Comments:Chris Langham's sentence for downloading child porn reduced

• should we be putting people in prison for simply viewing child porn, or should we concentrate our efforts into those who produce it? afterall, who does it harm when one views it? -Imind 00:16, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
  • I think the argument goes "If you remove the demand for child pornography, it will kill of the supply". theres probably some validity to this argument but it doesnt acount for the imporatant factor that the suppliers are child abusers and have their own reasons for supplying it. And the harder you make it to find child porn the harder time the police have finding it to catch the abusers. SO its all quite complicated i think upto a year for veiwing the stuff is alright.

Better solutions are needed

A policy based on an ideology of censorship is never going to be satisfying on a legal standpoint, even if it is otherwise effective. The U.S. has already gone back on the notion of punishing "simulated child pornography" - a ruling long overdue in the case of artist Mike Diana, whose comic strip tried to call attention to the abuses countenanced by the Catholic Church a decade before the scandal broke but only got him prosecuted. A case like this reminds us that when all you prove is a picture on a computer, you really don't have any idea what kind of man or what kind of danger is actually present, and it's a crime you could easily "frame" someone for if so inclined. The pictures lead of course, to a crime so distressing that many are willing to sacrifice a few innocent oddballs in action against it, but we should look to assemble a raft of other solutions that children may find a safer refuge.

One good idea that was proposed recently is to award the children victimized to make child pornography the copyright over the unauthorized photographs, allowing them to use civil procedures to recover damages from pedophiles. Even though the civil actions seem much less severe, by putting control in the hands of victims and making their crusades self-funding, we might see more accomplished than with more draconian penalties.

We also need some more systematic way to deal with child molestors once identified. Currently the favorite options are a) to let them loose in a neighborhood and use a Web site to warn all the neighbors that they're supposed to beat them up themselves, or b) to lock them up forever based on a quack psychiatrist's guess that they might be harmful. I say we can do better. For example, we should consider the use of internal exile (hopefully in a bit more humane fashion than the Soviet Union, but the same idea) to sequester child molestors in isolated locations where there are truly no children, not just poor children.

Most importantly, there has to be some way to treat these people, and the research should not be written off as hopeless. I know that earlier efforts to "cure" homosexuals have left a strong distaste for any similar idea, but I don't think the situation is the same. The human organism has been evolved over millions of years to love men or women, and it's easy to see how a very strong innate preference toward one sex could be hard to override. But I can't believe there's some buried genetic program to ensure that people are attracted only to children - there's no reason for such mental circuitry ever to have evolved at all. So let's fund more research and see an end to this problem. 70.15.116.59 04:51, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

"Research"

Why do they always claim they are "researching." He's a pedo, leave him in jail. Rogutaan 03:02, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

They should jail people for making half-arsed statements without knowing the facts, you know Chris do you Rogutaan?.60.234.154.203 10:01, 17 November 2007 (UTC)