Jury In: America DEFINTELY NOT MOST FREE COUNTRY

[Don Corleone]

At least, not when your children are seized and you're charged as a sex-offender (http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2009/09/22/pn.bathtime.photos.cnn)for taking bathtime photos of your kids. :dizzy2: :dizzy2:

WTF?!?!?

Any parent out there in America should be wetting their pants right now. There's kids knowingly beaten and sexually abused and Child Services won't lift a finger. But take a photo of your kid in the bathtub? We'll lower the boom on you, bucko... :dizzy2:

Absolute and utter insanity. And the worst part is... the City defends its actions, maintains its absolutist stance, and continues to overrule their own panel of psychological experts and take the word of an untrained detective that family photos like these constitute child pornography.

[Crazed Rabbit]

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
-- George Washington

This is why the less power the government has, the better. Here we see the result of politicians passing laws because of a moral panic, and obstinate government officials operating based on punishing the 'lawbreaker', not reason.

CR

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

On the bright side, that means most of them and their spouses will be arrested.

[Samurai Waki]

Maybe I should take up the job offer in Vancouver B.C. ...ugh.

[Lemur]

Oh, the sex crimes laws are a mess that deserve a real discussion. Check out the age curve of convicted sex offenders:

https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v489/Lemurmania/OffenderAges.jpg

As you can see, 14-year-olds are a bunch of recidivist criminals. Madness. Here's a great essay on the subject (http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2009/09/there-is-fury-and-and-sadness-inside.html), which will leave you both enraged and depressed.

[drone]

I live in fear of the cops busting down my door because I own the Nevermind CD.

Edit-> almost forgot... Won't somebody please think if the children! :drama1:

Double Edit ->

Oh, the sex crimes laws are a mess that deserve a real discussion. Check out the age curve of convicted sex offenders:

https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v489/Lemurmania/OffenderAges.jpgThat graph is very interesting. The hump that starts at ~27 is where the real child-touchers are. :yes:

[Louis VI the Fat]

Kiddie porn? Your kids in a bathtub? Are they mad?

Here's a thought: simply google 'children swimming pool' in any European language, and you get all the kiddie pron you want. Lots of little children swim / splash around naked in European public parks and swimming pools. Come to think of it, I probably took some children pornography pictures myself this summer. Of other people's kids, no less.



Shall I risk a link? Why not. 'Enfants piscine' gives you this naked six (five?) year old Swiss girl right on page one: *

If you are an American, close your browser RIGHT NOW, destroy your computer and pray!


*Edit: hmm...on second thought, perhaps not. Linky removed. Perhaps in an alternative universe.

[Strike For The South]

We may actually be retarded. How we ever managed to do anything right is beyond me, much less fool the world into thinking we should be something to envy.

[Beskar]

America :daisy: yeah! Here to save the :daisy: :daisy: day!

[Crazed Rabbit]

As you can see, 14-year-olds are a bunch of recidivist criminals. Madness. Here's a great essay on the subject (http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2009/09/there-is-fury-and-and-sadness-inside.html), which will leave you both enraged and depressed.

Huh, I read that essay a few days ago myself. Odd how people trail's cross. :inquisitive:

If I were those parents, I don't think I could let them take my kids.

CR

[Aemilius Paulus]

A month ago, I believe, I got yet another Economist through my subscription and this was the cover:

(BTW, is hotlinking for this purpose allowed?) [No, it isn't. BG]

Here are the two articles inside the issue:


Illiberal politics
America's unjust sex laws

Aug 6th 2009
From The Economist print edition
An ever harsher approach is doing more harm than good, but it is being copied around the world


IT IS an oft-told story, but it does not get any less horrific on repetition. Fifteen years ago, a paedophile enticed seven-year-old Megan Kanka into his home in New Jersey by offering to show her a puppy. He then raped her, killed her and dumped her body in a nearby park. The murderer, who had recently moved into the house across the street from his victim, had twice before been convicted of sexually assaulting a child. Yet Megan’s parents had no idea of this. Had they known he was a sex offender, they would have told their daughter to stay away from him.


In their grief, the parents started a petition, demanding that families should be told if a sexual predator moves nearby. Hundreds of thousands signed it. In no time at all, lawmakers in New Jersey granted their wish. And before long, “Megan’s laws” had spread to every American state.
America’s sex-offender laws are the strictest of any rich democracy. Convicted rapists and child-molesters are given long prison sentences. When released, they are put on sex-offender registries. In most states this means that their names, photographs and addresses are published online, so that fearful parents can check whether a child-molester lives nearby. Under the Adam Walsh Act of 2006, another law named after a murdered child, all states will soon be obliged to make their sex-offender registries public. Such rules are extremely popular. Most parents will support any law that promises to keep their children safe. Other countries are following America’s example, either importing Megan’s laws or increasing penalties: after two little girls were murdered by a school caretaker, Britain has imposed multiple conditions on who can visit schools.

Which makes it all the more important to ask whether America’s approach is the right one. In fact its sex-offender laws have grown self-defeatingly harsh. They have been driven by a ratchet effect. Individual American politicians have great latitude to propose new laws. Stricter curbs on paedophiles win votes. And to sound severe, such curbs must be stronger than the laws in place, which in turn were proposed by politicians who wished to appear tough themselves. Few politicians dare to vote against such laws, because if they do, the attack ads practically write themselves.
A whole Wyoming of offenders

In all, 674,000 Americans are on sex-offender registries—more than the population of Vermont, North Dakota or Wyoming. The number keeps growing partly because in several states registration is for life and partly because registries are not confined to the sort of murderer who ensnared Megan Kanka. According to Human Rights Watch, at least five states require registration for people who visit prostitutes, 29 require it for consensual sex between young teenagers and 32 require it for indecent exposure. Some prosecutors are now stretching the definition of “distributing child pornography” to include teens who text half-naked photos of themselves to their friends.
How dangerous are the people on the registries? A state review of one sample in Georgia found that two-thirds of them posed little risk. For example, Janet Allison was found guilty of being “party to the crime of child molestation” because she let her 15-year-old daughter have sex with a boyfriend. The young couple later married. But Ms Allison will spend the rest of her life publicly branded as a sex offender.



Several other countries have sex-offender registries, but these are typically held by the police and are hard to view. In America it takes only seconds to find out about a sex offender: some states have a “click to print” icon on their websites so that concerned citizens can put up posters with the offender’s mugshot on trees near his home. Small wonder most sex offenders report being harassed. A few have been murdered. Many are fired because someone at work has Googled them.
Registration is often just the start. Sometimes sex offenders are barred from living near places where children congregate. In Georgia no sex offender may live or work within 1,000 feet (300 metres) of a school, church, park, skating rink or swimming pool. In Miami an exclusion zone of 2,500 feet has helped create a camp of homeless offenders under a bridge.
Make the punishment fit the crime

There are three main arguments for reform. First, it is unfair to impose harsh penalties for small offences. Perhaps a third of American teenagers have sex before they are legally allowed to, and a staggering number have shared revealing photographs with each other. This is unwise, but hardly a reason for the law to ruin their lives. Second, America’s sex laws often punish not only the offender, but also his family. If a man who once slept with his 15-year-old girlfriend is barred for ever from taking his own children to a playground, those children suffer.


Third, harsh laws often do little to protect the innocent. The police complain that having so many petty sex offenders on registries makes it hard to keep track of the truly dangerous ones. Cash that might be spent on treating sex offenders—which sometimes works—is spent on huge indiscriminate registries. Public registers drive serious offenders underground, which makes them harder to track and more likely to reoffend. And registers give parents a false sense of security: most sex offenders are never even reported, let alone convicted.


It would not be hard to redesign America’s sex laws. Instead of lumping all sex offenders together on the same list for life, states should assess each person individually and include only real threats. Instead of posting everything on the internet, names could be held by the police, who would share them only with those, such as a school, who need to know. Laws that bar sex offenders from living in so many places should be repealed, because there is no evidence that they protect anyone: a predator can always travel. The money that a repeal saves could help pay for monitoring compulsive molesters more intrusively—through ankle bracelets and the like.



In America it may take years to unpick this. However practical and just the case for reform, it must overcome political cowardice, the tabloid media and parents’ understandable fears. Other countries, though, have no excuse for committing the same error. Sensible sex laws are better than vengeful ones.


Unjust and ineffective

Aug 6th 2009 | HARLEM, GEORGIA
From The Economist print edition
America has pioneered the harsh punishment of sex offenders. Does it work?


Illustration by Noma Barr
ONE day in 1996 the lights went off in a classroom in Georgia so that the students could watch a video. Wendy Whitaker, a 17-year-old pupil at the time, was sitting near the back. The boy next to her suggested that, since it was dark, she could perform oral sex on him without anyone noticing. She obliged. And that single teenage fumble wrecked her life.


Her classmate was three weeks shy of his 16th birthday. That made Ms Whitaker a criminal. She was arrested and charged with sodomy, which in Georgia can refer to oral sex. She met her court-appointed lawyer five minutes before the hearing. He told her to plead guilty. She did not really understand what was going on, so she did as she was told.

She was sentenced to five years on probation. Not being the most organised of people, she failed to meet all the conditions, such as checking in regularly with her probation officer. For a series of technical violations, she was incarcerated for more than a year, in the county jail, the state women’s prison and a boot camp. “I was in there with people who killed people. It’s crazy,” she says.


She finished her probation in 2002. But her ordeal continues. Georgia puts sex offenders on a public registry. Ms Whitaker’s name, photograph and address are easily accessible online, along with the information that she was convicted of “sodomy”. The website does not explain what she actually did. But since it describes itself as a list of people who have “been convicted of a criminal offence against a victim who is a minor or any dangerous sexual offence”, it makes it sound as if she did something terrible to a helpless child. She sees people whispering, and parents pulling their children indoors when she walks by.
Punish first, think later

The registry is a gold mine for lazy journalists. A local television station featured Ms Whitaker in a spot on local sex offenders, broadcasting a helpful map showing where she lives but leaving the specifics of the crime to each viewer’s fearful imagination. “My husband’s family saw me on TV,” she says. “That’s embarrassing.”


What Ms Whitaker did is no longer a crime in Georgia. The state’s sodomy laws, which in 1996 barred oral sex even between willing spouses, were struck down by court rulings in 1998 and 2003. And since 2006, thanks to a “Romeo and Juliet” clause in a sex-crimes law, consensual sex between two teenagers has been a misdemeanour, not a crime, if one partner is underage but no more than four years younger than the other.


The Romeo and Juliet clause was not retroactive, however, so Ms Whitaker is stuck on the register, and subject to extraordinary restrictions. Registered sex offenders in Georgia are barred from living within 1,000 feet of anywhere children may congregate, such as a school, a park, a library, or a swimming pool. They are also banned from working within 1,000 feet of a school or a child-care centre. Since the church at the end of Ms Whitaker’s street houses a child-care centre, she was evicted from her home. Her husband, who worked for the county dog-catching department, moved with her, lost his job and with it their health insurance.


Thanks to a lawsuit filed by the Southern Centre for Human Rights, a group that campaigns against rough justice, Ms Whitaker won an injunction allowing her to return home. But her husband did not get his job back, and now works as a labourer. The two of them are struggling financially. And Ms Whitaker is still fighting to get her name removed from the registry. “When you’re a teenager, you do stuff,” she says. “You don’t think you’ll be paying for it when you’re nearly 30.”


Every American state keeps a register of sex offenders. California has had one since 1947, but most states started theirs in the 1990s. Many people assume that anyone listed on a sex-offender registry must be a rapist or a child molester. But most states spread the net much more widely. A report by Sarah Tofte of Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, found that at least five states required men to register if they were caught visiting prostitutes. At least 13 required it for urinating in public (in two of which, only if a child was present). No fewer than 29 states required registration for teenagers who had consensual sex with another teenager. And 32 states registered flashers and streakers.


Because so many offences require registration, the number of registered sex offenders in America has exploded. As of December last year, there were 674,000 of them, according to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. If they were all crammed into a single state, it would be more populous than Wyoming, Vermont or North Dakota. As a share of its population, America registers more than four times as many people as Britain, which is unusually harsh on sex offenders. America’s registers keep swelling, not least because in 17 states, registration is for life.


Illustration by Noma Barr
Georgia has more than 17,000 registered sex offenders. Some are highly dangerous. But many are not. And it is fiendishly hard for anyone browsing the registry to tell the one from the other. The Georgia Sex Offender Registration Review Board, an official body, assessed a sample of offenders on the registry last year and concluded that 65% of them posed little threat. Another 30% were potentially threatening, and 5% were clearly dangerous. The board recommended that the first group be allowed to live and work wherever they liked. The second group could reasonably be barred from living or working in certain places, said the board, and the third group should be subject to tight restrictions and a lifetime of monitoring. A very small number “just over 100” are classified as “predators”, which means they have a compulsion to commit sex offences. When not in jail, predators must wear ankle bracelets that track where they are.


Despite the board’s findings, non-violent offenders remain listed and subject to a giant cobweb of controls. One rule, championed by Georgia’s House majority leader, banned them from living within 1,000 feet of a school bus stop. This proved unworkable. Thomas Brown, the sheriff of DeKalb county near Atlanta, mapped the bus stops in his patch and realised that he would have to evict all 490 of the sex offenders living there. Other than the bottom of a lake or the middle of a forest, there was hardly anywhere in Georgia for them to live legally. In the end Georgia’s courts stepped in and suspended the bus-stop rule, along with another barring sex offenders from volunteering in churches. But most other restrictions remain.


Sex-offender registries are popular. Rape and child molestation are terrible crimes that can traumatise their victims for life. All parents want to protect their children from sexual predators, so politicians can nearly always win votes by promising curbs on them. Those who object can be called soft on child-molesters, a label most politicians would rather avoid. This creates a ratchet effect. Every lawmaker who wants to sound tough on sex offenders has to propose a law tougher than the one enacted by the last politician who wanted to sound tough on sex offenders.
A self-defeating pillory

So laws get harsher and harsher. But that does not necessarily mean they get better. If there are thousands of offenders on a registry, it is harder to keep track of the most dangerous ones. Budgets are tight. Georgia’s sheriffs complain that they have been given no extra money or manpower to help them keep the huge and swelling sex-offenders’ registry up to date or to police its confusing mass of rules. Terry Norris of the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association cites a man who was convicted of statutory rape two decades ago for having consensual sex with his high-school sweetheart, to whom he is now married. “It doesn’t make it right, but it doesn’t make him a threat to anybody,” says Mr Norris. “We spend the same amount of time on that guy as on someone who’s done something heinous.”


Money spent on evicting sex offenders cannot be spent on treating them. Does this matter? Politicians pushing the get-tough approach sometimes claim that sex offenders are mostly incorrigible: that three-quarters or even nine out of ten of them reoffend. It is not clear where they find such numbers. A study of nearly 10,000 male sex offenders in 15 American states found that 5% were rearrested for a sex crime within three years. A meta-analysis of 29,000 sex offenders in Canada, Britain and America found that 24% had reoffended after 15 years.


That is obviously still too high. Whether or not treatment can help is disputed. A Californian study of sex offenders who underwent “relapse prevention”, counselling of the sort that alcoholics get from Alcoholics Anonymous, found that it was useless. But a meta-analysis of 23 studies by Karl Hanson of Canada’s department of public safety found that psychological therapy was associated with a 43% drop in recidivism. Some offenders—particularly men who rape boys—are extremely hard to treat. Some will never change until they are too old to feel sexual urges. But some types of treatment appear to work for some people and further research could yield more breakthroughs.
Publicising sex offenders’ addresses makes them vulnerable to vigilantism. In April 2006, for example, a vigilante shot and killed two sex offenders in Maine after finding their addresses on the registry. One of the victims had been convicted of having consensual sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend when he was 19. In Washington state in 2005 a man posed as an FBI agent to enter the home of two sex offenders, warning them that they were on a “hit list” on the internet. Then he killed them.
Murders of sex offenders are rare, but harassment is common. Most of the offenders interviewed for this article said they had experienced it. “Bill”, who spent nine months in jail for having consensual sex with a 15-year-old when he was 27 and is now registered in North Carolina, says someone put up posters with his photograph on them around his district. (In at least four states, each offender’s profile on the online registry comes with a handy “click to print” function.) The local kids promptly stopped playing with Bill’s three children. And someone started leaving chopped-up sausages on his car, a possible reference to castration. Bill and his family moved house.


Jill Levenson, of Lynn University in Florida, says half of registered sex offenders have trouble finding jobs. From 20% to 40% say they have had to move house because a landlord or neighbour realised they were sex offenders. And most report feeling depressed, hopeless or afraid.


“Mike” spent a year and a half behind bars for statutory rape after having sex with a girl who said she was 17, but was two years younger. He was 22 at the time. Since his release, he has struggled to hold down a job. Once, he found work as a security guard, but his probation officer told him to quit, since the uniform lent him an air of authority, which would not do.


He is now unemployed, and lives in a flophouse in Atlanta between a jail and a strip club. The area is too desolate to have any schools or parks, so he is allowed to live there. His neighbours are mostly other sex offenders and mentally ill folk who talk to themselves. “It’s Bumville,” sighs Mike. His ambition is to get a job, keep it and move out. Any job will do, he says.


Several studies suggest that making it harder for sex offenders to find a home or a job makes them more likely to reoffend. Gwenda Willis and Randolph Grace of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, for example, found that the lack of a place to live was “significantly related to sexual recidivism”. Candace Kruttschnitt and Christopher Uggen of the University of Minnesota and Kelly Shelton of the Minnesota Department of Corrections tracked 556 sex offenders on probation and found less recidivism among those with a history of stable employment.


Some bosses do not mind hiring sex offenders, if they know the full story and the offender does not seem dangerous. But an accessible online registry makes it all but certain that a colleague or a customer will find out about a sexual conviction. Sex offenders often report being sacked for no apparent reason. Mike had a job at a cake shop. His boss knew about his record. But one day, without warning, he was fired.


Publicly accessible sex-offender registries are intended to keep people safe. But there is little evidence that they do. A study by Kristen Zgoba of the New Jersey Department of Corrections found that the state’s system for registering sex offenders and warning their neighbours cost millions of dollars and had no discernible effect on the number of sex crimes. Restricting where sex offenders can live is supposed to keep them away from potential victims, but it is doubtful that this works. A determined predator can always catch a bus.


Laws that make life hard for sex offenders also affect their families. A survey by Ms Levenson found that 86% of family members felt stressed because of registration and residence rules, and 49% feared for their own safety. “It’s very difficult,” says Bill. “Pretty much all the things that make you a good father are now illegal for me to do.” He cannot take his children to a park, a pool, or a museum. He cannot be at any of their school events. And his children are ostracised. “The parents find out I’m registered and that’s it,” he sighs.


The penalties for sex offenders who break the rules can be severe. In Georgia the first time you fail to provide an accurate address or register annually with the county sheriff to be photographed and fingerprinted, you face ten to 30 years in prison. The second time: life. Yet because living on a public sex-offender registry is so wretched, many abscond.


Some states have decided that harsher sex laws are not always better. Iowa has sharply reduced the number of sex offences for which residency restrictions apply. Previously, all Iowan sex offenders who had abused children were barred from living within 2,000 feet of a school or child-care centre. Since where offenders lived was defined as where they slept, many would spend the day at home with their families and sleep at night in their cars at a highway rest stop. “That made no sense,” says Corwin Ritchie of the Iowa County Attorneys Association. “We don’t try to monitor where possible bank robbers sleep.”


The Iowan politicians who relaxed the law gave themselves cover by adding a new rule against “loitering” near schools. Mr Ritchie thinks the new rules are better, but he would rather get rid of the residency restrictions entirely and let probation officers make recommendations for each individual offender.
No quarter

Nationwide, the trend is to keep getting stricter. In 1994 Congress ordered all states that had not yet done so to set up sex-offender registries or lose some funding. Two years later it ordered them to register the most serious offenders for life. In 2006 it passed the Adam Walsh Act, named for a six-year-old boy who was kidnapped and beheaded, broadening the categories of offence for which registration is required and obliging all states to upload their registries to a national database. States had until this summer to comply with that provision. Some objected. In May they were given another year’s breathing space.
Illustration by Noma Barr
Other countries now seem to be following America’s lead. Hottest on its heels is Britain, where the sex-offenders’ registry includes children as young as 11. The British list is not open to the public, but in some areas parents may ask for a check on anyone who has unsupervised access to their child. France, too, now has a closed national directory of sex-offenders, as does Austria, which brought in some American-style movement restrictions on sex offenders earlier this year. After the disappearance in Portugal in 2007 of Madeleine McCann, a British toddler, some European politicians have called for a pan-European registry.


Human Rights Watch urges America to scale back its sex-offender registries. Those convicted of minor, non-violent offences should not be required to register, says Ms Tofte. Nor should juveniles. Sex offenders should be individually assessed, and only those judged likely to rape someone or abuse a child should be registered. Such decisions should be regularly reviewed and offenders who are rehabilitated (or who grow too old to reoffend) should be removed from the registry. The information on sex-offender registries should be held by the police, not published online, says Ms Tofte, and released “on a need-to-know basis”. Blanket bans on all sex offenders living and working in certain areas should be abolished. Instead, it makes sense for the most dangerous offenders sometimes to face tailored restrictions as a condition of parole.


That package of reforms would bring America in line with the strictest laws in other rich countries. But few politicians would have the courage to back it. “Jane”, the mother of a sex offender in Georgia, says she sent a letter to her senator, Saxby Chambliss, urging such reforms. “They didn’t even read it,” she says. “They just sent me a form letter assuring me that they were in favour of every sex offender law, and that [Senator Chambliss] has grandchildren he wants to protect.”

[Tribesman]

As you can see, 14-year-olds are a bunch of recidivist criminals.
Ah underage sex again, now who were the two posters who were insisting that underage sex is rape?
As such I am sure they a perfectly happy about these young "rapists" getting registered as sex offenders for life.

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

(BTW, is hotlinking for this purpose allowed?)


I don't think so. You should upload the image to a host service, like Imageshack, and use the code provided there to post the image here.

[Aemilius Paulus]

That said, I am almsot gloating to some degree, although I deeply regret those parents had to suffer so much, as well as their kids. The "gloating" though, comes from the fact that the very American parents themselves promoted these logically-impenetrable laws. They rode the bandwagon. Everyone wants any person remotely similar to a sex-offender to suffer forever. By now, America has passed a series of wholly, utterly constitutional laws. Its rampant, entirely ignorant laws, based on nothing but primal animalistic emotions have have finally struck back at its own creators, the ever-restless parents. The draconian laws regulating supposed sex offenders constitute as double jeopardy, which is blatant transgression in the field of law and justice.

I understand the urge to protect one's offspring is one of the most powerful human emotions, but we do not govern based on emotions. None of the proponents of the sex-offence laws have even glimpsed at statistics, nor made any effort to make laws reasonable. I have always been fearful of populism and mobocracy, as it is virtually impossible to restrain in a state such as US. Once people are inflamed, try and stop them. Political suicide. If you rationally refuse, some nutjob will materialise, ready to follow the people's vociferous demands.

How can you stop this? I attempted to debate this with my mother, but as expected, she shrilly proclaimed she is willing to support any legislation that makes people safer, no matter its cost. Such as that mockery of law in the form of "bomb threat" regulations. In some neighbouring schools here in Florida, they have bomb threats, I swear on my honour, about once every week or two, which means all schoolchildren evacuate the building for a whorl day while bomb disposal and detection squads comb the school. I kid you not. It is true, I swear again.

We had quite a few in junior high years (grades 6-8) as well, in my own school. Every time, the same course of action is mandated, despite the frivolous and in-credible nature of the threats (someone once scrawled "Bomb" on a WC room with a permanent felt-tip pen) all of which lead to the same disruption. My (young) Spanish teacher once remarked that in the college she went to, whenever someone did no wish to take an exam, they simply used a public phone to announce a bomb threat, thus postponing the test.

Safety is splendid, but it is taken too far IMO. Middle school kids definitely know how to make superb explosives. Oh yeah. The gov't says so.

[Cute Wolf]

Kiddie porn? Your kids in a bathtub? Are they mad?

Here's a thought: simply google 'children swimming pool' in any European language, and you get all the kiddie pron you want. Lots of little children swim / splash around naked in European public parks and swimming pools. Come to think of it, I probably took some children pornography pictures myself this summer. Of other people's kids, no less.



Shall I risk a link? Why not. 'Enfants piscine' gives you this naked six (five?) year old Swiss girl right on page one: *

If you are an American, close your browser RIGHT NOW, destroy your computer and pray!


*Edit: hmm...on second thought, perhaps not. Linky removed. Perhaps in an alternative universe.

Luckily I'm not American :laugh4:
But seriously, seeing children naked DID NOT sexually arrouse most of us, the normal adult male... Especially if your child life is normal. Now, If someone who took that "bathtime photo" are 5 years old themself, are they must spend their time in prison?

EDIT:
I now finished reading all of this, and watching all the videos.... and what I say is SIGH......... so the "child protection act" actually DID destroy the life of what we called: Petty offender, as we could find their bios in the Internet... This was actually A PRIVACY VIOLATION!!!


(Soory AP, but this was just an example...) :laugh:
------------------------------------------------

Photo:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/images/avatars/rtw/Rom_gen/Roman_general_033.gif

First Name : Aemilius
Last Name : Paulus

Home : Tiber river, lane 24, Roma, Senatvs Populvs Que Romanvs

Alias : Quintus Fabius

Convictions : Slap a butt of a 9 years old slave

Description:
Gender : Male
Race : True Romans
Hair : Brown
Eye : Blue-grey
Height : 6'2"
Weight : 167 lb
Birth : Roma, 23 Mars 185 BC
Markings : Usually found wearing a good Lorica Mvscvlata.

[Veho Nex]

Wow, this is some heavy stuff. Ten years from now, every single american will be a sex offending child murdering rapist. All because they heard how awesome this thing called sex is and how all their friends are doing it.

[Aemilius Paulus]

Yeah, I mean, I checked Pensacola, FL - where I live, and there is trainloads of offenders of all sorts, and I doubt many of them are serious... Georgia has one of the toughest US state laws, so I can expect Hooahguy to be practically surrounded with paedophiles :laugh4:

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Havn't most of the laws been loosened up? A judge overturned the charge on the people in the op.

[Aemilius Paulus]

Havn't most of the laws been loosened up? A judge overturned the charge on the people in the op.
Read the two Economist articles I posted. They should answer your question better than anything else I can think of.

[Lemur]

Havn't most of the laws been loosened up?
No.

[Fragony]

Complete and utter insanity. Why do people do things like this, they must know that nothing is going on, but can we charge them anyway? Yes we can! Rapist mentality it's all about power.

[Shaka_Khan]

What about nude pictures of me when I was a baby?

[Ja'chyra]

What about nude pictures of me when I was a baby?

Shudders

[Aemilius Paulus]

Alias : Quintus Fabius
Bah, traitor :laugh4:


Hair : Brown
Eye : Blue-grey
Height : 6'2"
Weight : 167 lb

Corrected :wink:

What about nude pictures of me when I was a baby?
Who wants to see mine?? Imma' auctioning them off for balloons! Heh, is true that individual get arrested for simply possessing child pornography? Then why haven't more people tried to plant such things? And why is it that pure possession of such material is prosecuted? I mean, if you distribute or create the crap, then yes, but simply posses it? So I suppose it is a serious felony, eh?

[Peasant Phill]

[QUOTE=Crazed Rabbit;2339422]This is why the less power the government has, the better.QUOTE]

I'm always shocked when I hear someone say something like this. I agree that regulations can become tedious and counterproductive but they are at least objective (the same for all). The alternative is randomness and panic reactions.

[HoreTore]

Who wants to see mine?? Imma' auctioning them off for balloons! Heh, is true that individual get arrested for simply possessing child pornography? Then why haven't more people tried to plant such things? And why is it that pure possession of such material is prosecuted? I mean, if you distribute or create the crap, then yes, but simply posses it? So I suppose it is a serious felony, eh?

Because real child pornography(it really should be called "child rape material" or something) always comes from rape and abuse of children. And that's illegal. If you didn't commit the abuse yourself, then you supported the guy who did it by getting his photo's, and a lot of it wouldn't be committed if there wasn't a market for it.

[Centurion1]

OP case is simply retardation.

AP of course people with real child pornography have to be punished. There is no excuse for REAL child pornography. The fact is that the bath time photos were not pornography. Real child pornography is sick and can in no way be tolerated.


In some ways i wish protection laws to be stricter especially in cases like rape and molesting. However, they need to judge cases more individually so that these poor kids don't get the rest of thewir lives ruined for having sex with girls their own age. (whether they should be having sex is a whole nother thing, but as long as it is consensual and is not rape or similar ilk they should not be receiving sex offender status)

[HoreTore]

In some ways i wish protection laws to be stricter especially in cases like rape and molesting. However, they need to judge cases more individually so that these poor kids don't get the rest of thewir lives ruined for having sex with girls their own age. (whether they should be having sex is a whole nother thing, but as long as it is consensual and is not rape or similar ilk they should not be receiving sex offender status)

The simple, effective definition:

Stop calling it child pornography. It's not pornography, that's something entirely different. We're talking about child abuse photo's. Start calling it that instead of child porn, and all of a sudden, what pictures are legal and which ones are not becomes crystal clear. The ones we want to punish people for comes from child abuse. If it doesn't come from child abuse, then it's simply a harmless photo of a toddler, like in this case.

Oh, and for the record, I would've been a sex offender if I lived in the US. I'm rather happy I live here in hippieland instead...

[Fragony]

Sometimes things can just be that simple.

[Husar]

child abuse photo's

No, that would be wrong, we're talking about child abuse photos with photos being plural and not genitive. ~;)

I do agree that this story is quite horrible and that there is something wrong with the system when things like this happen.

[Beskar]

Let's have a vote, who was tempted to google "baby pictures" and stick random obviously non-offensive images in here for a joke going "OH NO, LOOK AWAY, IT IS CHILD PORN!".

[Aemilius Paulus]

Let's have a vote, who was tempted to google "baby pictures" and stick random obviously non-offensive images in here for a joke going "OH NO, LOOK AWAY, IT IS CHILD PORN!".
:laugh4:

Wow, we are all so much alike. Except I was going to upload that photo of my now-four-year-old year old brother, sitting on his bed, when he was three, fully nude with his plums 'n carrots very much exposed. I was tempted that is.

[Beskar]

That reminds me of ages ago on another forum. Some one was winding some one up, they google'd children pictures and they sent a girl (dressed) laying on a bed in a Sumerset Bed + Breakfast style place, with a topless granfather. They cropped the image, so the "granfather" looked like he was nude (as no pants were shown) and they pm'd it to some one over the forum going "You now got Child porn saved in your cache!".

Then there was a big internet debate behind the scenes with me, administrator and this other person and he was like "I am going to report him to the feds! he sent me child porn!!", and it showed what I described above and I was like "are you kidding me? this isn't child porn at all."

No one was naked (certainly not the child)
No sexual references or even sexual posing of any kind.
Looked like stereotypical UK seaside resort B&B with its dated décor.

Even funnier, I was looking at another forum, and they some one had the head of Pedobear and some one reported them calling them a paedophile and a child rapist, just for having a bears head for an avatar.

People need to be slapped.

[Azathoth]

Wow, we are all so much alike. Except I was going to upload that photo of my now-four-year-old year old brother, sitting on his bed, when he was three, fully nude with his plums 'n carrots very much exposed. I was tempted that is.

Wow, dude. Have your parents considered surgery?

[Aemilius Paulus]

Wow, dude. Have your parents considered surgery?
Carrot is slang for a phallus, quite obviously. Why the remark?

[Azathoth]

You used the plural, carrots. It was implied that your brother has multiple penises.

[Aemilius Paulus]

You used the plural, carrots. It was implied that your brother has multiple penises.
Ah, I see. No, he is not a crab.

[Beskar]

Ah, I see. No, he is not a crab.

He just has crabs.
Only kidding, haven't a clue if he has or not.

[Kadagar_AV]

Hardy har har...

let the topic die..

EDIT: part cause of the jokes, part cause the jury has been back ages ago:

[Fragony]

Well I don't think the rumours are true, I don't think you really have crabs. Sometimes it just itches you really have nothing to worry about.

[Banquo's Ghost]

Enough, I think.

:closed: