Just one other little point that is usually overlooked: Most child abusers, sexual or otherwise, are NOT pedophiles. That is, they are NOT primarily attracted to children. They have other motives for their crime, or often are under the influence of alcohol or other drugs.
At least, that's what the data from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies shows.
According to a document posted by Wikileaks, a company from eastern Europe that sold subscriptions to child erotica (nudity, but no sex) around 2003 was getting 15 million unique visitors to its main page per month.
It is hard to know the actual numbers, as research in this area is suppressed, but it would appear that among men:
90% are sometimes attracted to prepubescent girls.
20% to 30% are attracted to girls at least as much as to women.
3% to 10% are exclusively attracted to girls.
Figuring approximately 300 million in the USA, and roughly 50% male, this means:
120 million sometimes attracted to girls.
30 million to 45 million attracted to girls as much as or more than to women.
4.5 million to 15 million are exclusively attracted to girls.
This does not include boy lovers or female pedophiles, so the true numbers are larger.
You've got to stop believing the media and the government. They lie.
You're not sick. Little girls are HOT! Women are . . . not.
Studies show that 90+% of men are sometimes attracted to prepubescent girls, 20-30% find girls at least as attractive as women (or moreso), and a guesstimate for exclusive attraction to girls is maybe 3 to 10%.
Let's turn those into numbers, using a figure of 300 million Americans, half of whom are male:
That would be at least 120 million who sometimes like little girls, at least 30 million who find girls at least as sexy as women, and at least 9 million (more than the population of New York City) who are exclusively attracted to little girls.
Plus there are the boy lovers and female peds. We are not a small community, despite what our enemies would have you believe.
And looking around, I believe I see some signs of change. We will not be silent much longer.
I am not opposed to child pornography. It is ludicrous to believe that possession of a photo inherently causes harm. We used to laugh at people who objected to being photographed because it stole their soul - now we jail not only the photographer but anyone who can be proven to have seen the image.
That said, I wonder how these guys got work in Security. I mean, everyone knows that the paysites are mostly FBI honeypots, and - incidentally - the FBI has even put new child porn into general distribution via these sites, so I wonder about the intelligence and judgement of those who paid for cp. Likewise, why on earth were they using government computers for this? They must be reckless idiots.
Anyone with even a modest understanding of security would at least be using TOR or a proxy, and only accessing this material from a non-monitored computer, preferably one with no personally identifiable information on it. The lack of even these simple steps suggests that these people are unsuited to their profession.
Of course, these are only the ones that got caught. Other evidence from a decade ago suggests that ten years ago perhaps 10 million Americans were accessing child pornography, and the true number is probably much higher - especially if one includes pictures of 16 and 17 year olds. At some point we will have to come to realize that we can't put everyone in jail for violating someone else's sensibilities.
"Child porn is defined by what it is, not who has it."
Er, no.
Some years ago, in Pennsylvania (the same state as this case), a man was successfully charged with possession of child pornography because he owned a cheerleading video that was completely legal for others to own. He was successfully prosecuted because he admitted to being turned on by the cheerleaders.
More of a child pornography ring than most reported cases.
The typical widespread child pornography ring you hear about consists of three people, and is only "widespread" because one of the guys sometimes visits his native Bulgaria.
"Psychologically, I say this is the extreme conversatives who would really like to outlaw nudity, masturbation and while we're at it, even thinking about sex."
That's only half of it. The liberals are also idiots, especially the feminist faction.
There have been at least two cases where women have been put in prison for being raped by teenage boys. Yes, you read that correctly, they were put in prison for being the victims of actual, honest-to-god, forcible rape. Because their rapists were less than 18 years old, the victims were convicted of statutory rape of a minor. Unlike Saudi Arabia, where the public was outraged when a woman was convicted for being a rape victim, nobody cared much. And where did this happen, some conservative bastion in the backcountry? No. It happened in Madison, Wisconsin - a famously "liberal" enclave.
This idiocy is coming at us from right and left, and frankly I think the feminists on the left are worse. The conservatives at least have some moderating influences like a belief in the power of forgiveness and millennia of history.
This has been happening for a while now, with or without pictures.
In one case, one poor girl got put on the sex offenders registry for playing doctor. She was TEN at the time. She was playing doctor with her step-siblings, their biological father found out and decided to punish his ex-wife by taking it out on the girl. She's a woman now, and can't get a job because she's a registered sex offender.
But the pictures thing has been happening too, in a number of jurisdictions. Seems like I hear of a case every few weeks. There's no end to the stupidity. Kids are too young to consent to sex, but old enough to be held criminally accountable for the rest of their life if they TRY to consent to sex.
"these are not adults making a rational decision about these pictures"
When I saw this, my first thought was "Yes, that principle and the prosecutors obviously are not adults, and are obviously not making a rational decision about these pictures.
Then I realised you were talking about the teens.
The United States has been heading this way for a long while now, at least since Anita Bryant started her "Save Our Children" campaign, when she was under the impression that homosexuals could only increase their number by "recruiting" innocent children. Then John Walsh turned his personal tragedy into a national, and now a global tragedy with his movement that deceived the nation into believing that the thousands of children who run away from abusive homes each year were in fact millions of children who were being raped and murdered by strangers each year. (The quasi-governmental organization Walsh founded, the National Center for Misusing and Exploiting Children, is the king of dubious statistics - at one point they were telling Americans that over a million kids went missing annually. More recently they have been claiming that the non-existent child porn industry is larger than the legal pornography industry and Hollywood, combined.) What started out as an anti-homosexual movement has turned into an anti-child and anti-man movement, and in fact an anti-everything-good-about-the-world movement.
(As a curious aside: Anita Bryant made a name for herself as a singer, and one of her hits was a tune from the 1950's musical "The Music Man", which was set in the early 1900s. "The Music Man" was about a charlatan who deceived parents into believing their children were in danger so that he could sell them the cure. Sound familiar?)
So now we have reached the point where we are putting children who are "doing what comes naturally" in jail, or blacklisting them for life, in the name of "protecting them". Protecting them from what, exactly, no one has been able to satisfactorily explain, but protect them we will, by God, if we have to kill every last one of them!
I feel for both the boys and girls who have been caught up in this situation, in which the only real crimes were those committed by the principal who violated their right to be safe from unreasonable search and seizure and those committed by the police and prosecutors who pursued charges.
When combined with such things as The Drug War, it is getting harder and harder every day to do anything but laugh at the notion that the United States is home to the free or the brave.
"And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the fear and the home of the slave!"
Play ball!
Parent post is a good one, but just to inform the engineers on this board . . . plenty of people think you're pretty stupid. As tradesmen would say, "book smart" but not practical.
As it happens, I can stroke your ego a bit and say that on average engineers are a good deal smarter than the average tradesman - but the religious belief in the stupidity of engineers is not entirely without merit. Frequently engineers may know how things physically work, but are not familiar with things beyond their narrow specialty - so, for example, a civil engineer may not realize that their perfect design has just violated the fire code, the building code, and the electrical code. Naturally, this can delay things and cause accusations of stupidity all around.
That said, I am heartened by the general tone of the conversation here, and the realization that all of us are idiots to some degree. I would only add that average news reporters, psychologists, and sociologists really are a bit more idiotic than the rest of us. Oh, and a recent survey in the U.S. found that U.S. lawmakers are significantly below average (for the entire population) in their understanding of the law.
"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne
