MEN without a prior sex conviction who look at child pornography on the internet are unlikely to sexually assault a child, according to Swiss scientists.

Researchers led by Frank Urbaniok of the Canton of Zurich Department of Justice delved into the criminal record of 231 men who were charged with viewing child pornography via a US website.

In the six years before the 2002 police operation, only one per cent were known to have committed a hands-on sex offence.

And only one per cent of the men committed a hands-on sex offence in the six years afterwards.

The study reinforces previous research which found most consumers of internet child pornography are well-educated and view other types of illegal pornography as well, including sexual acts involving animals or violence.

Mr Urbaniok said men who surfed the web for child pornography were sex offenders, but it should not be automatically assumed that they were a risk for sexually assaulting a child.

“Our results support the assumption that these consumers, in fact, form a distinct group of sex offenders,” he said.

“Probably, the motivation for consuming child pornography differs from the motivation to physically assault minors.

“Furthermore, the recidivism rates of one per cent for hands-on and four per cent for hands-off sex offences were quite low.”

A 2005 paper by Canadian researchers Michael Seto and Angela Eke found that of 201 men charged with child pornography offences, 24 per cent had prior offences for sexual contact.

Four per cent went on to commit a subsequent sexual offence after being charged or prosecuted.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25779646-26103,00.html

English law has got there before you. “Viewing” child porn is considered production. For before you viewed it, there was one copy on hte hard drive (or the server etc) and while you were viewing it there were two copies, one in your browser and one on the hard drive/server. Thus you have published/produced child porn.

No, really, that is the way the law is being run.

It’s just the same as the way the libel laws work. A story that has been viewed by a browser in England has been published in England on hte same basis. Thus English libel laws apply. (This was actually tested in another Common Law jurisdiction, Australia, and Dow Jones lost.)

So, she’s not so much a communist apologist as an unreformed Communist.

it’s official: newspapers are dead, and will all by gone by 2035. they’ve become parodies of themselves, **and don’t even know it**.

As far as locking someone up and throwing away the key, that depends. I have represented numerous people charged with possession and distribution of child pornography. Part of any good defense work involves a review of what was found on the client’s computer. The difficulty is in defining material or drawing an appropriate sentence.

The federal sentencing guidelines offer some assistance – increasing levels for ‘sadomasochistic’ images, which have been held to involve what would typically be hard-core, or penetrative, pornography (and there are numerous problems with applying those standards, but that is a whole other post). Frequently, state laws do not.

That being said, I believe that a better response would be that prison can be an appropriate punishment for production of child pornography. Involving a 7-year old in hard core sex scenes should involve prison time, and lots of it. On the other hand, I’m not so convinced that production of ‘child pornography’ involving 14 and 15 teens should involve the same amounts of prison time. This assumes voluntary participation, of course. Forcing someone of any age to be involved in pornographic videos should require prison time.

The last case I handled involved numerous images from the Netherlands. Among the images was a girl who appeared quite healthy and happy, and about 15 years old. The ICE officer, examining the computer with me, commented that pictures like that are common in the Netherlands and in Scandinavia. “It’s just a different culture,” was his explanation. “It’s not that big of a deal there.” So why was my client prosecuted for something that appears to have been legally produced and legally uploaded in its country of origin?

On the one hand, it bothers me that clients are prosecuted here for possessing images that are legally available in other country because of cultural differences. On the other hand, some cultures countenance behavior that, because it involves force or fraud against another, our culture rightly condemns. “Honor rapes” and “honor murders” are the type of crime that come to mind.

An area that seems black and white on the surface can, when one begins to examine the particulars of a specific case, show many nuances and reasons for either stricter or more lenient sentences. All things considered, I would prefer to err on the side of less jail time rather than more.

Thanks for the link to the article. It gives me another potential defense. The main difficulty now is that federal law prohibits providing the computer to the defense in these types of cases. That, too, is a whole other story.

In any case, there wasn’t much use for ex-East German law professors after 1990, and thank God! One hopes that the same will be true for ex-North Korean law professors in the near future.

http://blog.mpp.org/medical-marijuana/nation%E2%80%99s-largest-medical-association-calls-for-review-of-marijuana%E2%80%99s-legal-status/11102009/

2. I’m very curious to see if, you were to corner Chris Harris, if he’d see the irony in his attacks on Heritage, given the simultaneous work that Media Matters does regarding Glenn Beck. I’d guess not.