We have to be better than this.

NAMBLA to me is a criminal organization not in need of understanding but in need of something called the Rico Act.

I promise you ignorance has hurt more people then nambla or pedophiles in general ever will. They like all other minority groups deserve to be understood by their society and not shunned for somthing they cannot control.

They like all other minority groups deserve to be understood by their society and not shunned for somthing they cannot control.

You realize what NAMBLA is right? What they advocate? They want the right to abuse boys, not understanding.

You realize what NAMBLA is right? What they advocate? They want the right to abuse boys, not understanding

.

You know what the LGBQ is right? What they advocate? They want to spread AIDS and destroy the institution of marage.

Regardless of what "blank minority group" advocate I would like to understand where they come from how they think, and why they feel what they feel. To ignore a minority group is to cause unnecessary damage to thar group and possibily the society in which they live.

JeffreyA wrote:One can find anything on the internet thn can support or not support any subject, I could spend all day posting views on the long term effect of abuse and prostition, just do some searches.

And you can always find someone to say anything, but that certainly does not mean that all such findings on the internet and people's positions are equally valid. So then how do we go about determining what to believe? Well, the best man has come up with so far is science. Not that the conclusions of every scientific study are valid, but it is a self-correcting system in that just to get published in the first place, a professional article must be reviewed by other professionals in the same field, and in the second place, the results must be subsequently reproduced by others.

One of the strongest tools in science is the meta-analysis which is not a direct study itself, but rather consists of an amalgamation of a bunch of studies on a particular phenomenon. When a meta-analysis not only passes peer review in a prestigious journal but then is replicated, no single study alone found somewhere in the internet is enough to discredit it.

As a older man I am not the same person I was when I was 14 or 18 or 20 etc. Just because a 18 year old goes out and willfully becomes a prostitute does not mean they will not become victim and suffer later in life because they later realize it was the wrong choice.

Nor does it mean it will. Anybody can become a victim at any time.

I made my share of bad choices when young and there were certianly enough adults around me leading me down the wrong roads. Sure it can be argued I could have said no but at 14 you do not have the life experience to know how it will effect you later in life and how badly.

But then again, no one can predict the future.

I know people who have been abused as children and are former prostitutes, their lives are a mess years later, and in their 30's and 40's they are still reliving the horror of their past.

and as Alevi wrote:So do I, and I have found that if they start identifying themselves as victims and focus excessively on what happened to them, they start feeling sorry for themselves out of habit.
Not very constructive.

I know people who have been abused as children who have grown up to become wildly successful CEOs and celebrities. I have noticed two types of abused people: those who overcome it to become better persons for it and thrive, and those who choose to remain victims all their lives by attributing all their current failures on a incident from decades ago. I say, choose forgiveness and success.

As human we live and grow as a person, and to say looking at a 10 year old photo of a child being abused creates no victims, how do you think that child feels 10, 20 years down the road.
They are devestated.

That child may have been victimized when the photo was made, but some stranger seeing it decades later perhaps thousands of miles away has no effect upon him whether one person sees it or a hundred.

Shrink Rap wrote:I have noticed two types of abused people: those who overcome it to become better persons for it and thrive, and those who choose to remain victims all their lives by attributing all their current failures on a incident from decades ago.

Yes, I noticed an exact fifty-fifty split for those that I talked to, as well.
Half having a boyfriend / married and in seemingly harmonious relationships, half consciously or unconsciously attributing every negative development in their lives to the abuse.
Without noticing that they were socially inept / fat / ugly / doing drugs / hanging with the wrong people / being bullied etc. and so on.

Shrink Rap wrote:That child may have been victimized when the photo was made, but some stranger seeing it decades later perhaps thousands of miles away has no effect upon him whether one person sees it or a hundred.

This sounded so callous (which I like) that I started out wanting to disagree with you, but comparing it to the concept of creating a demand in the market for ivory and thus contributing to the ongoing poaching, I remembered that old pianos (having ivory teeth) are exempt from any bans, just for this reason.
And there's a limit to how long after a crime has been commited, that it can be prosecuted.
Also, this "feeling" that the abused people have when thinking about how people may be masturbating to pictures of their abuse right now - that's all in their heads and everybody have to be responsible for their own emotional reactions.

This is a tremendously interesting problem philosophically and legally. Sorry if I gush about it, but it presents all sorts of challenges.

To draw some kind of comparison:

If a newspaper publishes an entirely unfounded and deeply defamatory story about an individual, then that newspaper would be open to the charge of libel. The newspaper's readers would not be charged with anything. In a sense, though, without a reader there is no defamation, because defamation means having your reputation sullied, and it can't be sullied without there being a public to downgrade their opinion of you. (A bit like Berkeley's tree falling in the wood.) So the readership are implicated in the libel in one sense of the word 'implicated' (not the legal sense); without them the damage could not be effected, though they are in no way responsible. I'll come back to this.

Let me next sidestep to the topic of people viewing pictures/films of child porn. All sorts of 'evils' may have been entailed in the making of these pictures/films (the acts depicted may not have been performed willingly, the material may have been used to blackmail the victim into silence, the material may have been made for commercial gain by an organised crime gang, the child may be being held captive for as long as there is commercial interest in keeping him/her involved in the production of such materials, etc.). However, to what extent is the viewer of the material responsible for this?

I'd have to think further on the matter, but I think the comparison (both comparison with and comparison to) between the two scenarios I've presented above has the capacity to produce interesting insights both in legal and moral terms, and quite possibly very divergent ones at that. It would be interesting to hear what conclusions others draw from such comparison.

Are we talking about old pornography? Vintage child-porn, perchance? Because that does sound strange, doesn't it. "No see, what I like is the grainyness of the videos man, and the way the colors are completely wrong in the pictures".

I don't think that there are that many who care about looking at grainy, blurry, handheld videos or such.

Perhaps that would disappoint one of these career self-sorriers, who I assume that they must be, to feel bad about the thought that 20+ years afterwards some sad old man puts on an old cp-tape starring them, and wacks it half-heartedly.

Alevi wrote:Perhaps that would disappoint one of these career self-sorriers, who I assume that they must be, to feel bad about the thought that 20+ years afterwards some sad old man puts on an old cp-tape starring them, and wacks it half-heartedly.

Jesus Christ!!!

Alevi wrote:Are we talking about old pornography? Vintage child-porn, perchance?

Nope, I don't believe we were.

However, I'm sure if the sense of pain a victim of documented (i.e. filmed or photographed) child abuse might feel mitigates over time this will have less to do with the visual quality of the materials and more to do with time being the supposed great healer, or the thought that the greater the intervening time the greater the chances of said materials getting lost or discarded.

In the Internet age there is the possibility of perpetual proliferation and endless copies being made. In fact, case law in the UK has established that simply viewing images is enough to constitute production, as the cached copies constitute 'new copies' of said images that did not exist before, thereby contributing to propagation of the existence of the images.

As an aside, I think it would be of great distress to me to think that some guy was whacking off to a tape of 7-year-old me being raped.

-- Mon Jul 04, 2011 10:58 pm --

I'm going to start a new topic with my 'philosophical problem' above...

GinaSmith wrote:As an aside, I think it would be of great distress to me to think that some guy was whacking off to a tape of 7-year-old me being raped.

-- Mon Jul 04, 2011 10:58 pm --

I'm going to start a new topic with my 'philosophical problem' above...

Yes, i agree absolutely, it's not just a matter of the material "creating a new crime" in that sense, but that it's utterly distressing to an individual to know that something so inherently personal and secret is being distributed and broadcast to other's across the world.