following text is concerned with the very beginning of Early Modern period-post Late Middle Ages] "When individual ages are looked at, however, we do find very occasional marriages in the early teens. One girl gave her age as thirteen, none as fourteen, four as fifteen, twelve as sixteen, but all the rest of the brides in the sample, 990 of them, were seventeen or over, and more than four out of five had reached the age of twenty. Only ten of the men were younger than this. The commonest age for women was twenty-two, for men twenty-four; the median - the age below which as many got married as above it - was some 22.75 for women, 25.5 for men." [Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: Further Explored, Routledge 2001, p. 83]

I admit that I have significant holes in knowledge regading the "Middle Ages in the Mediterranean" region of space-time. I am biased towards the NW region of Europe partly because there's a wealth of material accessible to me pertaining to the area, partly because I derive most of my income from providing language services for the language spoken in the region, and therefore I am expected to have more than just a passing familiarity with this region's culture and history (although I am partially excused from having to know it to any significant depth as I specialize mostly in technical and engineering texts where this knowledge isn't all that important, and history is merely my part-time hobby). I haven't seen a general work dedicated to the Romance-speaking and Mediterranean regions either in English or in my native tongue yet, therefore I plead incompetent on this charge. :-)

I might, however, try to dig up some data pertaining to my native, i.e., Central European environment; however, not on such a short notice for it to be relevant to this discussion.

EDIT: I wonder about the tradeoffs involved here. Tentative hypothesis: in Northern climates, the labor of daughters was more valuable, so fathers kept them around for longer before marrying them off.

My take on this - I believe that some of the factors involved were:

- the necessity for young people to help their families work on the household,

- the necessity for young women to earn their dowry, if their families couldn't provide it for them (usually by entering into service of nobles or townsmen for a few years),

- the stagnation of land development outside periods of borderland colonization (different periods in various countries, in Central Europe, this period of colonization would have taken place between 11th and 13th century), meaning that someone had to retire first for another pair of young people to get their household.

I'm quite sure there would have been other reasons that I can't recall right now.

1. An innocuous imageboard where someone posts child pornography, but the moderators quickly remove it.

2. A dedicate child pornography forum where people gain access to "higher levels" by posting more child pornography.

3. A peer-to-peer network, where by connecting to the network a person contributes to its operation, and where some child pornography can be found (but plenty of other files as well).

I do not think we would want to see people prosecuted for downloading child pornography in the first case (maybe for uploading it); that would allow anyone to poison any forum they want. On the other hand, we clearly do want to prosecute people for the second scenario, as it pretty clearly encourages more child pornography to be produced.

What about the last one? On the one hand, there is an exchange occurring -- by connecting to the network, someone is providing increased bandwidth and potentially increases the anonymity of the system, both of which likely benefit a child pornography producer. On the other hand, if we prosecute people for that, we would effectively outlaw many of the protocols in use on the Internet right now, and make criminals out of the millions of users/operators of those systems.

Personally, I would make a requirement that the defendant's actions directly encourage the production of child pornography, and that the defendant knowingly undertook those actions for the purpose of obtaining child pornography. Yes, it is a high bar, but that is how the American criminal justice system is supposed to work (cannot speak for other countries) -- the bar is supposed to be high, as a protection from tyranny.

And the idea behind targeting the consumers of child porn is really quite simple. If we can agree that creating sexual videos of a minor constitutes abuse, then those who purchase the tapes are supporting the abuse.

Once tarred with that brush, it's very difficult to remove the stain.

Even more bizarre were the later years of that hysteria, when people were accused of engaging in complex rituals involving child sex abuse, animal sacrifice (or human sacrifice), and satanic worship. It was an actual witch hunt, in an advanced, industrialized society. The moral panic cooled down once attorneys general started investigating the DAs cases, psychologists began pointing out the flawed methodology used to question the children, and people generally started realizing just how crazy things had become. Unfortunately, the hysteria is not over, it is just a bit less ridiculous than it was 20 years ago.

> Do these make me a pedo?

In the eyes of the law, likely.

> What about similar pictures my in laws have taken?

Yes, it's not advisable to take these kind of pictures.

> What about pictures of my young nieces and nephews doing similar things?

Yes, if there's nudity.

> Additionally, have you been around kids in bathing suits?

Not a problem.

> Sometimes the ones for little girls don't fit too well. There aren't exactly many curves to hold things in position at that age. What about accidental pictures of those mishaps?

Don't take pictures of kids in bathing suits.

Pretty much the rule is don't be around kids and don't touch kids unless they're yours, and I think everybody knows this today. And as a global rule, don't take pictures of kids at all, but especially avoid any that could involve any type of nudity, intentional or accidental (I'd avoid bathing suit shots for sure).

There might be a greater societal harm being done here, because as a male in my 20s, I have almost no interaction with children (which I think is fairly typical, at least among my peers). This could be a problem for my generation, as we're less likely to know how to handle kids; and it could be a problem for the younger generations as they don't get to interact with many adults besides their immediate family and friends. Either way, I think the societal rules about what's ok and what's not ok are reasonably well defined, if very arbitrary.

It's very normal here to dress your kid of either gender in just the pants or nothing at all (when they're very small) - no problem.

When an analyst looks through some images they have to make a subjective judgement because it is very hard to judge age in many cases.

To be clear; striking a suggestive pose is very very rarely illegal in itself. It may be classified on a relevant scale as part of the investigation (e.g. COPINE) but that is only because it is of obvious relevance to the charge/conviction.

If someone was caught with "suggestive" images on their computer in the UK, for example, the CPS wouldn't prosecute (because it's not actually illegal).

Actually no, read the comments on this page. There are many who think that Romeo did nothing really wrong.

Plenty of people have fetishes ranging from the distasteful (rape, both from the perspective of the rapist and the victim, cuckolding, etc) to the absolutely bizarre (inflation? transformation? vore? what the fuck, who comes up with this shit?) that they have absolutely no desire to participate in in reality. It exists purely as fantasy for them, never admitted to anyone but strangers on the internet or perhaps a very accepting (or similarly deviant) partner.

Of course this is the case. You don't hear stories about strange men chasing people down with bicycle pumps, do you?

In other words, it's almost as if the average person understands the line between fantasy and reality! What a relief, maybe they aren't all ticking time bombs after all.

If a stranger breaks into your home, goes through your belongings, and takes your prized possessions, it doesn't matter if you're well insured or if you're poor. It also doesn't matter if you're the extremely rare edge case who does not feel violated and doesn't press charges. The actual act of burglary occurred and the degree of it doesn't change based on your response.

Likewise, when a child is molested, it doesn't matter if he or she is not harmed physically. (Indeed, the psychological effects might be the longest lasting and most painful in many cases.)

Certainly, we can be thankful that they weren't physically harmed -- or in your rare edge case, that they are able to live the rest of their lives without any apparent repercussions. But that doesn't change the fact that there was an abuse of power (the other person was bigger, in a position of authority, more mentally capable, or more sober, etc.) And as I said before, it doesn't place any more responsibility on the child, nor any less culpability on the abuser.

The response does not change the act.

Of course, you can be questioned while not being under arrest but again, you can ask for a lawyer before they question you.

I can't think a police officer could say in court: "He refused to be questioned before we arrested him" because you're not under any obligation to talk to the police in day-to-day life.

What? Who carries all that around? Is this a good reason to drive around on your spare tire, so they can see it?