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Seems entirely fair to me

Paedophiles should not face jail for looking at pornographic images of children unless they are a physical threat to youngsters, says Britain’s most senior child protection officer.
Officers should instead focus on the most dangerous offenders who have access to youngsters or are directing abuse online, said chief constable Simon Bailey.

We should probably be producing digital porn for the paedos, giving it to them in fact.

For we know quite well that among adult heterosexuals access to porn reduces the rape rate. On the fairly simple grounds that the bloke who’s not had sex for so long he’s got sperm leaking out of his eyeballs is more likely to attack than someone who’s just wanked himself into a stupor.

And we don’t actually care what it is that people get off to. Makes no difference to us or society if someone deals with their stiffie with pictures of a Ferrari, Lola Ferrari or Lolita. Shrug.

What we do care about is that any physical activity with another takes place only with another consenting adult.

So, produce and distribute – digitally produced – kiddie porn and cut the rate of attacks.

Not that I expect this to be taken up such is the hysteria but it does actually make sense.

33 thoughts on “Seems entirely fair to me”

  1. Paedophiles should not face jail for looking at pornographic images of children unless they are a physical threat to youngsters, says Britain’s most senior child protection officer.

    I dunno about that. Computer-generated pics, yes. Real pics, no. Otherwise that supply and demand thing you like will kick in.

  2. Pornographic images of actual children are, by defintion, a physical threat to the children; digital images are not. So well done Tim for writing this.

  3. So Much For Subtlety

    Taking pictures of real children is abuse and should be criminal. But trading them? I doubt you could measure the additional damage to the victim of the one hundredth paedophile looking at a picture with an electron microscope. How is anyone hurt by 19th century kiddie porn? However it would create a market which would create more abuse.

    So hang them all.

    And we don’t actually care what it is that people get off to. Makes no difference to us or society if someone deals with their stiffie with pictures of a Ferrari, Lola Ferrari or Lolita. Shrug.

    Does it make no difference? I am not sure I agree. It may or it may not. I think some reasonable number of people might be paedophiles but they know it is illegal and so don’t go near pictures of underage children. If we move the goal posts, allow pictures, more people may explore their sexual preferences – which in turn might lead more people to abuse children.

    This is a complex issue and I doubt there are any simple answers.

  4. However disgusting I find something, I am against people being prosecuted for merely looking at images of it, rather than actually doing it.

  5. Not all people with paraphillias have the desire to act them out.

    At school there was a teacher who was 2 decades later found to have kiddie photos on his computer during the Operation Ore cop antics. He was actually one of the better teachers ,did absolutely nothing out of the ordinary and did not have any sort of negative “reputation” . So if he was a paedo he did nothing about it. That of course assumes he wasn’t a victim of set-up bluebottle dirty tricks to get themselves a “result” as some of those “exposed” by Ore were.

    Digital photos harm no one. And if it helps cool the femmi-scum created panic it would be a good thing.

  6. So Much For Subtlety

    Theophrastus – “However disgusting I find something, I am against people being prosecuted for merely looking at images of it, rather than actually doing it.”

    It is odd that in virtually everything else, we have no problems with this distinction. It is just sex that makes it difficult. For instance, it is better to have sex with a child than to murder it. We would all agree with that (while, of course, noting that people should not be doing either). But if simulated pictures of children or adults being murdered were banned, Hollywood would be out of business.

    How many people do I think I have seen have their throats cut, to pick one method of many, on the silver screen over the years? I would guess it was in thousands. Do I feel any particular need to go out and cut some throats? Well, yes but only under extreme Guardian-related stress, which, I am sure we can all also agree, is not really a crime.

    Mr Ecks – “Not all people with paraphillias have the desire to act them out.”

    Come on. Of course they do. When it comes to sex, everyone believes in their version of Kant’s Imperative – they believe their preferences ought to be a universal law. All Gay people think everyone is really Gay if only they gave it a chance. And as the man behind Tatu once said, everyone likes schoolgirls kissing each other.

    “At school there was a teacher who was 2 decades later found to have kiddie photos on his computer during the Operation Ore cop antics.”

    He wasn’t caught fiddling with any children *you*know*of*. That is not the same as not being a danger to children or actually being an abuser.

  7. I had some sympathy with this argument as expressed by the copper on R4 Today, namely that the quantity of cases would clog up the CPS and the courts as well as overwhelming the police so an arrest, a formal caution and placing on the register seems like a practical idea for offenders who aren’t likely to physically accost living children.

    But I find it hard to believe his estimate that there are a ½ million paedophiles in this country and the lack of police resources would be a more convincing point if these resources weren’t so often frittered away pursuing crimes against political correctness.

  8. SMFS–Tripe. I often wonder if you are not the reincarnation of Judge Jeffreys as it seems even the mere possibility of something has you reaching for the noose while pointing the finger of accusation.

    The cops had plenty of time/money to trawl for victims but the few alleged photos were all they had, And for all we know they might have been the old cop trick of looking for the youngest seeming females in a stash of ordinary adult porn and then trying to claim said females are 14 or so in an attempt to turn now defunct porn charges into kiddie porn charges.

    Although you are often correct in your views on lots of topics there are times when I think you should have been a copper –and I don’t mean that in a nice way.

  9. @The Meissen Bison: “…the lack of police resources would be a more convincing point if these resources weren’t so often frittered away pursuing crimes against political correctness.”

    THIS!

  10. It’s worth bearing in mind that the pursuit of paedophiles , like the pursuit of smokers and drinkers, is a lot to do with the desire to look down on someone. Hence practical solutions to ease or solve the problems are not to the fore.

  11. The Meissen Bison

    If 4% of the adult population is homosexual then I wouldn’t be surprised if 1.5% is effectively paedophile. That would give us about 500, 000, give or take? So quite possibly the right figure?

  12. SMFS – If we move the goal posts, allow pictures, more people may explore their sexual preferences – which in turn might lead more people to abuse children.

    If the evidence is that more porn = less rape then this would not be the case. In fact isn’t there evidence that an internet full of porn is actually replacing actual sex for an increasing number of people?

    Doesn’t matter though really. Even if it was conclusively proven to lower child abuse, no government would ever legalise digital nonce porn.

  13. I heard the interview (another example of the BBC presenting only the ‘approved’ side of the debate).

    The policeman was proposing to arrest every detected ‘offender’ and put them on the sex offenders register so that they could be ‘managed’ for ever. But an offender can only be put on the register after conviction: so no workload relief for the CPS or Court system.

    When questioned about that, he said that the Police would use Cautions to avoid going to Court.

    BUT a Caution can only be put on one’s record if one has ADMITTED the alleged offence. So, Plod plans to rely on 500K men convicting themselves by admitting their offences.

    It seems to me a short step to a US style plea bargain system. Plod will say, in effect, “We have decided to accuse you. You are toast. The easiest way out for you is to admit your guilt so that you will ‘only’ be registered as a sex offender for the rest of your life. The alternative is that we inflict The Process on you. It won’t matter if you are acquitted because The Process will punish you severely just for coming to our attention. Now, sign here, punk.”

  14. There are acts which are clearly illegal, there are acts which are clearly legal, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff that we would prefer people didn’t do, but making it illegal creates more problems than it solves. Computer generated porn of trolls and elves (how old is that elf?) Would be the later.

  15. @Ironman

    You could be right but I thought 1 man out of 65 or so to be improbably high. I’m not sure that any link to a figure for homosexuals is very helpful and I would expect the population of paedophiles to be more skewed towards men rather than women but who knows?

    It would be interesting to establish, given the burgeoning of all the alphanumeric categories, how tiny is the proportion of ather dull, analogue men.

  16. Does it make any sense to compare incidence of paedophilia with incidence of homosexuality? After all, noncery is a paraphilia, not a sexual orientation.

  17. It seems to me that an overlarge sex offenders register defeats the object of having a register at all. The police can only monitor so many people. Go beyond that number and not all are being monitored. Go a long way past that number and no-one is being monitored.

  18. The Meissen Bison

    I agree with you about linking paedophilia with homosexuality, it wasn’t my intention. I was looking for a statistical context; didn’t help my point really

  19. The Inimitable Steve

    Dunno Tim.

    Is it actually true that kiddy fiddlers are less fiddly when they’ve seen pictures of kiddies?

    I’ve heard the argument that people with abnormal sexual appetites gradually migrate to more extreme behaviours to get off.

    So, the squirrel suit eventually stops being a thrill and you find yourself nervously hanging around wooded areas with a bag of KP Dry Roasted.

    No idea if this is true or not, but it does seem to be the case for a lot of autogynephiliac transsexuals. (Who, BTW, I feel sorry for and am not comparing to 1970’s BBC personalities or squirrel schtuppers)

    Seems to me that the General Pinochet solution is safest. 100% of Marxists given free skydiving lessons didn’t reoffend.

  20. The Inimitable Steve

    And another thing.

    We all know by now that the slippery slope is real. So Mike Read was right about Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and we as a nation owe him an apology. If only we’d listened to him, we wouldn’t now be afflicted by Miley Cyrus or whatever the hell it is the kids are listening to these days.

    Do we really want to risk getting on the normalising noncery slope? Do we think it’s ever a good idea to tell creepy men and the Belgians that some expressions of slot-badgery are OK?

    And are we sure this – in light of all our other experiences with sexual let-it-all-hang-outery since the 60’s – is a line that we can confidently hold?

  21. “Pat

    It seems to me that an overlarge sex offenders register defeats the object of having a register at all.”

    I agree. Having a separate register for obese sex offenders seems daft.

  22. So Much For Subtlety

    Mr Ecks – “The cops had plenty of time/money to trawl for victims but the few alleged photos were all they had,”

    We would need to know what the photos were and how many of them. There has been an inflation in offense so that the police are probably considering charging people with an illustrated copy of Romeo and Juliet as kiddie fiddlers. But if a teacher chooses a career involving children and they have hundreds of pictures of comatose children being orally sodomised, they have a problem.

    This teacher must have known the risks, must have known these pictures were illegal (unless they were stills from Traci Lord’s earlier films) and did it anyway?

    MC – “If the evidence is that more porn = less rape then this would not be the case.”

    If. Such an interesting word. Is it true?

    “In fact isn’t there evidence that an internet full of porn is actually replacing actual sex for an increasing number of people?”

    And yet rape is getting nastier and more violent. Rape used to be vanilla vaginal rape. It is often anal and oral as well these days.

    MC – “After all, noncery is a paraphilia, not a sexual orientation.”

    That is just a polite way of saying that one is a sexual preference we approve of and the other is not. There is no reason to think that one is more of an orientation than the other or that one is any less of a paraphilia.

  23. re: 1.5%

    Bear in mind how wide the net is cast. The definition they are using would convict anyone who has an image of a 17 year old fully dressed in an “erotic pose” – whether or not they know that the subject is 17. There are a lot of 17 year olds who can pass for a lot older, so I reckon it’d be fairly easy to stitch people up with this, or to get people to incriminate themselves.

    If anything, 1.5% seems much too low.

  24. SMFS,

    And yet rape is getting nastier and more violent. Rape used to be vanilla vaginal rape. It is often anal and oral as well these days.

    Do you have any evidence for this. My impression is that this is a claim from feminists with the normal activitist feminist handling of evidence. I am not even sure that rape records from the past will distinguish the type of penetration in a way that can be easily assessed.

    As for getting more violent – as the act of rape is itself violence (something I agree with the feminist activists on – amazing) then that’s a tricky one. If there is more additional violence involved, we have to consider various factors, including the fact that victims may be more likely to fight back now than in the past.

    Basically, I doubt any comparison of rape with historical rape is actually comparing like with like anyway – what is reported is probably actually a different subset of (generally) violent sexual encounters. Since date rape is now included far more as well, then if anything the amount of violence involved should go down.

  25. Rational Anarchist: There are a lot of 17 year olds who can pass for a lot older, so I reckon it’d be fairly easy to stitch people up with this, or to get people to incriminate themselves.

    If anything, 1.5% seems much too low.

    Ah yes, if we allow for stitching up, then of course 100% would be about the right figure.

  26. And yet rape is getting nastier and more violent. Rape used to be vanilla vaginal rape. It is often anal and oral as well these days.

    Ooh yes I remember the good old days, when rapists just put a knife to your throat and raped you all normal-like, then tipped their hat and they were off. These days it’s in front and back, some of ’em’ll have your dentures out and never a word of thanks…

  27. There is also the question of what peadophillia actually is. Whenever we hear the word, we instinctivly think of sweaty old men feeling up six year olds. An eighteen year old doing it with an already sexually active fifteen year old is in the same legal ball park as the sweaty old nonce.
    The law about the age of consent is based on two things only – the date and the country we live in.
    Laws have varied over time and still do vary across the globe. Which one is right? Are any of them right or can laws like this never work when they are only black and white with no grey areas?

  28. That of course assumes he wasn’t a victim of set-up bluebottle dirty tricks to get themselves a “result” as some of those “exposed” by Ore were.

    Actually, Landslide was an enormous credit card fraud which used the paedo porn connection to stop people complaining.

    Essentially, there were two routes: either you paid for access for (or gave your credit card details to identify you as over 18 so you could get {coughs} free access to) hard core but legal porn (and this was in the days before the extreme porn law so …) And the scumbags then billed you for access to paedo. If you noticed, would you complain?

    Or, they just bought credit card details stolen another way and ran them through the same system. People here did complain – not least because they had no idea that the site charging was a porn site – and the level of those complaints is what took Landslide down as a business.

    There was a lot of paedo (large number of images but a small %age of the total and, with the exception of old-looking-16, 17 year olds, as noted above, mostly limited to very specific sub-sites) on the Landslide computers (not that I agree with the insane sentence Reedy got, even the appeal level of 180 years is lunatic) but most of the hundreds of thousands of subscribers went nowhere near it. Although I was only peripherally involved, I _know_ this because the cops were so keen to do people where the only evidence they had was a credit card payment purportedly for one of the paedo sub-sites. Numerous people in that category accepted a caution (and the subsequent sex offenders register) because they hoped to avoid the “mud sticks” from any investigation, even if they really hoped such an investigation would clear them.

    The main lying bastard in the case was a US Postal Inspector, Micheal Mead. However, there are a lot of UK cops who took the American allegations at face value and then went in to Rambo mode before engaging brain.

  29. There was a guy a few years back, he organised multiple community events for years in his area. He organised an event and as usual was there with his camera taking a few pictures for the community centre newsletter and lots of pics for parents – who knew he would provide on request to the parents of any particular child.
    Community event, in front of parents and other family members and local residents – and someone complained to the police about him taking photos.

    He had zero photos of kiddie porn, he had mostly work photos on his PC. The fact he was accused was enough to get him driven from his home, loss of job, loss of his computer, loss of most of his friends.
    And a big loss to his community.

    The police found nothing at all that they could use against him. Just the allegation of taking inappropriate pictures – that was all it took.
    Years later this guy who has won awards for his camera work, who made money for his company doing professional photography, who taught dozens of photographers their trade…. has not touched a camera since.
    He cannot go through that again, simplest method for him is to avoid everything that he was involved in before.
    Zero evidence, zero issues prior to that.

    Just society hears the word ‘paedophile’ and goes mad.

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  31. Dear Mr Worstall

    “What we do care about is that any physical activity with another takes place only with another consenting adult.”

    Are you advocating raising the age of consent from 16 to 18, or lowering the voting age to 16? Assuming putting a cross on a ballot paper makes you an adult.

    DP

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