On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:22:45 -0700, jeanpauljesus wrote
(in article <gaugr4$rj4$1@aioe.org>):
> On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:21:08 +0200, jeanpauljesus wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:33:32 -0700, Brandon D Cartwright wrote:
>>
>>> The pedophile?s last lie
>>>
>>> http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/
>> archives/2008/09/07/2003422508
>>>
>>> Many pedophiles claim their crime is restricted to viewing Internet
>>> images, but new research shatters that myth
>>>
>>> By Phillipa Ibbotson
>>> THE GUARDIAN, LONDON
>>> Sunday, Sep 07, 2008, Page 9
>>>
>>> Last month, disgraced glam rocker Gary Glitter was deported from
>>> Vietnam after serving a two-and-a-half year prison sentence for
>>> sexually abusing young girls. He had fled Britain nine years earlier
>>> after receiving a two-month sentence for possessing child pornography.
>>>
>>> Despite the length and breadth of his subsequent offending career, the
>>> apparent ineffectiveness of his brief first sentence hardly rated a
>>> mention. Yet just days after his deportation, Scotland Yard issued a
>>> warning. The problem of child abuse is a far greater threat to society
>>> than first thought, it said, with ?huge? numbers of pedophiles now
>>> scouring the Internet.
>>>
>>> Since 1998, Internet crime involving sexual exploitation of children
>>> has risen by more than 400 percent; downloading, possessing and trading
>>> or distributing child pornography has also grown rapidly. Ever more
>>> sophisticated technologies have facilitated illegal online activities,
>>> making it easier to avoid detection.
>>>
>>> As a result, illegal material can move faster and in significantly
>>> greater quantities than before. And it is a highly profitable business:
>>> commercial child pornography was estimated two years ago to be a US$20
>>> billion industry worldwide.
>>>
>>> Yet it is not only the quantity that is disturbing. There is also the
>>> increasingly extreme nature of the material, as reported in the
>>> Internet Watch Foundation?s (IWF) study earlier this year.
>>>
>>> Detectives for the London-based Child Exploitation Online Protection
>>> center are uncovering evidence that pedophiles are concentrating more
>>> on pre-verbal victims. Ernie Allen, president of the National Center
>>> for Missing & Exploited Children in the US, said recently that child
>>> pornography has become ?a global crisis.?
>>>
>>> Child sex offenders are usually habitual fantasists. They are prone to
>>> distorted thinking; dissembling and deceit go with the territory. And
>>> it seems they are particularly skilled at disowning and evading
>>> responsibility, a trait prevalent among sexual abusers generally.
>>>
>>> Partly as a result of this, less is known about online child
>>> pornographers and their treatment than almost any other group of
>>> offenders. And even less is known about the correlation between the use
>>> of pornography and hands-on offenses. So despite some recognized
>>> advances in policing and containment recently, this lack of empirical
>>> knowledge is thwarting the professionals who seek to tackle the
>>> problem. The damage, meanwhile, continues to escalate.
>>>
>>> Psychologists Michael Bourke and Andres Hernandez conducted a study two
>>> years ago at a federal correctional institution in the US, in which
>>> they compared two groups of men in a voluntary treatment program for
>>> sex offenders. All 155 had been sentenced for the possession,
>>> distribution or receipt of child-abuse images. Only 40 of them were
>>> known to have committed any hands-on sexual offenses previously,
>>> averaging 1.88 victims each. The others claimed never to have committed
>>> such offenses: Their activities, they said, had been restricted to
>>> viewing images.
>>>
>>> But after participating in an 18-month therapeutic program, a very
>>> different picture emerged. It was a picture that not only belied the
>>> normal, law-abiding lives depicted by most of these men prior to their
>>> arrest, but one that also contrasted with the frequent assertion that
>>> such offenders are ?only? involved with images.
>>>
>>> It emerged that the number of men admitting to hands-on sexual abuse
>>> increased from 40 to 131. Their average number of disclosed victims
>>> rose to 13.56 (8.7 for the 115 men who had previously denied any
>>> offenses). Overall, the number of admitted contact sexual offenses
>>> increased by 2,369 percent.
>>>
>>> Far from being innocent or sexually ?curious? bystanders whose interest
>>> was reserved to Internet images, the vast majority of these men emerged
>>> as hands-on offenders with longstanding sexual interest. Not only were
>>> they significantly likely to have sexually abused more than one child,
>>> they were also likely to have experimented with both genders, and a
>>> variety of age groups.
>>>
>>> The other 24 men were offered a lie detector test; some refused. Only
>>> two of these men passed, both of whom admitted that with continued
>>> opportunity and online access they would have been in danger of
>>> molesting a child.
>>>
>>> Perhaps this should not surprise us. Among other things, online
>>> communities provide marginalized individuals with a feeling of
>>> solidarity, while at the same time maintaining the illusion of
>>> anonymity. Fertile grounds, you might think, for the awakening of any
>>> dormant or repressed sexual fantasies. Indeed, perhaps the act of
>>> repression creates its own vulnerability, rendering such individuals
>>> more susceptible to external triggers.
>>>
>>> It would be rash to conclude that the Internet causes contact sexual
>>> crimes. But the research puts paid to the idea that the desire to view
>>> images is easily distinguishable from the desire to act them out. And
>>> they also corroborate prior findings: The manifestations of deviant
>>> sexual arousal are seldom limited to fantasy. It is opportunity more
>>> than anything that dictates how many Internet offenders also rape and
>>> molest children.
>>>
>>> What is beyond doubt is the harm caused. Child abuse images dehumanize
>>> children and desensitize offenders, and child/adult sexuality is
>>> normalized in the process. Yet such a profitable business will not
>>> suffer exposure easily, nor welcome scrutiny.
>>>
>>> The above survey was among the first of its kind in the US, and
>>> doubtless proved discomfiting to many. It has yet to be published.
>>> Those experts who have seen it say privately that it could have
>>> enormous implications, both for law enforcement and public safety.
>>>
>>> What is becoming apparent is that the Internet has opened the way for
>>> new types of offending. The real issue is not whether viewing these
>>> images will make someone a pedophile ? a label liable to vast
>>> misunderstandings. The real danger is that those who do so will be
>>> encouraged to reoffend ? and that the proliferation of online
>>> child-abuse images will dramatically increase the incidence of child
>>> abuse.
>>>
>>> As the IWF has stated, there is urgent need for ?a coordinated global
>>> attack on these websites.?
>>>
>>> This is undoubtedly so. But as Bourke and Hernandez? report shows, our
>>> lack of awareness in this area is very dangerous. Particularly, it
>>> seems, when it comes to our knowledge of sex offenders. If nothing
>>> else, Glitter?s case shows that his initial prison sentence achieved
>>> little apart from delaying the next onslaught. Clearly a more
>>> enlightened approach toward the treatment of victims and offenders is
>>> not only long overdue but vital.
>>>
>>> This dark underbelly of society has fed on ignorance for too long. It
>>> is only through addressing why these things happen, as well as how to
>>> stop them, that we might shrink its appetite. This untold damage needs
>>> telling.
>>
>> So, when can we expect this "enlightened" approach to the treatment of
>> offenders? Anytime soon?
>>
>> Another sample based only on the prison population and I would venture
>> hardly representative. And one study does not make science.
>>
>> Whatever the intentions, this type of research will simply be used as a
>> rationale for harsher punishments for first offenders, especially
>> downloaders, despite pleas from senior UK police that jailing first
>> offenders simply for internet downloading of relatively mild images
>> achieves absolutely nothing other than devastating the offender's life
>> and family and tying up the courts.
>
> [oops, accidentally read and deleted your pissweak response, vile troll]
>
> *Society* defines "offender". What a dick.
>
> Cites? That is a question that might be of interest to non-trolls.
>
> Don't have specifics on hand, but I can give the context. This was from
> an article in a prominent UK newspaper a year or so ago, in the aftermath
> of Operation ??? or whatever it was, when UK police Yard were
> swamped doing thousands of softcore CP arrests of little old bank
> managers and barristers and so on who never had so much as a parking
> ticket before, after authorities were given lots of credit card details
> from the big busts in Belarus.
>
> Many of the types of people being charged for soft images (basically just
> a few child nudes) did not warrant destruction of their lives in the eyes
> of police. Nonetheless police are obliged to charge many under current
> laws, and that particular senior policeman was seeking a change to the
> law so the person could mend their ways rather than be jailed. That, he
> said, served society better than dragging all these people through the
> courts and probably into jail. An interesting and entirely sensible
> policeman.
>
> I also recall (different source) that Scotland Yard increased the
> criteria for laying charges to something like a minimum of 20 images I
> think it was. Downloaders of lesser numbers were cautioned instead of
> charged. But this was more a pragmatic measure than a humane one - they
> just couldn't deal with the huge numbers of cases.
>
M. Jeanpaul,
I have responded to your other post in afunb
|
|