Letters to the Editor
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I'm not sure what your problem is Tracy...
Other than rhetorical flourish? Would you have felt better if the judge had said "11 to 101". Otherwise, it is a conversation that our society should have.
Do you find the photographs of David Hamilton or Jock Sturges offensive? In other parts of the world these would be considered art - and they do feature some girls 11 years-old or younger.
The whole "child porn" thing has always perplexed me, especially since it apparently encompasses everything from grotesque pictures of 4 year-olds being sodomized to the beautiful and complex art of Hamilton. Adult pornography doesn't always feature actual sex acts or penetration and we can appreciate the difference (e.g., Cinimax shows nudity and softcore simulated sex - but stops short of XXX). Couldn't the same hold true for naked pictures of people under the age of 18?
At what age is someone able to consent to a photograph? It must be earlier than 18, right? Or is it never OK if coercion is used? And how is someone, two, 3 or 4 generations removed from the making of the photo, supposed to judge who was coerced and who wasn't?
Difficult questions. I applaud the jugdes actions, if not his actual words...
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The whole story is more interesting, though.
- My first reaction was to ask "what was the judge smoking"? But actually if you read the whole story, and preferably the transcript of all of the judge's remarks, then you see that
it is not as bad as it seems.
- What the judge was trying to say is that men may be attracted to women of all ages (1 to 100 was a poor example) and that the boundaries for what is acceptable are somewhat arbitrarily drawn. (For example the age of consent is 12 in Spain, 14 in Canada, 16 in the UK, and 18 in the US.) However, the judge went on to say, you just have to comply with the law where you live and you can't make excuses.
- The man in question had been shopped by his wife and ended up getting sentenced to about 4 years in prison with 18 years of supervision. The judge did point out that during his career as a prosecutor and defender he had dealt with worse cases, including a man who raped 7-year-old girls and also mentioned that the defendant was an end user, not a producer of pornography.
- I know many people will think that castration followed by an appointment with Old Sparky would be too good for him, but you have to have some kind of relativity built into a framework of sentencing so that worse crimes get worse punishments.
- Somehow I doubt whether the wife will be marking his release date as a red letter day in her 2011 diary.
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Nothing arbitrary about it....
Culture isn't arbitrary... it's another kind of evolution for our species. How children are raised is IMHO one of the hottest topics going bar none, in part, because people really believe it will make a difference. I have no doubt that sexualized children will not behave the same as adults as non-sexualized children.
"A leading hypothesis holds that humans became paragons of adaptability by emphasizing general, species-wide behavioral and mental neoteny. Further, our offspring are born nearly unformed, or altricial, replacing reflex instinct with lessons drawn from experience and the accumulated wisdom of the tribe, channeled by only the most general of innate predispositions. This process takes a long time, during which our children are helpless as no others in the history of life on Earth."
Time will tell. Data is being collected.
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To my point the other day...
Not enough people take protecting children from sex predators seriously. If you think that desiring children sexually is "natural"--that one just has to practice "impulse control" and all will be well, then one is apt not to meet out the punishment that perverts deserve.
By the way, someone has already registered with my original handle--Phoenix, so now I'm known as Phoenixtrue. So, any letters that you've seen from Phoenix for the past few weeks up to this point were from me.
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evolution
Apart from his unfortunate choice of age range, the judge was on the right track.
What we haven’t learned from millennia of effort is that impulse control isn’t gained by prohibition or moral systems or “criminal justice”, but by the work ahead of us – integrating and transcending natural drives in ways that are adaptive and attuned to the social environment. That work requires, paradoxically, that we first stop prohibiting, shaming and fearing those drives and that we begin to move past counterproductive and meaning-free constructs like good, bad, moral, immoral, etc.
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Not very thoughtful
"It's a potentially interesting topic for debate, but this kind of moral philosophizing seems inappropriate coming from the bench. And setting legal and moral standards according to other cultures' values seems like a reach when we have our own cultural value system handy -- a value system that holds that sex with children is inherently wrong because children are not able to offer consent in any kind of meaningful way."
Inappropriate coming from the bench? Doe this mean that the bench should adjudicate on the basis of knee-jerk reactions that are simply the expressions of the hegemonic tendencies of our own cultural imperatives? That's the kind of judicial system I want.
Second, why is it that "moral philosophizing" seems to be a pastime with no practical application under this reading (i.e., as if to say that moral philosophizing is an "interesting" pastime, but isn't an important dimension of jurisprudence)? Personally, I'd prefer it if there were more moral philosophizing and less anti-intellectual insistence on the disctinction between theory and practice.
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Some thoughts on the matter
Well said, J.C.
1. A few months ago, and old friend from college was on TV. Hadn't seen him in 10+ years. This was a guy who I liked well enough, but who was always a little bit "off". He was very smart, a good athlete, entertaining, though kind of a dick at times. In many respects rather normal. But one thing myself and others who knew him could agree on: He had no impulse control.
The show he was featured on? NBC's "To Catch a Predator".
2. As the father of 3 young boys, I spend a lot more time amongst the 2-5 year old set than I have since, well, I was 5. And I have to say that I was taken aback at some of the fleeting thoughts that have flashed through my mind when around girls of this age. Not really sexual thoughts, but disturbing in a way that I can't really articulate. Fortunately, the next visceral thought that always comes down the pike is "You sick fuck, what the hell was that?" and I carry on. But those thoughts do flash (rarely) through my brain, and I doubt that I'm very atypical.
Similarly, I will admit to having more sexual thoughts toward teenage girls. Again, these thoughts are always followed by thoughts like "Whoa buddy, she's a little young for ya", and I remember that I am happily and faithfully married, and again, I carry on.
In my case, there are several layers that separate these dark thoughts from action, and many of these I would characterize as impulse control. The dark thoughts well up from wherever such things well up, are considered and rejected. Or adapted, or whatever (but good lord, not just suppressed!).
The bottom line is that despite harboring the occasional dark thought, I am happily and faithfully married, I've never been engaged in so much as holding hands with anyone over 2 years my junior (OK, I do hold my kids' hands to get them across the street, reassure them and so forth, but I think I'm safe there!), I don't leer at women, make inappropriate comments to girls, or hit on our babysitter.
My point is that I don't think the judge is entirely off base. In my opinion, guys (to generalize from myself, which is admittedly dangerous) do have various 'dark' thoughts about females of all ages, and I think it's unrealistic to expect otherwise. But most of us have several layers of thought and emotion that keep these thoughts well segregated from civil society, and I think that's fine. And while I think child predators must have more and stronger dark thoughts than people like me do, I do think the lack of filters/impulse control is also a big issue. I know it was for my old friend.
Now, if the general consensus here is that I'm a sick dude for having any dark thoughts, let me know and I'll look into it. But I really think I'm OK.
Phoenixtrue, I guess I fundamentally disagree with you. I think those who actually do sexual things with children are the lowest of the low, and if anyone engaged one of my children in such a way, I'm quite sure I'd want to kill them. I once had a picture up on a public photo sharing website of one of my 4 year old twins in his swim trunks. Some sick fuck posted a comment about him looking "tasty" or something, and you can't know the rage I felt. But I wasn't angry at the person for having this thought- it's that he actually had it and proceeded to act on it in a way that was so clearly not appropriate.
I really don't think the core problem is one of the presence or absence of 'dark thoughts'- it's a matter of degree and frequency of those thoughts, and at least as importantly, it's what happens after those thoughts appear.