‘Playgrounds for sexual predators”
p2p news / p2pnet: What’s hot with American politicians looking to score headlines in the on- and offline media?
The so-called social networks, typified by Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace.com.
It and similar sites sites, “were portrayed Tuesday as emerging playgrounds for sexual predators as lawmakers considered a measure to restrict their access in publicly funded schools and libraries,” says McClatchy Newspapers.
"This is the hottest issue of the day," it has Texas attorney general Greg Abbott saying after testifying before a House subcommittee examining possible new federal restrictions to protect young Internet users from pedophiles.
A bill by Mike Fitzpatrick, “would require schools and libraries that get federal funds to limit or ban access to social networking sites that could expose minors to sexual advances from adults,” says the story, going on:
“The bill, called the Deleting Online Predators Act, has drawn opposition among schools, librarians and free-speech advocates, who warn that it would have limited effect and could unintentionally block access to scores of other Web sites. Officials of the sites also say they are taking aggressive steps to protect their users.”
Abbott outlined the results of his office’s three-year-old Cyber Crimes Unit, “in which undercover investigators posing as 13- and 14-year-old girls operate on popular Internet sites,” says McClatchy Newspapers, adding:
“The undercover investigations have resulted in the arrests of 84 suspected sexual offenders.”
Digg this.
Also See:
McClatchy Newspapers – Bill would limit access to social networking sites, July 11, 2006
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July 12th, 2006 at 4:26 pm
The moral? Don’t turn your kids loose on the internet.
You wouldn’t turn your kids loose and let the run around without supervision near the seedy part of town would you? On the internet, every part is equally accessible. Children need supervision and education. What do these kids expect to happen when they give out enough information to physically locate them or willingly meet up with a stranger?
Supervision and education, that’s the solution folks.
July 12th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
I think government should have a program that monitors what everyone does on the internet and block what they feel is appropriate or not… Wait they already do, well part of it… The monitoring thing is well covered.
Seriously, this is a parental issue without any if’s ands or buts… As an adult male and admittedly I have a ’social network’ account I only ‘friend’ or ‘chat’ with people I know, other adults. I don’t stray from that. I do remember an episode of ‘Wife Swap’ (on tv not a porn) where one daughter had a myspace account (she was 14 and posted intimate pictures of herself and friends… To my surprise the mother knew about it and in her attempt to be a ‘cool parent’ she defender herself and her daughter by saying ‘thats what kids do these days’. Bullshit. Surprisingly enough the father of this 14 year old didn’t know about it and was, well the way he should have been about it… SHOCKED. He made her delete the site in the end.
I know this is a made for TV example but I am willing to bet this is far to often then not in terms of parenting around the modern world.
I agree, “Supervision and education” is the solution but I want to add that you can’t be a jack ass of parent either.
July 12th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
These sites provide a very FALSE sense of security for the
PREDATOR as well as the prey
For example ….
http://www.perverted-justice.com/
These folks comb the chatrooms and bust the pervs out to
Law enforcement, and SUCCESSFULLY aid in getting convictions.
Instead of banning and blocking, THIS is what should be happening.
Community and legal involvement, coupled with good parenting.
Ban these sites, the pervs will go further underground ( don’t
forget the lessons the RIAA has still failed to learn about infallible
DRM ).
Let the predators think they are safe, until the cuffs go on.
July 13th, 2006 at 4:15 am
but that is entrapment, which used to be illegal. Next thing that’ll happen is that vigilanties like these will be able to bust down people’s doors along with police!
Don’t get me wrong, here, I do believe that people who “sexually offend” anyone, regardless of age or gender, need a lot of help. Most “offenders” do get help, be it prison and/or whatever else is available and respond to it quite nicely.
Go through those sites with a very thouroughly before you participate in the Nazi-like hystrionics of groups such as in the link in the preciding post.
Yes, Nazi-like!!! The very first group of people to be interred in the Nazi consentration camps were the “sex offenders”. Hitler did this to convince everyone he “really wanted to clean up society and help people” so that everyone would buy into his load of male bovine fecal matter. Then, as we all know, Hitler effected the Holocost. You’ll find that contained within one of the provided links below if you look hard enough.
Get a genuine education here:
http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/cac/registry.htm
http://www.geocities.com/eadvocate/issues/?20064
http://portlandme.wpadmin.about.com/?comments_popup=257612
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=1855771&page=1
http://saltlakecity.about.com/b/a/257300.htm
July 13th, 2006 at 4:16 am
Sorry, but you’ll have to copy and paste the broken links. My apologies.
July 13th, 2006 at 5:38 am
It’s not entrapment.
The predators approach the police, initiating conversation and eventually making inappropriate suggestions.
There’s nothing illegal about a cop (or anyone else) saying they’re a 13-year-old, minding their own business. Except in certain cases (like fraud), lying isn’t illegal; it’s protected as free speech. If you call my house by mistake and ask how old I am, I can say ‘13′ if I want. I’m not entrapping you; I’m just bullshitting. You should then think, “13? See ya’ later, kid.” But if you instead decide to ask me about my level of sexual awareness and make a date with me for an ‘encounter’, you just wrote your own ticket to the hooskow.
Likewise, it’s not entrapment if a cop dresses to resemble a drug dealer or a prostitute, again minding their own business. But once YOU approach and say, “Got any blow?” or “How much for a blow job?”, well, YOU blew it.
Or perhaps you’d like to dispense with undercover cops and sting operations. Instead, maybe always give dangerous criminals a fair heads-up on where all the cops are?
Thankfully, it doesn’t work that way. Keep your nose clean and you won’t get in trouble.
– Reverend Flash (not really anonymous)
July 13th, 2006 at 8:44 am
I hate to tell you this, but most sex offenders DON’T get the kind of help you think they do. Many jurisdictions require a lengthy registration period and a lengthy treatment program after conviction (at the offender’s expense, of course, and psychiatrists aren’t cheap). On top of that, the offender’s picture is plastered on sex offender registries, the cops may decide to “notify the neighbors,” newspapers and Internet sites prominently display stories about the offender, child protectionist groups use the offender’s case as a crowbar to show why we’re not protecting children enough and need even more laws to restrict sex offenders and punish them.
It is in the best interests of society to work to re-integrate a criminal into society and simultaneously assist them in straightening up, both upon release from prison or the start of a suspended sentence. Often an offender is required to have a place to live and keep a job for the duration of probation, but if no one will rent an apartment to you and no one will hire you because of your criminal record or offender registration status alone, how can you do these things? What about the offender’s children, especially in the case of something as simple as having child pornography from the internet and not actually doing anything physical to anyone? The offender is required to do such things as not be with his/her own children alone and often can’t take them to school or other events either. Being stripped of the right to vote, own a gun, hold public office, hold any job requiring a state license or certification, etc. only adds fuel to the fire.
What happens is that the punishments becomes the reason for recidivism (re-offending), be it probation violation, stealing so you can survive, or committing a worse crime because you figure prison is better than the streets or the ghetto.
In other words, all the punishment everyone is so in favor of (especially with sex offenses of any stripe) and the strict laws brought about because of ignorance on the part of the population at large end up as part of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once you do the time, you should be getting all of your rights back and start with a clean slate, but instead you lose rights for a long time or forever and you carry the modern-day Scarlet Letter with you everywhere you apply for work or housing, for the rest of your life.
Things look a little different when you put yourself in an offender’s shoes, and the worst part is that there IS no flexibility in the law. If you happened to look at child pornography out of rebellion or curiosity, for example, but never directly victimized a child, the only thing that makes you different from the person who did victimize a child at that point is that you won’t get prison time, or won’t get as much. Other than that, you, the non-violent first-time offending non-stealing lowest-class-felony sex offender, can’t own a gun anymore because felons with guns that never committed a violent crime in their life automatically go berserk and kill people in schools.
No one dares to challenge errors in sex-related laws because when it comes to children and sex, people don’t think clearly. It’s the same as a 13-year-old being raped away from home, and then it’s MySpace that’s at fault because the parent was too lazy to provide parental supervision and make sure their children weren’t getting into this kind of trouble. It seems that most of modern society’s problems fall back on bad parenting. Yes, you fail your children when you leave them in front of a box because you’re too busy, and you fail them when you don’t explain sex, violence, crime, cursing, and explosions to them and put them in a proper context so Billy doesn’t think Grand Theft Auto is how it works in the real world.
Look up the North Carolina General Statutes for second and third degree sexual exploitation of a minor. Second degree lists a series of conditions required of the pornography to make the person a second-degree offender. One such criteria is “receives…child pornography.” The third-degree offense has only one criteria: “possesses…child pornography.” To possess anything, you must have somehow received it. I’ve posed that question to others many times: “How can you possess an item without ever receiving it?” The responses are usually very amusing, because the answer is that you can’t. What does this mean? If you’re charged with third-degree, they can hold second-degree (three felony levels higher) over your head to strong-arm you into taking the very same charges, because second is guaranteed YEARS in prison, where third will let a first-timer out on supervised probation. In other words, the third-degree law is covered by second-degree and this gives a NC District Attorney the ability to convict immediately by offering a light sentence as an alternative to going to trial (and possibly BACK to jail) on escalated charges that, due to the taboo nature of child sex offenses, the defendant is unlikely to win anyway, regardless of the evidence, and said charges will put the defendant in prison for a guaranteed period of time after conviction.
If you don’t believe me, look it up around http://www.ncga.state.nc.us/gascripts/Statutes/Statutes.asp and see for yourself.
END RANT
July 13th, 2006 at 1:43 pm
hmm …
looks to me like a sex offender has taken offense to this thread.
It’s not a disease .. it’s a crime.
Don’t “put yourself in their shoes” .. Put them in a cell.
I have a very genuine education.
July 16th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
You really are very young therefore preventing you from remembering when these things WERE __ILLEGAL__ ENTRAPMEN __OR__ you’re extremely BRAINWASHED!!! Either get educated about REAL History or go get deprogrammed.
July 16th, 2006 at 9:38 pm
Not so young.
Not brainwashed.
Very educated.
Not entrapment either.
You see, the convictions are standing up quite well in court.
May THAT’S why this bothers you.
It means you could get caught AND convicted.
Or maybe you have already been caught and convicted, and
THATS why this upsets you so.
We’ll never know.
July 28th, 2006 at 6:45 pm
You wear your ignorance on your sleeve, sir. Sex offenders are human, much as you are, and sex offenders don’t have to actually touch anyone else to become sex offenders.
No offense has been taken to the thread. Offense has been taken to the ignorance of society in general. It is people such as yourself that believe punishment for a crime should be unlimited that create the self-fulfilling prophecy of “once a criminal, always a criminal.”
Fortunately, that is not the case with myself. I am self-employed and rather successful, despite the status symbol. I am not delusional about what I have been convicted of, and I am constantly aware of the effects it could have on my life.
To say that I should be in a cell right now is absurd, however. I intend no harm to anyone, and in fact I have harmed no one. The damage lies on me, not on some innocent child or female. Much like a hacker, I am feared for my label, but there is more to me than a label.
It’s pretty easy to ask the government to protect you, isn’t it? Lock up and chain down everyone that could potentially cause you harm. It sounds like the way to free society from the bad guys, but consider that you could cause me harm as well, and when you’re rotting in prison because you threatened me out of anger but never laid a finger on me nor intended to, and the tables, they shall be turned.
All the education in the world doesn’t change the fact that you fundamentally don’t get it.
July 28th, 2006 at 6:47 pm
Wait, who said anything about a disease?
Or about education for that matter?
Looks like you’re offering up a plate of fallacy. I’m not hungry, thanks.
July 28th, 2006 at 9:55 pm
http://www.atsa.com/ppTenThings.html