judge tries to mitigate collateral consequences

A New York Times editorial tells the story of a courageous judge who is trying to make up for the failings of the justice system.

In May, a federal judge in Brooklyn took the extraordinary step of expunging the conviction of a woman he had sentenced to five years of probation more than a decade earlier for her involvement in an insurance fraud scheme that netted her $2,500. 

Calling her “a minor participant in a nonviolent crime,” a Federal District Court judge, John Gleeson, decried the “dramatic adverse impact” the woman’s conviction has had on her ability to get a job to support her four children. “There is no justification for continuing to impose this disability on her,” Judge Gleeson wrote. “I sentenced her to five years of probation supervision, not to a lifetime of unemployment.” [My emphasis.]

The move was significant because there is no federal law that allows for expungement — the permanent sealing of a criminal record to the general public. In fact it appears to be the first time that a federal judge has expunged a conviction for this reason. It should not be the last.

Judges must certainly get wind of what happens after being convicted of crimes in their courts. This one did. Surely they can recognize that their pronouncements cause pain far out of proportion to the crimes.

The editorial tells the awful truth:

Some 70 million to 100 million people in the United States — more than a quarter of all adults — have a criminal record, and as a result they are subject to tens of thousands of federal and state laws and rules that restrict or prohibit their access to the most basic rights and privileges — from voting, employment and housing to business licensing and parental rights.

 A quarter of the U.S. population is prohibited from access to the most basic rights and privileges. 

The editorial makes clear that expungement won't solve the whole problem. For too many, sex offenders in particular, their records have been loosed on the Internet, with no way to control what happens to the information.

This judge may not be the only brave judge out there but we need more who are willing to do the right thing even when their positions are on the line.

criminalizing what young people do

Dahlia Lithwick writes in Salon about what goes on at the intersection of youth and the criminal justice system.

Kids can sometimes see their lives destroyed by the merest brush with the criminal justice system. In one of the most outrageous examples, between 2003 and 2008, two Pennsylvania judges—Mark Ciavarella Jr. and Michael Conahan—sentenced thousands of children to juvenile detention centers, sometimes on trivial charges. These juveniles were sent to private, for-profit detention centers, whose operators paid the judges for filling their beds. [My emphasis.]

I blogged about the kids-for-cash case(s) here.

Lithwick continues:

But as the school year opens, and our eyes turn again to young people and the justice system, it’s worth revisiting the failings of the systems we have created. “Kids for cash” is emblematic of a larger problem: the tendency to criminalize so much of what young people do, the tendency to hit them with draconian punishments that are out of proportion to the crime itself, and the ways the system itself profits financially from those impulses. 

Criminalizing what young people do.

Remember streaking, the foolishness of the seventies? Some states have added that offense to the list of registrable offenses. Forty years ago we could laugh at--or be outraged by--naked kids racing across a football field and let them grow up to become the bank president but are things so different now that a streaker must be added to the sex offender registry that will make it difficult for him to land a job at McDonalds?

Lithwick tells about an 11-year-old boy who was charged with drug possession for bringing a single marijuana leaf to school. He was charged even after the leaf was proven three times to be not marijuana. The school stands by its decision to treat him as if he had brought actual marijuana to school because, you know, zero tolerance protects our children.

Bad behavior at school used to be bad behavior that the school and parents handled. Now, the school leans prissily on zero tolerance rules as if zero tolerance makes any kind of sense and if that's not enough, the school has a police officer wandering the hallways, making the school-to-prison pipeline a reality.

As the school year opens, it’s probably a good idea to remind your youngsters what “zero tolerance” really means: that “it was only a naked photo/fake pot leaf” is not a defense, no matter how clearly the facts are on your side, and that kids are adorable innocents only until the law decides they are vicious predators. There’s a for-profit prison machine out there, and sadly, it eats zero tolerance for breakfast.

Plenty profit from the sex offender registry, as well. Too much of what young people do can land them on the registry. Like putting them into a for-profit prison to be forgotten, it is easy to forget those who are on the registry for all the wrong reasons.

Like the judges who knowingly sent kids to prison when they didn't deserve that punishment, the criminal justice system knowingly puts kids on the registry when they don't deserve that punishment.

ninety days plus life

Julie Bosman, in today's New York Times, tells the story of a 19-year-old who meets another teen online; the teens meet and have sex. Not the recommended way to conduct relationships but common behavior now. It turns out that the partner who said she was older than the age of consent was not. 

[The 19-year-old] was arrested and charged and, after pleading guilty to fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct, was sentenced to 90 days in jail and probation.

Ninety days. That slap on the wrist, however, is accompanied with lifetime on the sex offender registry.

Lifetime punishment for a single sexual encounter. How did we ever come to this?

...his story is a parable of the digital age: the collision of the temporary relationships that young people develop on the Internet and the increasing criminalization of sexual activity through the expansion of online sex offender registries. 

“The whole registry is a horrible mistake,” said William Buhl, a former judge in Michigan who has publicly argued that laws governing registries ought to be relaxed. “I think it’s utterly ridiculous to take teenage sex and make it a felony. This guy is obviously not a pedophile.”

That's the opinion of one retired judge, of course. The judge in this case thought differently.

“You went online, to use a fisherman’s expression, trolling for women, to meet and have sex with,” he said. “That seems to be part of our culture now. Meet, hook up, have sex, sayonara. Totally inappropriate behavior. There is no excuse for this whatsoever.”

Harumph. Totally inappropriate behavior.

Totally appropriate, though, to make sure young people are punished with life sentences for hooking up with a willing partner.

For some reason, [the prosecutor] told the judge in court, this generation seems to think it is “O.K. to go online to find somebody and then to quickly hook up for sexual gratification.” 

“That’s not a good message to send into the community,” he said.

 Tsk tsk. Not a good message to send into the community.

So much better to send the message that if you have consensual sex even once, you can pay for it for the rest of your life.

Times change and, wouldn't you know it, young people still like to have sex. The online hookup might very well be a bad way to use the Internet, though there is a worse way to use the Internet: The sex offender registry.

Using the Internet to prevent people from moving on with their lives after they have learned hard lessons about bad judgments is totally inappropriate behavior, a milktoast description of the unbelievable cruelty imposed on those who have paid their debt to society.

Ninety days in jail? Done.

Punishment and public shaming? Never ending.

Abolish the registry.

USA Today interviews child porn collector

Kevin Johnson, a USA Today reporter, interviews a man serving time for child pornography offenses.

The man's arrest uncovered

...the single-largest cache of child pornography — up to 1 million images — recovered in Florida history and one of the largest recent seizures in the nation.

This is a lot of child porn, by any measure. There was a time when collecting child porn was hard work because collectors needed to make contact with those who could provide the images. Now, however, the Internet and peer-to-peer software make collecting astoundingly fast and easy. So fast and easy that the reporter's wide-eyed astonishment at the size of the collection seems naive. The article does not report how many distinct images were found and how many repeats were in the collection.

State and federal authorities said such vast repositories of images are becoming increasingly common in exploitation cases across the U.S. Once celebrated as important law enforcement victories, the large seizures and the labor-intensive analysis required of each photograph and video are now complicating the search for victims pictured in the images and others who may have been physically abused by suspects.

Law enforcement will continue to find enormous stashes of illegal images, not because the collectors are that much more evil than pre-Internet collectors were, but because it can be done so easily. A collector who keeps everything is going to have a large collection.

In an estimated 75% of child pornography cases, actual physical abuse by the suspects is likely going undetected, said Michael Bourke, chief psychologist in the U.S. Marshals Service's Behavioral Analysis Unit. In a 2014 study of 127 child-pornography suspects with no known history of "hands-on'' sexual abuse, 5% admitted during traditional questioning to the sexual abuse of at least one child. Yet when investigators introduced tactical polygraph examinations to assist interrogations, another 53% of suspects admitted that they engaged in physical sexual abuse of children, according to the study co-authored by Bourke.

Relying on polygraphs as a tool to expose truth is odd when polygraphs are not allowed to be used as evidence in court...because polygraphs are unreliable, even when they are called tactical polygraph examinations. Using polygraphs as an investigative aid is nothing new.

Although the offender in the Florida case has denied any involvement in physical abuse, Bourke, who has spent years researching child pornography cases and interviewing offenders, said traditional interrogation methods and the enormously time-consuming review of large seizures are not proving effective enough in identifying those suspects who have crossed into physical abuse.

The Florida offender, contrary to Bourke's facile assumption that he has committed hands-on crimes, continues to deny any such activity. That doesn't stop the reporter from dropping fat hints that the man is hiding a history of hands-on offenses.

Research shows that using child porn can reduce the incidence of child sex abuse but the reporter ignores those studies.

Likewise, he ignores the fact that Michael Bourke was co-author of the firmly debunked Butner Study which tried to sell the idea that those who look at child porn have a long list of hands-on victims.

Perhaps instead of examining the million images for evidence of child sex abuse of which they imagine the collector to be guilty, the investigators should investigate the clear evidence of child sex abuse contained in some of those million images.

It is important to know that putting people in prison for possessing, receiving, or distributing illegal images does nothing to reduce the availability of child porn.

Those million images? Still freely available on the Internet.

Disney World, running amok with perverts; or, reading between the lines

Theme park employees from Disney, Universal Studios and SeaWorld caught in sex stings, the headline says.

Thirty-five Disney employees arrested in sex stings since 2006, that is. Thirty-five arrested over a period of nine years. Thirty-five out of 300,000 employees during those nine years.

Thirty-two of the 35 have been convicted. Well, of course they have! The other three cases will almost certainly end with a conviction, too. The article does not tell us how many of these people went to trial though I imagine the number is close to zero. Most prosecutions--not only for sex offenses--end with plea agreements.

A justice system where the prosecution never has to prove its case is no justice system at all.

The article provides details about some cases. In one case, a man was found in possession of illegal images that included "multiple scenes of nude prepubescent children engaging in sexual activity with adults and other children". For other cases, the illegal images are described only as "child porn."

Why the difference? I have a sneaking suspicion that some cases have more interesting, more shocking details than others. It simply isn't shocking to hear that someone was in possession of video that a teenager made of himself and uploaded himself. News media doesn't like to explain that the legal definition of child porn also includes images of teenagers, made by teenagers. When people hear about child porn, they assume it means images of small children being raped. What news outlet, hungry for advertising dollars, wants to get in the way of audience imaginings that will bring them back for followup articles?

Some of the arrests were of men who met a kid online and eventually tried to meet in person for sex. Where do you suppose these men were hanging out online that they met kids eager for sex? Nickelodeon? PBS Kids?

Let's think. If the men had been trolling websites meant for children, what reporter would fail to lead with that detail? Look at the headline above: It doesn't leave it at theme park employees; it says Disney, Universal Studios and Sea World. If the websites had been those intended for children, the headline would have included that juicy tidbit. But it doesn't and that tidbit doesn't show up in the article, either. We are probably safe in assuming that the men were using adult websites.

But what children hang out on adult websites looking for sex? As it turns out, it seems there weren't any children looking for sex. There were only law enforcement officers pretending to be children. Is it possible that some cases did involve real children? Let's go back to the question about what news outlets would like to include in their stories. If an actual child isn't mentioned in the story, it is safe to say there were no actual children involved.

So: we have men spending time on websites meant for adults, in conversation with adults pretending to be children. Who starts those conversations? Who brings up the possibility of sex? If the pretend child introduces the idea of sex, that is very different from an adult approaching children in a chat room for children and asking for sex. The reporter does not tell us who introduced the idea of sex with the minors.

Now that Disney has been named in a headline as an employer of sex offenders, what does Disney have to say about it?

In a statement to CNN, Disney spokeswoman Jacquee Wahler said, “Providing a safe environment for children and families is a responsibility we take very seriously. We have extensive measures in place, including pre-employment and ongoing criminal background checks and computer monitoring and firewalls. 

Background checks, hey? If that means the kind of background check that would have exposed a job applicant as a registered sex offender...that must mean that none of these 35 were registered sex offenders. Once again, we see that arrests for sex offenses most often are of those who are not on the registry. Once again, we see that the registry protects no one.

“The numbers reported by CNN represent one one-hundredth of one percent of the 300,000 people we have employed during this time period. We continue to work closely with law enforcement and organizations like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as we constantly strengthen our efforts.”

Huh. Now that Disney has been named in a headline as an employer of sex offenders, they have no choice but to cooperate with law enforcement. Imagine the headlines if they did anything else.

What is said in a news article can be interesting. What is not said can be even more interesting.

police want to force a 17-year-old boy's erection so they can photograph it

For the last week, the Internet has been chewing up a story about child pornography. Radley Balko sums it up:

...the efforts of officials in Northern Virginia to forcibly induce an erection in a teenage boy in order to pursue “sexting” charges against him has deservedly provoked national outrage. ... Manassas police have since backed down and now say that they won’t execute the warrant. Of course, there remains the problem of why the warrant was issued in the first place. No one in the Manassas Police Department, the office of Commonwealth’s Attorney Paul Ebert or the judge who signed off on the warrant was able to see what the rest of the country saw, here: an outrageous abuse of power and an unfathomable violation of this kid’s privacy. The Commonwealth of Virginia was prepared to create child porn in order to prosecute a 17-year-old kid for sending videos of himself to his then-girlfriend, who was 15 years old.

Seems clear: an outrageous abuse of power and an unfathomable violation of this kid's privacy.

Also clear: in the prosecution of a child pornography case, they were going to produce child pornography. 

As usual, it is a good idea to read all of Balko's piece. He talks about several other crazy cases in which teens landed in huge trouble for playing doctor while texting.

The trend is toward dragging more minors into the justice system.  

In an effort to register their contempt for child exploitation and sex crimes, lawmakers have defined sex offenses so broadly that a teen sending an explicit photo to a boyfriend or girlfriend can qualify. Typically, when critics point out that a new law could be used in ways lawmakers never intended, supporters point to prosecutorial discretion. They argue that it’s ridiculous, even insulting, to suggest that a prosecutor would twist a law to bring charges against someone in ways the law clearly never intended — or that a judge would allow it. That police, a prosecutor’s office and a judge all saw nothing wrong with forcibly inducing an erection in order to pursue charges against a 17-year-old kid puts the lie to that argument.

Sex isn’t the only context in which we’re ruining kids under the pretense of saving them. We’re protecting kids from drugs by arresting and jailing them for marijuana possession. We’re protecting them from the (mostly nonexistent) problem of school violence by assigning law enforcement to patrol middle and high school campuses. The presence of law enforcement means that kids who were once reprimanded, assigned detention or possibly suspended for infractions such as fighting, throwing food or truancy are now fed into the criminal justice system.

I have written about how casually cruelty is directed at the children of sex offenders, here, here, and here. As demonstrated in the cases Balko discusses and in a 2010 prosecution of sexting minors, the cruelty can be even more astounding when minors are the offenders.

More on the Virginia case from Robby Soave at Reason, from Shelly Stowe at Justice For All, and from Lenore Skenazy at Free Range Kids here and here.

truths about--and consequences for--teenagers

In Barrington IL, school administrators and parents are trying to teach students not to share pornographic images. Pornographic images were shared--via text messages--among a large number of students. At that time, the images were deleted from all the phones but another incident occurred recently and may result in a couple of students being charged with felonies because the images are considered child porn.

...although middle and high school students are “regularly taught about safe online behaviors,” the district is considering introducing “age-appropriate lessons” on sexting in upper elementary grades.

Will those lessons about sexting go the way of the DARE program?

DARE is very popular with students, school administrators, police, and the general public. This, in spite of the fact that research over the decades has repeatedly demonstrated that DARE is not only ineffective, but also sometimes counterproductive. That is, students who graduate from DARE are sometimes more likely than others to drink or do drugs.

Kids get frequent warnings about the dangers of sharing too much on the Internet. A current Facebook stunt is to post a picture and ask people to 'like' it; the goal is to show kids how far and fast a picture will travel via social media. Because posting an indiscreet selfie can embarrass you far, far away and very, very soon.

Teaching kids why they shouldn't share too much information, while certainly not pointless, is ineffective, as are many lessons we deliver about personal safety. One night, a group of high schoolers around our kitchen table all shared the codes that opens the garage doors at their homes, laughing about the warnings their parents had given them. They have all been told not to share that information but they did it anyway. At that age, very little bad has happened to them and they cannot conceive the unexpected hairpin turns ahead in their lives.

Telling them they shouldn't drink is a lesson they will understand and then ignore. Not every kid, of course. Some will absorb the lesson and follow the recommended course of action, "just say no". Many kids don't drink booze, have sex, or smoke. 

Many more do, though. They have all heard the advice to stay away from booze/pot/sex/etc. and they decide to try it anyway. They know the dangers of drunk driving, STDs, and drug overdoses. They know they could be arrested for drunk driving or for having illegal substances in their possession. They may even be aware that sex with the wrong partner could have lifelong consequences for one or both partners. They do not think it will happen to them.

They will still drink booze, smoke cigarettes or pot, and have sex. All that knowledge, all those warnings...for nothing?

Probably not for nothing. At some point, kids grow up and those lessons take hold. Many grownups look back to their foolish days and shake their heads. What were we thinking?

The same thing will happen with advice not to share excessively on social media, not to take suggestive or nude selfies, not to pull out the iPhone and record that couple doing naughty things in the corner. Kids hear the advice, they understand some of the dangers...and then they do it anyway.

The question isn't will they or won't they; they question is what should happen when they do?

If we charge kids with felonies, do we honestly think that will keep other kids from sharing naughty pictures? All our lessons about drugs and booze and sex have not stopped kids from drinking, smoking, and having sex. Why would we think we can control a new kind of foolishness?

Advice for the Barrington students includes:

If a person forwards a sexual image of someone underage, that recipient is as responsible for that image as the original sender. A distributor could face child pornography charges, go to jail and be required to register as a sex offender.

Is that really what we want to happen to our students? Do we really want them to be on the sex offender registry (for life, in some states) for foolishness? Child pornography includes images that are shared freely and willingly by the teens themselves. Do we really want the default reaction to be to charge them with a crime? 

We need to look at our criminal laws and decide if it makes sense to insist that foolishness is criminal since that particular kind of foolishness--indiscreet sharing--is not going away anytime soon, no matter how many times we tell kids it is a bad idea.

Computers, laptops, tablets, video game consoles, cell phones...the opportunities for online hijinks are not diminishing. The number of kids who will end up on the registry and with a felony on their record will only increase.

To pretend that we can control what kids do online might be a worse foolishness.

high shock value; low information value

Fourteen men arrested for exploiting children via the Internet. 
Twenty-seven thousand subscribers of the website operated by those arrested.
Two hundred fifty-one victims as young as 3 years old. 
Forty terabytes of pornographic images.

According to a Reuters article on Townhall.com, a Department of Homeland Security investigation uncovered a 27,000-member, subscriber-only website (or websites; it is not clear) that made child pornography available. 

According to a USA Today article,

Those members and users, according to documents, "coerced hundreds of minor boys to record themselves engaging in sexually explicit conduct.'' Unknown to the child victims, the videos were allegedly transmitted to Johnson's sites, allowing members to view and download the videos.

This sounds horrifying. Some of it may be but let's sort out the words calculated to shock and frighten us.

On the USA Today video, the ICE spokesman says the amount of storage needed for the porn on the web servers was 

...forty terabytes, five times the size of all the information stored by the Library of Congress.

That's an impressive number, to be sure. Not many of us have an external drive that holds even a single terabyte, so forty terabytes must be, like, VAST. On the same video, a line from a court document is highlighted:

...websites contained approximately 2000 sexually explicit videos of young boys...

It is safe to say that a boy masturbating in front of a webcam (with parents and/or siblings down the hall) is not likely to produce a full two-hour movie so those 2000 videos cannot account for all forty terabytes. The website must have offered images other than those of the boys, perhaps even--dare to imagine--legal pornography. 

In addition, the comparison to the size of the Library of Congress ignores the fact that no one knows how many terabytes (or petabytes) of storage the LOC would require if all its documents--and movies!--were digitized. The comparison was used for effect, not for accuracy.

The victims were all boys ages 13-15, with the exception of eight girls and two boys around three years old. Members and operators of the website enticed the boys to perform on camera and the images then ended up on the website. Sometimes the operators/members posed as young girls asking the boys to show or do something for the camera.

Hard to tell if the subscribers were all seeking child porn or how many of them were involved in soliciting the illegal images or how long any of them were subscribers. Was it a month-by-month subscription so that the same subscriber could be counted multiple times? (Rest assured that the feds have already collected as much data about the subscribers as possible from the website. I imagine they could answer my question if they were so inclined.)

Given the information we have, the victims were enticed, not forced, so we have teen-aged boys, foolishly performing before a webcam. The two little ones? Those images are not described, but if someone did something to or with those little guys, they should be held responsible. On the other hand, if the images are not described, perhaps the images don't have the shock value needed for the story.

If over 200 boys will perform for a webcam when a stranger entices them, how many boys are doing the same for their real-life friends? In this case, the boys are called victims and ICE can claim to have saved them from the bad guys. 

In other cases, teens who upload naughty videos are called child pornographers.

A careful reading of the story should raise questions as well as eyebrows. 

Jacob Sullum on misguided child porn laws

In the Washington Post, Jacob Sullum talks about child porn laws.

The legal treatment of people caught with child pornography is so harsh that they can end up serving longer sentences than people who actually abuse children. In a 2009 analysis, federal public defender Troy Stabenow shows that a defendant with no prior criminal record and no history of abusing children would qualify for a sentence of 15 to 20 years based on a small collection of child pornography and one photo swap, while a 50-year-old man who encountered a 13-year-old girl online and lured her into a sexual relationship would get no more than four years.

True. One need not look far or long to find cases in which actual molesters are given much less prison time than those convicted of child porn offenses.

Under federal law, receiving child pornography, which could mean downloading a single image, triggers a mandatory minimum sentence of five years — the same as the penalty for distributing it. Merely looking at a picture can qualify someone for the same charge, assuming he does so deliberately and is aware that Web browsers automatically make copies of visited sites. In practice, since the Internet nowadays is almost always the source of child pornography, this means that viewing and possession can be treated the same as trafficking.

Hmm. People in prison for receiving images downloaded without their knowledge through peer-to-peer file sharing may want to quibble with Sullum when he implies that the download must be deliberate in order to qualify for the charge of receiving. I would also be willing to bet that many, many inmates doing time for possession or receipt had no idea that Web browsers automatically make copies of visited sites. Most people do not understand the caching of temporary internet files.

Sullum discusses the probable reason for increasingly severe sentences for child porn offenses.

While the original justification for criminalizing possession of child pornography was that demand creates supply (an argument that has been weakened by the shift to free online distribution), the escalation of penalties seems to be driven largely by the assumption that people who look at these images are all undiscovered or would-be child molesters. ...

Even allowing for the fact that many cases of sexual abuse go unreported (as indicated by victim surveys), it seems clear that some consumers of child pornography never abuse children. “There does exist a distinct group of offenders who are Internet-only and do not present a significant risk for hands-on sex offending,” says Karl Hanson, a senior research officer at Public Safety Canada who has co-authored several recidivism studies.

It is clear that those convicted of child porn offenses are doing time for what the courts and legislators fear. Courts fear the defendants molested children but were never caught and courts fear the defendants want to molest children if they haven't already.

Here's the thing: All the research about whether child porn consumers did or didn't molest children--as interesting and reassuring as it can be--should have nothing to do with the sentences handed down for non-production child porn offenses. If the defendant molested children, the prosecution should find the evidence to prove that. Until then, his offense is downloading or possessing illegal images and nothing more.

In fact, it is not clear why mere possession of child pornography should ever be grounds for locking people in cages. The Supreme Court’s main rationale for upholding the ban on possession was that demand for this material encourages its production, which necessarily involves the abuse of children. But this argument has little relevance now that people who look at child pornography typically get it online for free. Furthermore, people who possess “sexually obscene images of children” — production of which need not entail abuse of any actual children — face the same heavy penalties. “They are not protecting a single child,” Boland says. “They are throwing people in prison for having dirty thoughts and looking at dirty pictures.”

Our prisons are already overcrowded; now is a good time to reconsider child porn sentences because the number of people doing time in prison for thoughts and pictures is growing.  We do not put people in prison for imagining violent robberies or for owning a photo of a violent robbery. The parallel is obvious.

So is the insanity of punishing people for crimes for which they have not been charged.

sex crime investigator commits sex crime

A detective with the San Jose Police Department will serve a minimum of six months for communicating with a minor online, requesting and receiving a nude photo from the teen.

This detective worked in the sexual investigations division. Law enforcement officers are not impervious to temptation.

If this man has a family, they, too, will suffer from the extreme humiliation and exposure that comes with arrest for a crime like this. They will be as frightened by the circumstances and the consequences as any other family would be. Perhaps more. Law enforcement often go tougher on their own.

if porn is addictive, do we ban it?

At The Public Discourse, Morgan Bennett writes,

Internet pornography is a “monstrous injustice,” and the time for its abolition has come.

She makes some excellent points in a pair of articles though I disagree with her conclusion.

In The New Narcotic, she talks about the addictive effects of repeated viewing of pornography. Viewing pornography can be more addictive than hard drugs like cocaine or heroin. Because pornographic images, once seen, stay in memory and can be recalled consciously or unconsciously, porn addictions can have a more lasting effect than using drugs that do not remain forever in the user's system.

...internet pornography does more than just spike the level of dopamine in the brain for a pleasure sensation. It literally changes the physical matter within the brain so that new neurological pathways require pornographic material in order to trigger the desired reward sensation. ...

Pornography, by both arousing (the “high” effect via dopamine) and causing an orgasm (the “release” effect via opiates), is a type of polydrug that triggers both types of addictive brain chemicals in one punch, enhancing its addictive propensity as well as its power to instigate a pattern of increasing tolerance. Tolerance in pornography’s case requires not necessarily greater quantities of pornography but more novel pornographic content like more taboo sexual acts, child pornography, or sadomasochistic pornography.  [My emphasis.]

Powerful stuff. The idea that this is all freely available--and can be used in privacy and anonymity--is worrisome. Kids who happen onto, or search out, porn have no idea what they may have started. For that matter, neither do adults. An addiction to legal pornography can lead a regular viewer to more novel content, images of more taboo sexual acts. The easy availability of porn on the internet inevitably leads to more people looking at illegal images.

Just as not everyone who has a beer ends up an addict, not every porn consumer will end up addicted to child porn. Some will and the numbers will increase over time.

In Internet Pornography & the First Amendment, she makes a persuasive argument that internet pornography damages both society and personal relationships. The pervasiveness of pornography, freely available and available at all times, is bound to have an effect on society.

If I could, with a stroke of luck or genius or my pen, make all pornography vanish, I would do it. Alas, I cannot. And neither can legislators.

First, local, state, and federal governments should enforce the current obscenity-related laws already on the books. Nearly every state has anti-obscenity laws. The enforcement of those laws would send a message that the production and distribution of obscene material is unacceptable in a civilized society. Second, local and national groups should run billboard, TV, and internet advertising campaigns to expose the harms of internet pornography to the public. 

Looking beyond those “first steps,” I would argue for the eventual enactment of new laws that would censor obscene internet pornography.

Pornography is too easily created, too easily distributed, and too appealing to the curious for it ever to be successfully abolished. Did the prohibition of alcohol stop people from drinking booze? Has the prohibition on marijuana made pot unavailable? Has the ban on child pornography stopped production or downloading?

Have we truly learned nothing from those efforts?

What the ban on pot and other drugs has done is put millions of people in prison and vacuumed over $1 trillion out of taxpayer pockets...all without reducing drug use. Putting thousands and thousands of people in prison for possessing illegal pornography has done nothing to reduce the amount of child porn available.

Another effect of prohibiting child pornography has been to make it impossible for child porn addicts to ask for help to stop. Morgan Bennett, in The New Narcotic, nicely outlines how addictive pornography can be and in Internet Pornography & the First Amendment she wants to penalize those with that addiction. Compassionate, she's not.

Imagine those efforts applied to currently-legal porn as well. How many more would we incarcerate? How many more families would be torn apart by the justice system? How many breadwinners would spend years in prison when therapy or 12-step groups would have served them better?

Her suggestion that we educate the public on the dangers of porn is sensible. Something related has been suggested before.

Censorship or abolition of any kind of pornography is, quite simply, impossible. To attempt to do that will destroy more families than the porn itself does.

when embarrassing pictures go viral

In his comment on the arousal is not the crime post, Ethan included a link to a Salon article by a young woman who tells what it was like when a photo of her went viral.

Not just any photo. An embarrassing photo.

On Facebook, she had posted a photo of herself dressed as the sexy Lara Croft for Halloween. Unfortunately, she had neglected to check her Facebook privacy settings, leaving her photo open to the public. Someone saw the photo, re-posted it and then the re-postings snowballed. Cruel comments were posted wherever the photo was posted. And it was posted everywhere, it seemed.

So I laughed it all off at first — but then, I read the comments. 

“What a waste of space,” read one. Another: “Heifers like her should be put down.” Yet another said I should just kill myself “and spare everyone’s eyes.” Hundreds of hateful messages, most of them saying that I was a worthless human being and shaming me for having the audacity to go in public dressed as a sexy video game character. How dare I dress up and have a good time! 

We all know the awful humiliation of a person laughing at you. But that feeling increases tenfold when it seems like everyone is laughing at you. Scrolling through the comments, the world imploded — and took my heart with it.

LisaMoore commented after Ethan posted his link:

The Salon article is interesting and I showed it to my kids to reinforce not to put anything online that could be embarrassing. It is not the same as child porn pictures though. She was an adult.

True, the Lara Croft photo is not the same as child porn but there are similarities worth noting. She lost control of an image of herself, an image that she did not want the world to see. 

This must be a tiny slice of what it feels like to know that strangers on the internet are seeing, sharing, downloading photos of oneself in a sexual situation. For children, who were coerced or outright forced into sexual situations, to learn that there are photos of those experiences out there...I can't imagine what that must feel like. Embarrassment and humiliation must be the least of it.

This young woman, though, took action.

I called my friend Terri Jean, a photographer. She reminded me that I was beautiful, and told me I would get through this. And then, like any kick-ass heroines, we came up with a plan. [My emphasis.]

The photo was of her and she wanted as much control over it as she could get. She used her paralegal training and experience to fight back. She began contacting people who had shared it on Facebook and asked them to take down the post. Most of them were surprised to hear from her.

And of course, they hadn’t really thought of me as a person. Why should they? These images are throwaways, little bursts of amusement to get through a long workday. You look, you chuckle, you get some ridicule off your chest and move on to the next source of distraction. No one thought about the possibility that I might read those words. Far less, that I would talk back. 

Next, I began the monumental task of sending out copyright violation notices to the websites hosting the image — I would have to issue hundreds of them. My work as a paralegal had given me some training in this regard, but it was tedious, like pulling weeds out of the planet’s largest garden. I had to seek out each instance of the image and sift around until I could find contact information. 

No wonder this woman chose Lara Croft for her Halloween costume! She and Lara are both determined, resourceful, and smart.

The story for child pornography images is different. The law does not allow people to fight back the way this young woman did. Parents who want to remove images of their children from the Internet or children, now adults, who want to track down their own images--what can they do? 

If families go looking for child porn images, even with the purpose of fighting back the way this young woman did, they are likely to end up in trouble with the law. If an adult finds the pornographic image of herself as a child, she will herself commit the crime of possessing it.

Because the images are illegal, the websites on which they are available are driven far underground, making the job of tracking much more difficult.

If you are thinking--But the woman in the Lara Croft costume wasn't able to remove the images from the internet. She lost the fight!--I cannot argue with that. There is no way for her to remove all the images of her from the Internet. Ultimately, she did lose but not without putting up a fight, and not without making some of her tormentors aware of what they were doing. Being able to fight back felt good.

The children in child porn images never have the opportunity to fight back. Law enforcement is not trying to remove the images from the internet. No one is trying to confront those who re-posted the images to ask, "Why are you posting pictures of me?" The children are left with the possibility of receiving court-ordered restitution payments with which they can afford therapy. 

Is therapy the best we can do? What if fighting back would do more good than therapy or if it would make therapy a little less necessary? 

Reading this woman's story makes me see how powerful she felt when she found a way to fight back.

And while my self-confidence took a large blow from the experience, I’m getting over it. My photographer friend Terri did a photo shoot with me after it all went down. She’s a retro pinup photographer, and I’ve been posing for her for a while now, but that particular shoot felt great. Just to be seen a little bit more as I wanted to be.

But I refuse to disappear. I still go jogging in public. I don’t hide my flabby arms or chubby ankles for fear of offending someone else’s delicate sensibilities. I dress in a way that makes me happy with myself. And this Halloween, I’m thinking of reprising my role as Lara Croft just to give all the haters the middle finger.

Criminalizing child porn denies its victims the chance to fight back. Instead, they are in limbo, waiting for law enforcement to punish the people who downloaded the images. 

Waiting for someone else to do something. They aren't even waiting for someone to save them because that's not going to happen. They are stuck waiting for something to happen which doesn't affect them much at all. Arresting people for possession doesn't rid the Internet of the images, nor does it give the child (or family) any control over, well, anything.

They are relegated to the role of victim, a role some refuse to let them abandon. Tom Joad is not the only commenter to think once a victim, always a victim:

 I don't care if the image is two days old or twenty years old...that little child was still the victim of a terrible crime and continue to be a victim!!!

Some people seem to like the idea that children in child porn images will never be able to recover from the experience. Those children are not all alike. They each have their own way of recovering from bad experiences. Some of them would certainly prefer to be able to take action.

Do I really want child porn images popping up on my Facebook news feed? Certainly not. Society has a very strong taboo on sex with children and anyone who dared to post something like that would immediately come under fire from those who know how wrong it is. Wouldn't you protest? Wouldn't you demand that your Facebook friend remove the image? Wouldn't you do something to help any child you might recognize in the images? 

I hope it would work like that, though perhaps I am wrong and the world would come to accept the images. Would you? Freedom poses difficult problems. 

Would decriminalizing child porn create more viewers? I don't know. There seems to be no shortage of new viewers even though it is illegal now. Again, freedom poses difficult problems.

The thought of victims prevented from fighting back is painful. 

Would every family or child want to do what this woman did? Probably not. But for those who have a heart for the battle and who want to feel the power surge that comes with fighting back, why make it impossible for them to do that?

incarcerate or educate?

 Two different approaches to child pornography on the Internet:

...Microsoft announced that it planned to implement a new mechanism to fight child pornography by creating a pop-up warning when someone searches for illegal images of child porn on Bing, The Guardian reports. However, Google, which owns the largest share of online search traffic, has decided not to include the new program in its search engine. 

“Child abuse imagery is illegal and we have a zero tolerance policy to it," a Google spokesperson said in an email in The Huffington Post on Tuesday. "We use purpose-built technology and work with child safety organizations like the Internet Watch Foundation to find, remove and report it, because we never want this material to appear in our search results. We are working with experts on effective ways to deter anyone tempted to look for this sickening material.”

The Most Boring Radical has related thoughts:

Certainly if we were interested in actually deterring these crimes–if we believed that these were serious criminal problems and we needed people to stop engaging in them–that’s what we’d do. We’d have commercials running during sporting events warning men of the penalties they can face for engaging in these kinds of online behaviors; we’d have health classes in school cover the legal dangers of online sexual activity; we’d put warnings up before people entered certain websites, reminding them of the penalties in their state of engaging in certain activities. 

But, we aren’t doing that. Why? Because these are crimes the police are interested in creating, not deterring. If we actually believed that scores of guys in their 20s and 30s and 40s were meeting horny teen girls in adult chat rooms and meeting up with them for sex, you can be sure that we’d have campaigns designed to deter such behavior. But, it’s not happening (probably mainly because actual 15yo girls who really want sex with older guys don’t need to resort to skeezy chat rooms to find it, and aren’t doing so). There is nothing to deter. There is, however, money to be gained from creating the crime and arresting people for it.

Money to be made. That's about right. More money is made from the investigation, prosecution, and incarceration of child porn users than child pornography producers ever dreamed of making.

It costs taxpayers about $27,000 per year to incarcerate someone. At a time when government needs to spend less, it makes sense to educate people about the penalties for downloading child porn if that will keep them from committing a crime. Those penalties are not well known. 

People do not expect the penalties for looking at pictures to be greater than the penalties for molesting a child. 

People do not know that simply looking at an image online leaves a copy on the hard drive. 

People do not know that the law makes no distinction between intentional and accidental downloading or between images that have been viewed or not viewed. 

People do not know that curiosity can result in years and years in prison.

If a warning about the penalties would keep someone from clicking that link--from looking at child porn--wouldn't we all want that? 

what are YOU fine with?

Some visitors to my blog come here ready to be outraged. Vera seems to be one of those visitors. Her comment leaves me shaking my head.

Wait. So you think a naked photograph of YOU, that was taken without your permission, that was out there on the internet where any pervert who likes jacking off to pictures of naked women he doesn't know can access it, save it to his computer, show it to his friends, share it online - would be okay? Like that wouldn't bother you, to have your naked picture floating around without your permission? You wouldn't want to know about it? You would have no problem with ANYTHING that anyone did with that picture?

If I knew a naked photo of me was available on the internet and creeps and perverts were thinking who-knows-what....I would not be okay with that. Of course I would be bothered. If I knew about it, what in the world do you expect me to be able to do about it? I can't retrieve the photos, I can't find out who has a copy, I can't know what they were thinking when they saw it, I can't know if they shared it with others. 

I would rather not know. I have enough worries keeping me awake at night. 

What if that picture was of you as a child, naked, in the midst of the thing that brought you the most pain and shame in your whole life? THAT picture floating around the internet forever, for your children to some day possible stumble across, that picture being used by perverts to jack off to - that would be fine with you too? You wouldn't worry about where that picture is or what was being done with it?

No, that would definitely not be fine with me. If memories of the earlier abuse recorded in the images are already giving me nightmares, why in God's name would you want me to worry about the photos, too? What kind of sadist are you?

So far, Vera's point seems to be that I think child porn is no big deal. She's wrong, as she would know if she had read with something approaching comprehension. Then she goes off the rails:

You wouldn't feel some need to try to control what happens with those naked pictures that someone else took and posted without your permission?  

Okay, Vera. What kind of "control" do you think I could possibly have over images loosed on the Internet when all the law enforcement agencies in the world can't control access to the images? How do I make sure I gather all the CDs that may have been burned or thumb drives that may contain my images? How do I figure out who downloaded the images, who downloaded them by accident, who doesn't even realize they have images of me? Are you picturing me circling the globe from pervert to pervert, snatching photos of me from their sweaty hands? 

You don't believe people have any right to control photographic images of themselves? Especially images that were not taken or distributed without their permission?  

As marvelous as it would be if the children in the images had the right to control those images, that idea is incredibly naive. 

If the victims are told that images of them are floating around the Internet, they have the same amount of control they would have if they are not told: NONE. Absolutely none.

In her hurry to express her outrage with me and with my husband, Vera has lost sight of what matters most: children who are dealing with the trauma of sexual abuse. She would rather hammer at me than give any real thought to what it would be like to know.

That is SO interesting to me, because I have not seen ANY pictures of you on this blog... why is that? Are you shy? Are you worried about your picture getting out? Are you worried about someone in your life recognizing you? How ironic.

Oh, Vera. A registered sex offender and his wife were murdered last week (was that fine with you, Vera?) in South Carolina because he was on the registry...and you wonder why I don't post my photo on my blog? 

why I publish the hostile comments

Notes from the Handbasket generally runs along quietly, not drawing much attention. Once in awhile, someone notices it and holds it up to their online friends as an example of all that's wrong with the world. What follows then is a sort of competition to see who can make the comment that will leave the mark on me that stings the most. After all, I should be ashamed of myself, staying with my husband.

I will have a few days of high traffic and negative comments from people who disapprove of me having anything nice to say about my husband. Every time it happens, I wonder if maybe I ought to think about running Google ads; after all, I could use the money for the anti-registry causes I support.

Happily, every time it happens, I end up with a few more regular readers. Some of the regulars still don't like what I have to say but they make intelligent comments. The fly-by-night commenters are here not to understand but to condemn. Some, in their condemnation, are unintentionally amusing. I doubt this earnest commenter intended the irony in her comment:

I also want to suggest (gently) that you refrain from visiting this blog in the future. I don't think there are any minds here that are open to changing. 

Open minds, indeed. That commenter can't open her mind even the tiniest crack to the possibility that people can change for the better.

So far, I publish all comments except for the one I deleted by accident yesterday (apologies to the commenter...repost and I will publish it) and one some time ago that was the f-word repeated for several lines. Too bad that commenter didn't include more because just one more f-word would have made me see the error of my ways.

The first time I got hit with nasty comments, I considered not publishing them. After all, I started this blog to welcome others like me who have family members in trouble for possessing child pornography. How does it feel to a visitor who is planning to stay with her husband to read cruel comments like these:

You disgust me perhaps more than your husband does. 

I am extremely disgusted there are people like you and your husband in the world. 

...you are no better than the perverts who exploit children.

...or to encounter truly ignorant things like:

Police officers don't watch child porn or look at images to get their jollies off... 

YOU should not be allowed to say whether people looking at child pornography is abuse.  

Of course there's a difference! In one instance, he's viewing pictures of victimized children -- in the other he's not!  

The ignorant comments speak for themselves. Information is easily available but some horses won't drink the water.

The cruel comments say more about the commenters than about those of us who have watched someone deal with crippling guilt, shame, and remorse. When I read them, I wonder what it feels like to write those comments, to think that way. 

Maybe it is wrong of me to publish such mean-spirited thoughts. I honestly hadn't thought that until just this moment. Is it wrong to let someone bare the worst of themselves in public?

Fallible human beings are worthy of redemption. We should all be happy to know that. Instead, some take pleasure in beating down people who try to live with hope. 

I oppose pornography and sexual abuse because it is immoral. Wrong. That isn't a secret to anyone who has read my blog. However, child pornography laws are not based on reason, sex offender sentences are draconian, and the sex offender registry is unconstitutional.

That is my focus.

It is wrong to stand by and watch a whole segment of the population--750,000 Americans on sex offender registries--be vilified and labeled as monsters. Publishing those vile comments brings the ugliness to blame for injustice out into the open where it can be examined and challenged. 

I hope that others who have family members in trouble read those comments and can see clearly that that kind of thinking is evil. Don't give in to it.

eradicating child porn, take 2

In one of my favorite comments ever on my blog, gleakk holds my feet to the fire:

I'm not sure I understand, are you saying this is a BAD thing? I disagree with a lot of your opinions but I can usually see the logic behind them, not in this case though. Firstly, the arson analogy doesn't work, looking at pictures of a fire isn't a crime, looking at pictures of child porn is. Also your comment about increasing the value of images seems to fly in the face of your strong assertions the principles of supply and demand don't apply to child porn. This measure isn't a cure all by any means but I can't see how it could possibly hurt the situation.

gleakk is right: I did not write the post well. I wrote it over several days while traveling, editing it in a series of motel rooms. I finally said "enough!" and posted it. 

The arson analogy does work. The "one's legal, one's not" distinction is just silly. Of course child porn images are illegal; this blog questions whether those laws make sense, whether those laws do what they are promoted as doing. It makes as much sense to say that looking at a photo of child abuse IS child abuse as it does to say that looking at a photo of a fire set by arson IS committing arson.

I'm saying that knee-jerk celebrations about eradicating child pornography aren't taking into consideration the fact that we don't really know what the unintended consequences will be. The motivations of those who produce child porn and those who use it are not well understood--probably because each producer and viewer has his/her own motivation. 

I have no objection to Google doing this--the internet corporations can do as they like, within the bounds of the law. The timing of the announcement, though, makes me go...hmm. Google recently came under heavy criticism for cooperating with government spying activities and now Google is offering itself up as the consummate good guy because it is working against child porn. 

People who go ballistic when I defend child porn users (from the excesses of the justice system) say we need to protect children and they also like to use the supply/demand argument. I didn't do it well, but I was trying to point out that their enthusiasm for making child porn just go away ignores those two arguments. 

If someone believes child porn users (the demand in that argument) are responsible for the producers creating child porn (the supply), the elimination of existing child porn should make them wonder if this will increase the value of new images.

If someone believes that we should protect children from abusers, they cannot argue that it is also a good thing to eliminate evidence of that abuse.

The push to "eradicate" child porn ignores what is happening when the images are created. Why would anyone think that is a good thing?

eradicating child porn images

The headline says, Google builds new system to eradicate child porn images from the web, but what does it really mean?

The new database, which is expected to be operational within a year, will allow child porn images which have already been “flagged” by child protection organisations such as the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to be wiped from the web in one fell swoop.

Farther down the article, it says something different:

Scott Rubin, Google’s spokesman, said: “We are creating an industry-wide global database of ‘hashed’ images to help all technology companies find these images, wherever they might be. 

“They will then be blocked and reported.”

And at the end,

“Recently, we have started working to incorporate these fingerprints [codes that identify illegal images] into a cross-industry database. This will enable companies, law enforcement, and charities to better collaborate on detecting and removing child abuse images.” 

They won't be eradicating child porn images in "one fell swoop," they will be making it easier for Google and other companies to block access to illegal images. They will also be taking on the task of reporting illegal images to law enforcement.


Eradicating child porn is an interesting idea--knees jerk everywhere in favor of it--but don't forget the law of unintended consequences. What else could happen when child porn is driven further underground?

Seeing the images is the best way to identify the people responsible for the abuse recorded in them. If we can magically make these images disappear, are we eliminating the chance that someone would recognize the people in the images? 

And don't kid yourself--the images wouldn't go away. They may not be easily available anymore, but they will be out there. Google doesn't index every website--many websites are coded so that Google cannot "see" their content. 

Making child porn images harder to find--will that increase the value of new images? There will be new images; that's about the only certainty in this plan.

Destroying pictures of a fire does nothing to stop arson. 

UPDATE: Response to gleakk's comment here.

FBI, distributor of child pornography

This is troubling.

The FBI seized and ran a child pornography service late last year as investigators worked to identify its customers...

The Bureau ran the service for two weeks while attempting to identify more than 5,000 customers, according to a Seattle FBI agent's statements to the court. Court records indicate the site continued to distribute child pornography online while under FBI control... 

Operating a child porn website is illegal. Distributing child porn is illegal. Possessing child porn is illegal. The FBI did all of this themselves in order to catch those who do the same.

According to the agent’s statement, investigators were unable to identify “Website A” users through the service’s records. Allowing the site to continue to operate – allowing pedophiles to continue swapping photos and accessing images stored on the site – was necessary to identify the customers.

Ah, so here it is. Identifying those who used this particular site was hard, so the FBI decided to change the rules for themselves. They decided that their ends justified their means. Shutting down the website wasn't enough?

Law enforcement officers are not above the law. If people can be incarcerated for years for possessing a few mild images, why is it okay for the FBI to run an entire website distributing even worse images? There is no foolproof measure of character that determines that it is okay for some people to distribute child pornography and not acceptable for others to distribute the images. 

When my husband was arrested for possession of child porn, no one evaluated his character to see if he is one of the special ones who can look at child porn. There was only the fact that investigators found child porn images on his computer; that was enough to send him to prison. He didn't run a website; he didn't distribute any images. 

FBI agents did, though. The FBI distributed thousands of images. The FBI is responsible for every one of the images that was distributed or downloaded during the time they ran the site.

A moral evil such as child pornography isn't something law enforcement--anyone--should play with. And running a child porn site is playing when you are also telling people how bad child porn is.

In what has become a disturbing legal cliché, federal prosecutors often assert that each time an image of rape or molestation is shared, the child is abused again. 

That was among the arguments offered by Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Marci Ellsworth last year when she sent a Seattle child molester to federal prison for child pornography crimes unrelated to the Nebraska investigation. 

Ellsworth opined that Pinson’s crimes were not, as the child pornography consumers sometimes argue, “victimless.” 

“Distributing of child pornography – images and videos of real children experiencing the worst moments of their young lives – is not a ‘victimless’ crime, and the heinous nature of this offense should never be diminished by referring to it as ‘just pictures,’” Ellsworth told the court.  “The children portrayed … suffer real and permanent damage, for the rest of their lives, each and every time their exploitation is shared over the Internet.”

If that is true--that the people in the child porn images "suffer real and permanent damage, for the rest of their lives, each and every time their exploitation is shared over the Internet"--why shouldn't the FBI be held responsible for what happened while they ran the site? 

Perhaps plumping up the number of arrests is more important than actually protecting the children in the images because if law enforcement truly wanted to find the people who are producing the images, they should stop putting people in prison for looking at the images. Looking at the images is the only way to identify those responsible.

Driving child porn further underground has only made it more dangerous. When no one dares to admit looking at child porn, who will come forward to identify the children or adults in the images? 

The article also quotes some of the more abhorrent comments made on the site, detailing what the commenters imagined doing with and to the children. Ugly, repulsive, stomach-turning, frightening comments...comments protected by the First Amendment, nonetheless. When commenters are anonymous, they will say things they would never say in the presence of someone who knows them. 

What is the difference between an anonymous commenter who talks about hurting a child and a commenter who wants to shoot my husband? Both are talking with some pleasure about doing something illegal, both are talking about very real people--the children in the images and my husband. While it is possible that someone could put action behind their anonymous chatter and hurt a child or shoot my husband, it is not likely. 

What is likely, is that if the FBI faces no consequences for distributing child pornography, the agency will continue on that course. 

Which laws will they break next?

protect the children

Protect the Children is a great slogan, almost impossible to argue against. No sane person wants to argue  that we should torment children. What kind of person would think that way?

As it turns out, every defense of the sex offender registry is an argument to torment children. It's tricky, though, because the defense of the registry is tucked inside the unassailable Protect the Children slogan.

...Human Rights Watch released the results of an exhaustive new study on the long-term impact of placing minors on sex-offender registries in the U.S. “Raised on the Registry,” examining 517 cases of youth sex offenders across 20 states, reveals an almost incomprehensible reality in which children as young as 9 are being added to sex-offender databases, sometimes for life, and often as a result of sketchy plea deals or faulty juvenile-court proceedings.

Nine! Think about yourself at nine and what you knew about sex at that age. Of the information you had, and perhaps you even had a lot of it, how much of it did you truly understand? Maybe you understood how pieces and parts fit together but you couldn't have understood how sex affects people, their emotions and their sense of self for a lifetime. Nine-year-olds are simply too young to fathom the effects of adult behavior. How can a nine-year-old understand that sexual behavior today can affect himself and others for years to come? He has only nine years on which to base his understanding.

A child who gets into trouble for sexual behavior and ends up on the sex offender registry not only needs to deal with his faulty understanding of sex, he will need to deal with public humiliation as well. How does that help him? To protect the children, this child is put into another situation he is completely unprepared to handle: that of being labeled a sex offender.

Children who are abused by family members or by a trusted friend often do not feel better when their abuser is taken from them. Love and trust are twisted when sex abuse is part of the relationship. What child can make sense of that? Telling them that their uncle did a bad thing might be something they understand but they are not prepared to deal with the inner turmoil resulting from that bad thing. Children can feel guilt for sending the abuser away, grief for the person now missing from their lives.

On top of that confusion, the abuser is on the registry. A family member, a close family friend. The abuse is publicly known and talked about. Family know about the child's role--a role without blame, for certain, but how does a child deal with the rest of the family (and strangers as well?) knowing what the child did or what happened to him? When a sibling is the abuser, two children are tormented. Putting the abuser on the registry does not help matters for the rest of the family; it introduces more heartache.

With a parent on the registry to protect the children, the child's address is also on the registry. Her house can be searched by law enforcement at any time; the family car can be pulled over for a search at any time. Parents of her friends learn something very private about her family when they find her parent on the registry. Perhaps friends are forbidden to come to her house, perhaps she knows that people look at her and wonder if she had been abused, perhaps others look at her and wonder if she would be an easy mark for further abuse.

The registry is for a lifetime for former offenders even if their names are removed after 15 or 25 years. Nothing disappears from the Internet. A child who abuses a six-year-old will forever be labelled an abuser of a six-year-old. When the child is nine, people might understand how the abuse happened. When he is 17 and asks a girl to prom, a six-year-old victim will be a problem. The older the abuser is, the further away from his abuses--the worse his offense looks.

In jurisdictions that notify the neighborhood whenever a sex offender changes residence, how does an abused child deal with the periodic reminders of his abuse? A postcard arrives at the house, announcing where the offender now lives. Oh, you remember which offender, dear. The guy who did that terrible stuff to you. This is not a good way to help children deal with memories.

What about the children I haven't mentioned yet? Your children. You know...the ones who deserve protection from sex offenders. Does the registry protect them? Nope. Family members who are abusers are still bringing pumpkin pies to Thanksgiving dinner, still whispering secrets with your children. Those abusers are not on the registry. Ninety percent of sex offenses are committed by first-time offenders.

In plain terms, the next sex offense arrest in your town will most likely be at a home not listed on the registry.

The registry does not protect the children. It does, however, make life painful for a very large number of children. With over 750,000 Americans on registries, the number of children affected must be staggering. Abolish the registry and protect those children.