Who Is a Sex Offender?

Response to the article:

What decent human being with a heart, some life wisdom, and intelligence would disagree with the obvious point that the author is making?

Unfortunately, in America there has been a big shift in attitude towards “Hate your neighbor/fellow citizen” rather than “we are all brothers and sisters united as one” (you know, how every other country tends to view their fellow peers). Instead of putting ourselves into a situation, we immediately want to kill/castrate and ‘cheer on’ the death of an individual that was locked up in jail, regardless of the reason. It’s sickening, and unfortunately is happening much more often. The hatred between the Democrats and Republicans is a great media example of that these days.

In the comments section, I am not surprised to find most individuals using their hearts/emotions instead of their brains/intelligence. The remaining few people that aren’t jumping to emotionally-charged conclusions are hesitant about speaking up and agreeing with the author.

Let me ask you all this:

At what age did you learn that looking/possessing any pictures makes you a consumer that feeds a market? How old and what grade were you in?

Did you PAY for those pictures?

Did you reward the source in some non-monetary way that will signify that you are exchanging one thing for another? (you know, an actual ‘Marketplace’ because that is HOW markets work).

So how on Earth are you going to know, inherently (like you know that theft and violence is bad) that merely POSESSING a picture creates a ‘marketplace’ that hurts people?

So why are you expecting young adults to inherently just KNOW that they are ‘consumers’ in a ‘market’? These are the SAME so-called consumers that inherently know that Theft, Violence and Rape is bad, keep that in mind.. you know, these are often productive members of society that are good people without long criminal rap sheets. So you want these decent people, that generally understand Right from Wrong, to somehow know that they are causing so much harm by possessing images? They should JUST know this? They should know it’s a Criminal Felony with serious time and sex offender registration simply because it is made illegal just like many things are illegal in this country?

Did you know that collecting rainwater is a Felony too? Do you believe people that do it are intentionally wanting to commit a horrible crime?

You’re expecting people to just be born with this twisted logic?

Let’s be very honest with ourselves:

‘Children’ does not mean prepubescent little kids. It means anyone under age 18. Keep in mind the age of consent in some states has been as low as 14-15. So not ALL viewers were looking for little kids online. They could have easily been looking at legal ‘teen porn’ and then pushed their boundaries out of sheer human curiosity as well as just lack of education (which is non-existent on this topic in schools, unlike drug education that is mandatory).

Should we CASTRATE these people and hang them now? Let’s throw them in prison for years and take them away from their families, yes?

Many times, these people are forced to pay thousands or tens of thousands of dollars as compensation to the victim in one of the possessed images, yet this person has never even met or knew the victim or even thought of them as a ‘victim’. Is that not enough of a punishment to teach someone a lesson for a first offense?

Should we take years of their life away and punish their families too?

How about we place them all on GPS monitoring without any evidence of them being a threat to actual children? Let’s prohibit from traveling out of state for seeing their family, friends, for work. Let’s place a stigma on them because their GPS device will not allow them into some adult establishments now. It will also create an issue for their personal relationships and dating life because most humans associate GPS monitoring with ‘the worst of the worst’, because that only make sense. Try explaining to the average citizen why a GPS monitoring device should be placed on someone that had committed a non-contact offense on their computer. Good luck.

Do you know that pornography DE-SENSITIZES viewers as it rewires their brains? Do you realize that means that those viewers were not even looking at those images and looking at the ‘Under age 18 minors’ the same way as they view them in real life? Desensitization causes viewers to look at porn and not consider it as being ‘Reality’.

Can you imagine that someone that was charged with such a underage porn offense can still look at anyone underage age 18 and not think of them as a sex object, or even giving two thoughts about it aside from the innocent kids that these people are?

Does looking at images of the poor souls losing their lives due to terrorist acts directly create a demand and ‘market’ for terrorism? Yes, we are just talking about the mere Viewing of images that one may possess. Or does terrorism work based on possibly other mechanisms that are not related to merely looking at images of the said acts?

Are you aware that so many of these Underage Porn charges are based on people simply leaving their music/books/movie downloading programs running? They were downloading porn and some happened to be underage, and while this download happened, a State Police trooper could download this file from the individual now, because by default, whatever you download is automatically being made available to others, even without your consent or any proactive steps taken by you. Do you know this person will now be labeled as an underage porn distributor? Is that the type of person you think of when you imagine someone being charged with underage porn distribution?

Have you considered the reality that the ‘producer’ of the underage porn could be an adult or could be an underage minor that was just stupid enough to leave these files in their Documents folder that was inevitably shared? Or that they are not making the videos for others as a reward mechanism?

Have you considered that the person who is in possession of these images may have no idea, or could care less about who is connecting to their file program and downloading any media files from their computer?

Have you considered that without any PRO-ACTIVE steps taken by the possessor of the files, without any Communications with another individual, without any ‘status’ reward, without any MONETARY compensation at all, that this person will now be charged with distributing child pornography?

Do you finally understand how mis-understood such laws are because the crimes are not inherently classified as ‘criminal’ in our brains such as violence, theft and rape is?

So let me ask you this now:

WHY are we punishing people as if they committed heinous crimes?

If a person TRULY and pro-actively distributed underage porn for some clear reward or compensation, yes this should be a felony. THIS can be applied to the ‘creating a Marketplace’ argument.

However, to claim that everyone who possessed underage porn KNOWINGLY created a marketplace and victims, is absurd and goes beyond any human logic.

How can you commit a serious heinous crime without KNOWING inherently that is it a horrible crime?

Drugs, Violence, Theft. These are things we have INHERENTLY learned are bad and to avoid.

Possession of digital files was NEVER explained to anyone in school as to what harm it is causing.

So please stop passing out of control Laws that punish people as if they all knowingly committed a heinous crime! On top of that, you go on to place these public on a Sex Registry alongside serial rapists and child molesters. So that is what makes intelligent human beings feel safer with common sense feel safer?

You are punishing people that have had no scientifically established LINK to hands-on offenses. The one study of 155 individuals well over a decade ago that tried to be used for pushing harsher punishments was DE-BUNKED. There is absolutely NO statistical evidence showing a clear link of someone who had come in contact with underage porn that had gone on to commit any hands-on offenses. To the contrary, there was a large study done of two countries which showed quite the opposite link, that digital porn resulted in lower hands-on child offenses. This infamous study is cited in numerous articles online.

Let me be very clear:

No human being should ever KNOWINGLY support child abuse, child exploitation, or human trafficking!

But for anyone to try to ever present a fact-less, baseless, emotionally-driven argument that every underage porn possessor partakers in the above 3 horrible crimes, is Absurd, Un-American, Overzealous and just filled with hatred and zero understanding or compassion for people’s mistakes. The people that make this false link should be ashamed of themselves.

We the citizens and especially Politicians should not be setting the laws on punishment, as WE are not in the courtrooms hearing every single detail of these cases. Only a Judge should be allowed use their sole discretion to decide the appropriate punishment (sentence, probation, if GPS monitoring is needed, etc) based on a CASE-BY-CASE basis.

Now THAT is the right thing to do, for starters.

Instead of wasting money by throwing non-production, non-contact convicted citizens in jail, we should use some Common Sense: Invest in educating children from a young age on how to watch out for abuse, exploitation and also learn how serious underage pornography is as far as the effects it will have on them.

What we should NOT do is waste time treating these people like an immediate threat to society.

We do Not and should Not seriously punish people for crimes that we THINK they may commit. That is not how criminal justice works on this planet.

This man should have been placed on probation for 3 Years, monitoring of his online activities and gone through a sex rehabilitation and education program. Why was he being charged with a felony while someone who violently puts their hands on another human being is simply charged with a Misdemeanor? How does this make any sense?

These non-contact underage porn crimes are a mental health issue. Let’s stop treating them as if they are the same as Rape, Child molestation and other heinous acts. That is doing a disservice to our entire criminal justice system, the public and humanity.

ALL sex offenders, every type, have a recidivism rate amount 5.3% in the USA according to recent studies. This average includes the ‘worst of the worst’. Let’s stop referring to everyone in this category as a violent, malicious, heinous monster. This is not what America or the world needs. We should be leading by Example by creating laws that are based on facts, statistics, and empirical evidence, not just our emotions.

Thank you for your time in reading this. We can only hope that now people can look at this topic in a less biased, one-sided way.

150 years ago the average age at death was 40 years And people frequently married brides at 13 nature needs to catch up, in 200 years we may be living into the 200’s maybe 96 will be the age of majority.