Did you just seriously argue that alcohol consumption is punished more harshly than child sexual abuse? ....

HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Personally, the advice stands.

However, in your situation, I would not hesitate to gripe about it, even while I followed it.

Perhaps I reacted more to the fact that you presented this advice without any commentary on that situation at all.

I think it's one of the fundamental problems of urban living... the lack of community. When Mr Teacher was seen by every student when he visisted the barber and the butcher and the blacksmith, it would be absurd to say "don't fraternize with students", but today that seems reasonable because we live in these huge anonymous conglomerations.

Ugh. I find it somewhat gross to think of. Personally, when i was young, I had a number of teachers I saw on a regular basis outside of school, including one who's house I visited often and another who was a friend's parent and would take us camping in the summers. As a result of those two, other teachers would be over for barbecue or whatever and I knew 8 or 10 on a friendly level outside of school.

School was much easier for me, even as a nerd, when the teachers all saw me in a more personal light.

Our culture is sick and broken that this is "inappropriate". :-)

This is absurd.

The pillars of being a good teacher in the past were

1) Establishing mentoring relationships with students
2) Physical contact such a hand on the shoulder, is clearly shown through many studies and many generations, one of the best ways to establish a bond wit ha student
3) The American "bubble" is absurd to most of the rest of the world and would be considered rude
4) See 1
5) That's probably true, but the other 4 suck

Of course you've never been accused of sexual harassment, You've also never won teacher of the year.

It's sad that we dilute everything to the point of non-existence out of fear... sad sad sad.

I'm pretty sure the study was actually investigating "pedophilia" which the DSM-IV defines as "under 13".

I imagine if you expand that to 16 or 17, the number goes from 0.5% to about 95%. :-)

LOL, I just read it with less beer in my system and I see what you were doing. Need a +1 ActuallySarcasm tag.

Well, you are in the minority then. I am staggered by your ability to submarine your emapthy for both affected parties.

The reality is that most people disagree with you. This doesn't make them right, but it does give them some credence which you can't easily wash away with a snort and a wave of your hand.

Keep thinking really hard.

Heh... you did SORTA accuse some random coward that he was into kiddie porn with no evidence.

I recognize the aim of your post, but that seems rather baiting to me :-)

Personally, I think the issue with celebrities is not one of some sort of conspiracy cabal of rich and powerful, but one of human nature.

Someone who is famous and well known is a HUMAN. Their fans and friends identify with them and recognize their humanity.

Some guy from the news doing exactly the same thing is very very easy to dismiss as "DISGUSTING MONSTER".

It's a simple fact that in child sex cases, the family of the offender often feels the trial and sentencing are too harsh, but it is much less known that the victim often feels the same way.

Some people file this under something strange like Stockholm Syndrome, but in my opinion, it's simply the fact that the victim almost always knows the offender and sees him as a human. It is then hard to demonize him to the extent that society at large is capable of doing.

Think about it, if your brother/cousin/bestfriend were found tomorrow with 600 images of naked children on his computer, could you really feel the world was a better place if he was given 18 years in prison?

No, you would probably like to see him punished, but in a humane and justifiable way... say... with a year's house arrest.

In my opinion, that's what's happening here, not some right-wing conspiracy junk.

Agreed. Child porn is pretty unique in this regard. It's the cultural/legal equivalent of yelling "FIRE" in a crowded.... society.

This has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the government?

Did you read the case studies in the linked PDF? I didn't think so.

These people had clearance because of the rooms they needed to walk through but didn't have any real access to data. One was a telephone repairman at a military base. Others were mid-level office workers who had to be in secured areas for office work.

These weren't high level operatives. Just the low-hanging-fruit of the justice system.

All this proves is that there are A LOT of pedophiles in the country, and some of them tend to get caught now and then. Nothing else to see here, move along.

OR, there is an extremely large number of closeted pedophiles and it IS, IN FACT, a very small percentage of them that are dumb enough to get caught.

To be honest, I think that is the most likely case. There is nothing about being a pedophile that would make someone stupid or ignorant of the law and stigma, or the risks, and there is nothing to indicate that this is some sort of government conspiracy to screw over innocent people.

Research indicates there are likely approx 1.5 million pedophiles in the US (around 0.5% of the population based on several recent studies). That's about the same number of people as there are Muslims in the United States and about twice as many as all Buddhists in the US.

Food for thought.

Let me point out one thing that you might be partially correct about.

More than half (the FBI estimated around 60% in a paper in 1999) of child abuse that goes to trial IS, in fact, situational. It is an otherwise normal person doing something bad that they normally wouldn't do, under unusual circumstances.

However, the group "pedophiles" and the group "child molesters", while overlapping, are not equal. Many pedophiles never abuse children. Many who abuse children are not pedophiles (by a strict diagnostic criteria). Some pedophiles view child porn, some do not and keep their thoughts to themselves.

I'll leave the rest of the conclusions to you.

Frankly, the people in the linked PDF were folks like telephone repairmen and low level office workers. I doubt this was some sort of big publicity stunt. We're talking a dozen or so people here, nobody who really means anything to the organizations they represented....

I think there's reasonable evidence from a series of population surveys that around 0.5% of the population is attracted to kids, exclusively or primarily. That's about 1.5 million in the US, 35 million in the world.

Most manage to live a pretty normal life without doing illegal stuff, but even if 10% of those people do get porn at some point, that's still 150,000.

How many get caught? :-)

Well, research shows that you're an idiot. :-)

Just because you want it to be different doesn't mean it is. Simply accepting the fact that pedophilia is a sexual orientation like many others doesn't automatically make it acceptible and justified. It simply underscores the fact that humans who find themselves attracted to kids aren't "fundamentally broken". Research doesn't back that up at all. In fact, research indicates that the majority of them are profoundly normal in almost every way.

The image of a drooling pervert with low self-esteem and poor impulse control is based on studies out of the 1970s and 1980s that used population samples from high-security prisons and mental institutions. When you take people out of prisons and mental hospitals, wouldn't you expect them to be a tad off, from the norm?

There is shockingly little study on non-offending pedophiles, because of the social stigma of the topic, but what research there is indicates that something over 70% of exclusive pedophiles claim to have never abused a child and within that group, MMPI inventories and other social adjustment standards seem to lead us to believe that these people are very normal, well adjusted people, many of whom indicate they would remove those sexual feelings if they could, but they can't, so they have to learn to live with them.

I would also point out that the most common kind of child porn, according to a talk I heard a few years ago, are images and videos of teens that they take of themselves, alone in their bedroom, often on a webcam. These apparently outnumber other types of images by a notable factor.

But then again, feel free to continue to believe what makes you comfortable.