THE SCIENCE OF SEX ABUSE- Is it right to imprison people for heinous crimes they have not yet commit
(This is a long but important article about how to treat sex offenders. It raises many questions.)
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Child pornography didn’t become a priority for federal law enforcement until the mid-nineties, when the Internet, offering a fun-house reflection of the spectrum of human sexuality, exposed a previously invisible population of pedophiles. Chat rooms have spawned an underground subculture in which social status is based on comprehensive libraries of images. Many users consider themselves “collectors,” trading pictures until they assemble sets that feature certain children, stars on the Internet, being sexually abused over time.
In a study of child pornography, the historian Philip Jenkins, of Penn State, found that chat rooms foster a kind of “bandit culture.” Self-described “Loli fans” see themselves as part of a subversive fraternity, unified by the pursuit of forbidden pleasures. There is a hierarchy of users: newbies, lurkers, traders, and, at the top, the pornographers themselves—“kings of the rooms,” as John told me. He said that the most sought-after images were new and made in America, and showed interracial couplings. The more taboos broken, the better. Members reinforced one another’s desires, engaging in communal rationalization. “We’d pull at evidence from the dawn of photography to prove that child sexuality was once acceptable,” John said. “Then we could say, ‘See, it’s society—not me!’”
When U.S. obscenity laws were first relaxed, in the fifties, no special stipulations were made for photographs of minors. “If the First Amendment means anything,” the Supreme Court wrote in 1969, “it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.” But, by 1982, the public seemed to have discovered child sex abuse, both its trauma and its prevalence. The Supreme Court made child pornography an exception to the First Amendment, since “a child has been physically or psychologically harmed in the production of the work.”
Early efforts to suppress the American child-porn trade—a small network of adult bookstores and mail-order services—were so successful that within a decade the market was all but nonexistent. But the Internet undid those achievements. Controlling the flow of images is nearly impossible, because pornography is posted online from other nations, which have different definitions of who is a child and what is obscene. In arguing for harsher penalties for viewing child pornography, lawmakers have tended to conflate the desire to view photographs (a crime that can be detected by tracing a computer’s I.P. address) with actual sex abuse, which is notoriously difficult to prosecute, since young victims are easily silenced. In 2002, the chief of the F.B.I.’s Crimes Against Children Unit told the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security that the online pornography trade had created a “vast network of like-minded people, who believe it is acceptable to engage in sexual fantasies about children, thus lowering their inhibitions . . . and increasing the likelihood that they will actually molest children.”
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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/14/130114fa_fact_aviv?currentPage=all&mobify=0
Having been abuse, I have no patience with those who abuse or their enablers.
Having said that, this article does raise questions about imprisoning, treating, and dealing with sexual offenders. It is easy to get laws passed because it is such an emotional subject. Politicians don't want to be on record opposing those laws no matter how ineffective they are.
I have no easy answer either.
= new reply since forum marked as read
