We have all seen people jump upon stories of child abuse and rant that the alleged perpetrators need to be tortured, dismembered, and even fed to hungry beasts. We are told that the solution to abuse is… more abuse.
Yet punishment has not been shown to be an effective deterrent and can never undo any abuse alleged to have already happened. To effectively address abuse we have to get to the root and that is dependency. For example, child labor laws artificially prevent children from being able to provide for their own welfare. Restrictions on adoption and non-religious private schooling keep children from being able to freely choose from a list of competitive homes and schools. Although it is true that humans are social animals and there is always some degree of interdependence, children are far more dependent on their parents than is necessary. If you really want to help children, work to remove obstacles to their freedom to stand on their own. Abusing the alleged abusers only perpetuates the cycle of any abuse that has occurred. It’s not without reason that the most draconian punishments tend to be found in in the most authoritarian societies where children have it worse than anywhere else.
People who abuse children are were very often themselves abused as children, often by parents or other relatives convinced that they were meting out a just punishment. Rather than enshrine a similarly authoritarian and vindictive approach ever more into law, it would make far more sense to strive to break the cycle of dependence, helplessness, and abuse instead of compounding it.
Sometimes CLs also forget that we do not get to define abuse for the purposes of law and punishment; the power elites and their apparatchiks do. If alleged child killers are to be rounded up and tortured to death, in practice we would be next on the death squads’ hit list, because no matter what any of us might say, people in power materially benefit from labeling all honest CLs as abusers. The more revenge is enshrined into law the more juries will resemble lynch mobs and history tells us how that turns out.
Teen girl pleads guilty to child porn charges
This article is dated by a couple years (will be looking into more recent news on the young woman) but worth posting for comment.
I continue to hear the clueless insist on their “tried and true wisdom” such as “women are not visually stimulated” and “pedophilia is a guy thing.”
June 17, 2008
Scott Tracey
GUELPH
Police had already arrested a Wellington County man early last year before his teenage daughter confessed the huge amount of child porn on the family computer belonged to her.
A Guelph court heard yesterday the girl, then 15, was being interviewed as a potential witness against her father when she admitted she was the one who had downloaded images and videos of children being sexually abused.
The girl admitted to police she is “sexually attracted to young girls,” assistant Crown attorney Murray deVos told the court.
The girl, now 16, pleaded guilty yesterday to possessing child pornography.
DeVos said the material was stored “in a very elaborate storage and classification system” and the girl was able to describe this for officers. Court heard police came to believe the girl’s father “probably wasn’t sophisticated enough” to have downloaded and sorted the material.
Court heard an OPP officer monitoring online file-sharing programs Feb. 28, 2007, found a user making child pornography available. Investigation ultimately led police to the accused’s father’s home, where three computers were seized.
Police ultimately found 1,578 images and 18 videos of child pornography.
DeVos said the materials depicted children as young as six or seven engaged in “a full range of sexual activity.”
The girl, sitting alone in the front row of the courtroom, leaned forward, her long brown hair hanging past flushed cheeks.
Her father, arms crossed over his chest, sat a couple of rows behind as court dealt with his daughter’s case.
The girl had earlier pleaded not guilty. Defence counsel Marten Dykstra had tried to have evidence against his client excluded, arguing police violated the girl’s privacy rights by collecting personal information from her Internet service provider.
But Justice Norman Douglas rejected this argument, saying the girl could not be protected by a contract her father had signed with the service provider.
Dykstra said yesterday once the evidence was ruled admissible, his client wanted to change her plea to guilty.
Douglas agreed to adjourn the case, ordering a presentencing report and psychiatric assessment before the girl returns to court Sept. 2.
Guelph Mercury