Excellent link and very topical for this thread. Thank you for sharing it!
Exactly this. If you are under 18, and you text a photo of your genitals to someone else whoâs under 18 â even if theyâre consenting â you and the person you sent it to have both committed a felony and are both technically in possession of child pornography. If caught, both people are registered as sex offenders. In some states, that applies even if thereâs no photo involved, and youâre just dirty-talking.
9 Likes
Thank you for your contribution to the discussion 
Iâm sorry youâve had a negative experience with psychotherapy. The relationship between therapist and patitent is very important, and if itâs not a good one then the process wonât be that fruitful. If you are still in a situation that psychotherapy could help you with, I hope you are able to get past your bad experience and are able to find a mental health professional that is better suited to your needs.
Caring about the mental health of others is all about empathy.
Youâre welcome. Now, did the point of the comment even come within hailing distance of the top of your head, or, was it well out of range? Especially given your response to the next person, does it possibly glimmer as a possible thought why what you proposed is on the Smails level?
1 Like
Mod note: Snark levels rising. Bring it back down.
Which can be quite well misplaced. âI am doing it for your own goodâ can send you to pretty unpleasant roads. It can also have authoritarian tendencies hidden inside.
Besides, who defines where is a line between mere aberration/variation and a sickness/illness? Who should be given this power and how will its abuse be checked?
1 Like
The reason you canât falsely shout Fire! in a theater is because people will be harmed (trampled to death in the panic). It is not equivalent to this situation. Distasteful as these images are, you would be hard pressed to find someone physically harmed by them.
The most physical harm is probably going to come from the news articles describing the man as a pedo right before he goes to jail. Inmates are apparently quite harsh to pedophiles.
1 Like
Indeed. Bag of sugar dissolved in a kettle full of boiling water in the face is the go-to in UK jails, I am reliably informed. Nasty.
1 Like
Heh, thatâs a quite⌠Interesting assertion⌠Let me just note quickly, any points I make in any discussions, this one or any in the future, that might seem to be counter to yours are in fact completely agreeing with you.
I come from the C-3PO school of debate. Let the Wookee Win.
3 Likes
Comparing killing someone to compelling someone to receive therapy is ridiculous, so I assumed you were making a joke.
Any state program that involves compulsion of individuals has the potential for abuse. The need for checks to power and oversight is ever present.
The only mental illness being discussed here is pedophilia and the only initial test of that proposed is possession of virtual child pornography, which I tentatively define as:
I donât really think that straight up forcing someone to attend therapy is likely to be fruitful, nor do I think that throwing people in jail for possession of drawings is likely to have positive results. Perhaps the inducement should be having to pay a sliding scale fine -or- accepting therapy. However, I am really more arguing in principle and accept that the implementation of some of my ideas would be difficult at best.
As I stated before, the goal of mentioning that was not to draw an equivalency but to present an example where we accept abridgement of freedom of expression. I did not make that clear enough and apologize for that.
Prison is not a place to treat the mentally ill, so youâll find that we agree that ânon-practicingâ pedophiles should not be sent to prison. Iâll go further and say that even those convicted of sexual abuse of children should definitely not be in general population at prison.
1 Like
What exactly do you think is left of someoneâs life when you give them the official label of âpedophileâ, and send them for mandatory therapy? Ignore for a moment the absurdity of involuntarily compelled therapy, and what actual effectiveness that would have.
Look at what happens in terms of jobs, social connections, and vigilante violence to people today who are on the Sex Offender registry. Someone, I believe in this thread, linked to the Human Rights Watch report on the actual effects of those laws. And that registry is pretty well recognized as being over-inclusive, imagine what the official label of pedophile would do, regardless of any actual crime or offense committed against any existent, actual human being.
âWell, these are sick kiddy diddlersâ, you might well say âwhy should we care if they have jobs of places to live?â Well, even if you donât care about generally treating people humanely, even if they are criminals, if you give a crap about actual child welfare and preventing crimes against them in particular, as well as general crimes against society, you should care.
Creating outcasts, people who have no meaningful ties to society or civil behavior means youâve got a bunch of people with nothing to lose should they re-offend or commit other crimes. And youâre talking about branding them that way preemptively! Your idea would take one major disincentive to commit crimes, the ruination of social bonds, crippling of economic capability, and pretty much obliterate it, because itâs now already happened to them. You can no longer use the threat to send them to hell, theyâre already there! If they were the sort who were inclined to commit a crime, now they are MORE likely to do so, after all, what do they have to lose? And, if they wernât the sort, youâve just rained a lifelong sentence of suffering on someone who wasnât likely to do anything wrong in the first place.
The state electing to kill someone, rather than brand them with a scarlet letter, involuntarily subjecting them to âtherapyâ, and then turn them loose in a population ready to shit on them (at best), regardless of their proof of âcompleted or ongoing therapyâ⌠Well, it would seem to me that simply executing them swiftly is the humane option, at least of those two choices, rather than letting the mob do it in a prolonged fashion. What you propose isnât less ridiculous than gassing someone âfor their own goodâ, itâs MORE ridiculous.
6 Likes
I think youâll find that at no point have I advocated for the outing of ânon-practicingâ pedophiles or adding them to a sex offender registry or creating outcasts. You are putting words in my mouth and being extremely rude to boot.
How likely is it that people forced to undergo therapy due to alleged pedophilia will be able to keep the therapy secret from their community?
5 Likes
We got way off topic in this thread.
The original article certainly does include the fact that a man was convicted on the basis of possessing âdepictions of physically undeveloped persons in sexual acts.â
But the real point, and the one I think we were nearly doomed to miss because of the nature of the crime of which he was convicted, is that everything about his conviction was because he was imagining something our culture finds abhorrent.
Letâs take pedophilia out of the question for a moment:
If a person draws and distributes cartoons depicting armed robbery, should the people who view those cartoons be considered guilty of armed robbery?
If a person views and owns cartoon depictions of murder, are they guilty of murder?
If a person keeps a collection of cartoons that depict the capture and rape of adults, are they guilty of kidnapping and rape?
If a man sketches a map of an imaginary terrorist attack on the USA, as research for a story heâs writing, should he be subject to a police raid on his home on the suspicion he is a terrorist?
Iâve just listed a bunch of hypotheticals about imaginary crimes with imaginary victims and imaginary perpetrators. The crimes included robbery, murder, kidnapping, rape, and terrorism, all of which are criminal activities when a real person actually commits them.
[quote]My question to you is this:
If the fellow had cartoons depicting any crime except child-rape, would you be keen to convict him? Should he be compelled to some sort of treatment for those other cartoons, unless he payed a satisfactory, sliding-scale fine?[/quote]
#tl; dr
I think weâve all got our panties in a bunch about pedophilia, when the real issue here is thought crime.
11 Likes
This! This is the crux of the whole issue!
2 Likes
There is something to this, And I agree, thought crime is the core issue. But you canât ignore the pedophilia aspect, because itâs a factor that is effective at short circuiting rational thought and measured response. This isnât precisely shocking, from a biological standpoint, we have limited offspring and are therefore programed to respond swiftly and with terrible resolve toward any perceived threat to young.
And as much as I disagree with the man on other subjects, (I am an atheist, after all), I cannot think of any better statement on the ideas @mrfixit espoused than the one made by CS Lewis:
âOf all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baronâs cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be âcuredâ against oneâs will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.â
5 Likes
Maybe encouraging people to have some self-discipline and critical thinking skills will help them more than accepting the tendency towards emotional knee-jerk reactions. Honestly, people who canât think clearly are likely to cause more danger and suffering than all of the worlds pedophilia.
Exterminate all rational thought! That is the conclusion I have come to.
3 Likes
This is not some kind of overwhelming hardwired brain response, itâs cultural. Child porn laws cover 16-year-olds who would have been married for years already in times past.
The point of the comparison to other crimes is to see that the only thing that makes the kind of prosecution possible is precisely that we have a reason-blocking emotional response to pedophilia, which should be our trigger to overcome that response.
6 Likes
Donât at all disagree with you there. But, there may be a terminology issue at play here, and possibly two issues conflated into one. In the thread and though linked items, this has involved drawings of âunderdevelopedâ people, and, when you get to the technical aspects, pedophelia, in the medical sense, is generally referring to those attracted to pre-pubecents. I donât think youâll get a lot of argument that is a definite aberration, and likely a psychological issue, though I stop short of @mrfixitâs proposals of mandatory treatment for the reasons I went into above.
Then youâve got this nasty cultural area where weâve got individuals who are biologically sexually mature, but at a minimum culturally, if not mentally, immature. And that results in some really nasty problems, with some pretty hackneyed fixes, things like Romeo and Juliet laws, and, arbitrary age of consent laws.
This is a much dicier issue, and less clearly a psych one, though, inability to comport with social norms and rules, regardless of their consistency with biology, is itâs own problem.
Agree completely here, and also why I Liked @popobawa4uâs response. My point is simply that we canât just dismiss the aspect of it that confuses thinking, rather it needs to be attacked head on, as opposed to dismissed as a distraction (It is that, but, itâs way past the point of trivial-ness to be able to wave away that easily).
2 Likes
The confusion between paedophilia and ephebophilia/hebephilia?
3 Likes
