> It's fairly well established that many pedophiles where in fact victims of pedophilia in their childhood themselves …
Wouldn't that mean, that he is not only trying to catch pedophiles but actively curing pedophilia?
I think what is going on in the US with the public shaming of offenders in databases is wrong, but I am fine with honeypots to catch them. Legally he is in no position to do so, of course.
There is no "just be watching". If you watch a child getting raped, you are committing a crime and better have a very convincing argument why you had to do it. It is in fact that simple.
Of course they need help, too. We need both prosecution and prevention.
If you're watching game of thrones, you are watching people kill each other. You are committing a crime.
See how that's silly?
There are people who watch animated child porn and they are ruled as criminals even though no actual child was directly harmed.
There are people who watch snuff films, where people actually are killed, and the viewers are not breaking the law in most states.
Perhaps you would argue that snuff film viewing should be illegal, or that watching Game of Thrones should be illegal because it portrays rape, violence, murder, etc.
To me, it's clear that there is a distinct difference between watching that content and in producing it. Sure, if you actively encourage it to be produced you're breaking the law (same as if you try to convince someone to make a snuff film, you're breaking the law).
It's really not that simple and the laws are not consistent here.
Having done a small amount of volunteer work with children, I've had some exposure to child protection issues. Often, its a spiral downwards (IIRC its typically called the spiral of abuse), where the person in question erodes mental barriers so that they see the behaviour as normal. I don't accept the "just watching" argument - it is child abuse.
What you must understand is that it normalises the behaviour in that persons mind and then we're onto other barriers to be eroded - i.e. the person moves onto physical acts.
The blasé attitude on this thread is beyond belief.
Good reasoning is not a blasé attitude. It's an approach of setting aside personal feelings and instead having a discussion to get to the root of the problem and discuss the merits of opinion.
The fact is that anyone who simply goes around arguing that something is morally good or bad better have solid reasons for doing so.
~No, no, no. That's not what ancestor post was saying at all.~
~Watching Game of Thrones leads to playing Grand Theft Auto, and doing that will make you a murderer. When you're sliding down the slippery slope, you have to hit every rock on the way down.~
The theory reverses the arrow of causality.
If the Army uses simulation and gaming as part of its psychological conditioning program to not only get its soldiers to fire their weapons, but also aim at and kill the enemy, that does not imply that those games or simulations, used in isolation, will necessarily result in desensitization to violence.
I seriously want to design a contagion that imparts to individuals an intuitive understanding of conditional probabilities, and how to reverse one.
If you know that 99% of child abusers viewed images of child abuse prior to engaging in that activity themselves, you only know P(A|B), where A is viewing photos, and B is taking action. You do not know P(B|A), which is the likelihood that someone that someone who has viewed photos has done abuse, unless you also know the unconditional probabilities for P(A) and P(B). You can probably infer those two from crime statistics and investigative activities like those described in the article. But given the existing legal prohibitions and resultant secretive behaviors, I doubt you could determine either with a great deal of precision.
If (hypothetically) P(A|B)=1.0, P(A)=0.001 and P(B)=0.0001, then P(B|A)=0.1 . That means that even if you know that everyone who did A also did B, you can't assume that everyone who has done B has necessarily done A.
We could more easily calculate for the Game of Thrones and murder hypothesis.
Let's say A is "committed murder in 2014" and B is "watched GoT in 2014". From crime statistics, I estimate that P(A)=0.000045 . From ratings estimates, P(B)=0.063 . Now, I'm not entirely certain how many new murderers in 2014 had watched GoT, but I'll guess that P(B|A) = 0.063 . That makes P(A|B)=0.000045 . Huh. It looks like I assumed they were independent events....
If you went and did an actual survey of 2014's murderers, and discovered that P(B|A) was actually 0.12, that's a great find, but it still only means that P(A|B)=0.000086 . That's not a convincing argument that watching GoT causes actual murder. It just means that 0.0086% of GoT watchers committed murder. That might be explained by GoT inducing violent behavior in its viewers, but from the numbers, it's not bloody likely.
It's based on his work with child abusers - he's one of the leading academics in the UK on this issue, I don't know what kind of evidence your expecting.
Really? I understand the point you're "attempting" to make, but to claim that what is acted on TV is the same as what actually occurs is such a stretch I didn't think anybody would attempt to make it.
I don't equate animated child porn with actual child porn, much in the same way I don't equate the beheadings in GoT with the beheadings of IS. But to insinuate that the poster above would extend their 'committing a crime,' in the case of actual child rape, to something that is acted out for TV is an injustice to what they actually said. In essence, you just threw up a strawman and attacked it as a way of validating your final point (which, by most accounts, I agree with).
> If you're watching game of thrones, you are watching people kill each other
No, you're watching fictional people pretend to kill each other.
You would have an argument if you used snuff films as an example. And yes, if watching a child being raped is illegal, than watching a real murder should be.
You are assuming that just because the prefrontal cortex sometimes knows the difference between reality and fiction, the rest of the brain must as well.
If the argument is that seeing murders causes someone to become a murderer, I'm not certain you can exempt fiction. If you outlaw depictions of murder on the presumption that it would lower the actual murder rate, you have to go whole hog.
_O \O/ ...meaning this ASCII art of
' |\+-@- one guy stabbing another guy
/ \ /| with a sword would be illegal.
Believing in such suggests that Ludovico's Technique from Clockwork Orange is real, it works, and that humans can be effectively reprogrammed by presenting the appropriate images to the visual cortex and somehow zapping the limbic system, in exactly the same manner that Pavlov's dog was reprogrammed to salivate at the sound of a bell.
So where are the televisions that shoot tiny darts of cocaine into its viewers whenever someone is killed on-screen? At least a violent video game provides some virtual reward for virtual murders, such as glowing green stacks of cash, or mission advancement, or some stupid little thing that produces a squirt of dopamine.
That part of our brains does not know the difference between reality, dreams, and Hollywood trickery. Certain mirror neurons in the brain will fire whether you are actually doing yoga, thinking about doing yoga, or watching a yoga instructor do yoga. Your reward center doesn't really care if the image is a product of good photography or good GPU rendering. It doesn't even care that it is a 2D image rather than 3D reality.
Fortunately, there appears to be no causal link provable flowing from watching something done to doing the depicted act yourself. Instead, it appears that those who are predisposed to do something, or have already decided to do it, will very often model, simulate, and practice that action--using whatever means they have at their disposal--before going on to do it. If any one tool or strategy becomes unavailable, another would be substituted.
> So where are the televisions that shoot tiny darts of cocaine into its viewers whenever someone is killed on-screen?
Rather than direct chemical triggers that stimulate the brains reward system ("tiny darts of cocaine"), they typically use other triggers to the reward system, like music. Same effect, less additional machinery.
But simulated CP is illegal too. In many jurisdictions you can get locked away for drawing something on a piece of paper. This is probably what OP is addressing.
If watching a crime is a criminal offence, you better lock up the viewers of CNN, Fox News, and the BBC.
I do think their ought to be laws against the distribution of this kind of material (there probably are?), and there is no question that producing it is a criminal offence, and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Watching a report about a crime is not the same as consuming a product that was produced and shared or sold by the criminal that committed the crime. You are actively supporting the criminal, either through money or through community.
On a different note: There is nothing wrong with regulating how footage of crimes can be shown to protect the victims and even the offenders. I know this argument is hard to make on HN, because free speech, but I think privacy is an important right, too.
ISIS produces their beheading videos specifically for them to be shared and viewed by as many people as possible. By watching these videos, you are actively supporting ISIS by paying any attention to what they are doing and therefore granting them legitimacy. If videos of rape are illegal,then videos of murder should be too.
> There is nothing wrong with regulating how footage of crimes can be shown to protect the victims and even the offenders.
Right! That's how it starts. In the end we have "there's nothing wrong with censoring 28 pages of a 9/11 report to protect the security of all Americans because it doesn't really matter who funded it, the government told us who the bad people are so we don't really need to keep the government on check on this".
That sort of thinking ends really well. /s
Remember, the citizens hire the government. They work for us. Would you allow your employees to censor some parts of your financial reports?
Grow some principles. If people are sick that they need to look at sick images then offer to help them. Enabling tyrants does not help keep children safe. Incidentally, not spanking them does. If you really care about protecting children, get off your bureaucrat high horse and start helping educate people on the impact of spanking.
The "this is how it starts"-narrative is not necessarily true. While Germany has strict privacy rules for victims and criminals - media cannot show their faces or their last names and so on - I do not see that it is the country that has problems with its agencies and military-industrial complex being out of control and censoring stuff on their behalf.
If there were photos of me being raped as a kid I would want to see the rapist get punished and like-minded people forbidden to watch them. I do not think that it is moral to hurt people in concrete cases because of an abstract (debatable) threat to the values of a society. What do these values even mean if you do not have the mercy to grant victims this right?
You can still inform people about the crime without showing the victims face or the actual explicit imagery.
> You can still inform people about the crime without showing the victims face or the actual explicit imagery.
Let's say society makes a fund for people that were abused as kids (horribile dictu). Those funds are there only to benefit those people so we'd better be able to prove they were really victims of what they say there were, otherwise people can just say "yeah that happened to me" and collect the money without ever proving they were victims.
You may want to forbid people from seeing the evidence for your abuse but then you can't expect people to believe you. When we believe in tales of rape without proof we smear the name of the accused.
You will get quite a different punishment for watching child porn than from raping a kid. So yes there is "just watching" That doesn't make it less disgusting but it's not the same.
You might be surprised. I'd say that child pornography is often punished more harshly than child rape.
The justice system weights the crime of consuming child pornography by the number of images the defendent is in "possession" of. I guess laws vary, but at least in my jurisdiciton, you can be sentenced to years in prison per image. It would be easy for a single wank session to result in -- potentially -- life in prison.
The issue is confounded by widespread lack of techical acumen among judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and even the forensic "experts" who investigate and testify (on both sides). For example, would you consider it reasonable to charge someone with a separate crime for every copy of the exact same digial file present on a hard disk? For both an image file and an automatically-generated thumbnail image of that same file? Do you meaningfully posess a file in your browsers temporary cache? How about a file deleted from the filesystem, but still present in residual form on the disk? Some of the issues are nuanced, and it's difficult to even have an intelligent conversation about the evidence.
Wouldn't that mean, that he is not only trying to catch pedophiles but actively curing pedophilia?
I think what is going on in the US with the public shaming of offenders in databases is wrong, but I am fine with honeypots to catch them. Legally he is in no position to do so, of course.