101–110 of 332 posts
I hope he gets hit by a truck today. I really do. There isn't, nor will there ever be an argument where the enablement of child molestation and rape is acceptable. And if there is collateral damage, then so be it. I'd rather 100 go to jail wrongfully accused than to enable 1 child to be rape. This guy make me sick. Seriously Rick, please kill yourself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I challenge anyone to find actual foundation for the claim that unwittingly recording a child rape in the park is a crime even if the witness reports it and provides the video evidence. Seems to me that this is the "slippery slope" argument taken to unreasonable extremes.
Twenty years ago I would have challenged someone to find a case of a 17 year old being prosecuted for child pornography for taking a picture of themselves. Or a 19 year old being forced to register as a sex offender because of a 17 year old partner. These laws have already been pushed to unreasonable extremes.
"a case of a 17 year old being prosecuted for child pornography for taking a picture of themselves."
Has this happened? Hypotheticals don't help any. We need facts in order to move forward with the conversation.
EDIT: it has, in fact, happened. The facts are indeed in Google.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually not a true strict liability offense, at least in the United States. For example, 18 USC § 2252A(a)(2)(A) criminalizes " knowingly receiv[ing] or distribut[ing] any child pornography." § 2252A(a)(5) requires " knowingly possess[ing], or knowingly access[ing] with intent to view, any book, magazine, periodical, film, videotape, computer disk, or any other material that contains an image of child pornograp…
Thank you for this additional information about specifics of the United States. The described case with accidentally recording and realizing you accidentally recorded still makes you culpable under the "knowingly", though. Cheers, Rick
I can't believe there are very many courts who would convict under the circumstances of your example. OTOH, there might be a few, and if the law is not intended to be enforced exactly as written, that is certainly an excellent argument for changing it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case both destroying the evidence and possessing the evidence are crimes. What are you supposed to do?
I challenge anyone to find actual foundation for the claim that unwittingly recording a child rape in the park is a crime even if the witness reports it and provides the video evidence. Seems to me that this is the "slippery slope" argument taken to unreasonable extremes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a really terrible argument. You say "if you find yourself pressing your "moral values" on somebody over, quit", but then impose your own moral values upon everyone else. I'm an atheist, but I also accept that religion isn't necessarily the cause of all moral problems, but merely a conduit through which they flow. Find me a Catholic who's against abortion and I'll find you an atheist who feels the same way. A…
The problem with Catholics lies not in the fact that they are against abortion, but in the fact that they are against somebody else's abortion. They somehow got the idea that instead of helping poor raise their children, talking to pregnant girls, all the good stuff - they can just take a big stick and make things illegal. As if it helps anybody. This is where we have a problem, as you can see. Mentoring people to no…
I don't know where you get this notion of not "helping poor raise their children". Even if accurate, you haven't explained why that's good or bad. What's the "good stuff"?
If you want to go bandy about how awful Big Jesus is, you really need to have more thorough rhetoric.
There's a lot of food for thought here, and important points. But in one area, the author completely glosses over a crucial distinction: > why is it only documentation of sex crimes against minors that are being banned in this way? The lawmen are perfectly fine with a video documenting how a teenager is being stabbed with a screwdriver in both eyes, then murdered. ... why is the ban just related to anything sexual, a…
This allows potential rapists to satisfy their desires without harming any actual children.
When I lived in Houston and was buying a house I used a website to look up sex offenders in the neighborhood. I remember seeing one guy who was in the sex offender database because when he was 19, he had sex with a 17 year old. It made me feel a little uncomfortable. It struck me because I was in my mid 20s and I think we were around the same age at the time. Something is amiss in a system that punishes him for life…
The same situation happened to a family member of mine. He was 19 and his girlfriend was 17. Her dad got mad at him one night, called the cops, and had him arrested for statutory rape. He is now a registered sex offender. They went on dating and several years later got engaged. The relationship fell through, and they never did get married. But if they had, he would have been a registered sex offender for having sex w…
There's a lot of food for thought here, and important points. But in one area, the author completely glosses over a crucial distinction: > why is it only documentation of sex crimes against minors that are being banned in this way? The lawmen are perfectly fine with a video documenting how a teenager is being stabbed with a screwdriver in both eyes, then murdered. ... why is the ban just related to anything sexual, a…
Shock video sites that feature murders, dismemberment and other forms of crime on video for voyeuristic pleasure are a pretty big business. Perhaps not as big as child pornography woud be/is, but big enough that your distinction is a bit questionable. Further, videos of people getting murdered raise enough of an outcry that they get investigated/prosecuted much harder. Instances of child molestation are hidden, so th…
Do you?
There's a lot of food for thought here, and important points. But in one area, the author completely glosses over a crucial distinction: > why is it only documentation of sex crimes against minors that are being banned in this way? The lawmen are perfectly fine with a video documenting how a teenager is being stabbed with a screwdriver in both eyes, then murdered. ... why is the ban just related to anything sexual, a…
Okay, but then why criminalize shots for which it can be proven that no child were harmed along the way? Talking mostly about children filming themself and the like.
Fundamentalists of any kind trying to impose thought crime is the real problem here. Fix that, and the rest will follow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually not a true strict liability offense, at least in the United States. For example, 18 USC § 2252A(a)(2)(A) criminalizes " knowingly receiv[ing] or distribut[ing] any child pornography." § 2252A(a)(5) requires " knowingly possess[ing], or knowingly access[ing] with intent to view, any book, magazine, periodical, film, videotape, computer disk, or any other material that contains an image of child pornograp…
Thank you for this additional information about specifics of the United States. The described case with accidentally recording and realizing you accidentally recorded still makes you culpable under the "knowingly", though. Cheers, Rick
I'd go so far as to call your hypothetical example completely laughable. The idea that if I stumble across someone raping a child they would "point and laugh" is completely ridiculous. It's somewhat ironic that given one of the arguments for strict liability laws was "won't someone think of the children" you're basically making the same point.
I agree with many of your points - a 17 year old being sentenced for having sex with a 15 year old, for example, and it's possible to cite many, many cases where this sort of thing has occurred.
I doubt, however, you can cite a single case where somebody has been prosecuted for unknowingly recording child pornography. I think this very much weakens your argument, because you make it sound as if strict liability is a be-all end-all, when in fact there is precedent to override it (speaking in general terms - the exact precedent would vary from country to country).
Laws are typically not designed to cover future eventualities. It seems to me highly likely that the situation you describe is already easily avoided legally. After all, if a CCTV camera recorded a child rape in progress that would not be a criminal offence, since most countries provide exceptions for recording images for the purposes of preventing crime. It would be relatively straight forward to branch these laws out to devices like Google Goggles.
But you don't really consider these arguments, I suspect primarily because the image of a child rapist "getting away with it" is quite powerful, and you're designing your post to evoke heavily emotional responses. But it's very much a "won't you think of the children" argument, and that sours it for me.