Posted on 04/15/2006 10:35:45 AM PDT by wagglebee
Millions of men and boys are falling for the destructive myth that looking at "adult" porn is normal, healthy and harmless for "regular guys." Way too many are finding themselves handcuffed between two cops, under arrest for sexual conduct with a kid. The hook-ups with kids are occurring on the main streets of U.S. cities and the dark alleys of the virtual world.
Experts estimate that 50,000 sexual predators prowl the Internet for children every day. As long as myth trumps truth, the next estimate could be 10 times what it is today. Stopping predators before they ravage our kids and grandkids will be insurmountable.
The easy access to millions of pages of online porn is speeding up the dependence and escalation to harder-core material and more.
The centerfolds no longer gratify? There's an unending supply of harder-core images instantly available within a few mouse clicks and free for the taking. Want deviant? There's deviant beyond anything uncorrupted minds can fathom. Want some younger "stuff"? There's "pseudo" child porn where young-looking adults dress and act like teens and even toddlers sucking a pacifier and hugging stuffed animals. Want real child porn when the pretend doesn't do it anymore? It's traded for free by perverts in Internet chat rooms and encrypted Web sites, and for sale, and raking in billions. Want kids? There's a virtual playground full of kids ready to chat, instant message, and eager to send digital photos and videos to other "kids." Want a pimp for a hook-up with a kid? No need to risk being seen picking up a kid in a red light district. Their pimps and slave masters are online.
"'Men fly in, are met by pimps, have sex with a 14-year-old for lunch, and get home in time for dinner with the family," said Sanford Jones, the chief juvenile judge of Fulton County, Georgia."1
Stop and read it again until you get it. Men are flying home to dinner with the wife and kids after having sex with a kid. Who does that?
Most people can't even handle thinking about it, so they mix more myth and some truth to relieve their discomfort:
Not every guy who has sex with a minor is a pedophile. Most aren't. You may need to read that again too.
There is a difference between pedophiles who prefer to have sex with children and child molesters who prefer to have sex with adults but will have sex with a child if the situation presents itself. And it presents itself big time on the Internet.
For the kids' sake, educate yourself by reading Child Molesters: A Behavioral Analysis, authored by Ken Lanning for The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. spent 27 years investigating and apprehending child molesters of all types and training thousands of law enforcement officers the skills to do the same. America's parents and children are forever in his debt.
For the child, it couldn't matter less what the clinical definition of his or her molester may be. What should matter to the rest of us is stopping "regular guys" from becoming child molesters.
According to Gates and Goodman:
Half of the street-level prostitutes in Atlanta are believed to be under 18, according to experts. Others are booked through Internet sex sites and from social sites like Black Planet, where girls innocently post profiles. … In March, police arrested a Canadian man meeting a 14-year-old girl he found through the Internet. … Another man drove from North Georgia, with a bag containing a teddy bear, a love note and condoms, snorting methamphetamine on the way. He expected a 13-year-old girl, but instead found Heather Lackey, a corporal with the Peachtree City Police Department. … During the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, one man kept boys and hosted sex parties nightly.2
Just last week a congressional committee heard the gut-wrenching testimony of a 19-year-old telling how he began operating his own commercial Web site where men could view sexually explicit photos he took of himself. Justin Berry's nightmarish story is that of a 13-year-old boy in a broken home allowed unsupervised access to a Webcam and the Internet. A lonely boy looking for friends and love in all the wrong places immediately "found" adult males who seduced him with attention, gifts and money. Personal meetings led to his sexual abuse, which led to him sexually exploiting other boys by encouraging them to join the sordid business.3
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's latest weekly report indicates that its Cybertipline has received "2,589 complaints of unsolicited obscene material sent to a child" from September 1, 2002, through April 9, 2006. Worse yet are the "15,995 complaints of online enticement of children for sexual acts" in the last six years.
Here are just two recent media reports:
Men and boys: Beware before you click the mouse one more time and take a step closer to becoming one of the bad guys.
Part II will show how the porn industry is paving the road to the perversion it pretends to condemn by pandering "teen porn," with advice from lawyers who help them cash in on the big demand and skirt the law.
Jan LaRue, chief counsel for Concerned Women for America, the nation's largest public policy women's organization, is an expert in pornography law. She has covered this issue for 14 years.
This article first appeared on Human Events Online.
I don't care what the prosecutor says, that goat wanted it.
spinetein: There is NO PORN on the Internet.
wagglebee: Huh?!
I'm reasonably sure that was a joke.
Any male that believes that other males looking at adult porn is going to cause them to become pedophiles is probably a pedophile themselves. Classic projection.
But you see Porn is about people, NOT things. Sex (either simulated or real) being done for pay is the root of porn. Making THAT illegal is what I advocate.
The problem is that the CWA is at the same time too hyper and unaware of the true scope of the problem. Pornography does not cause escalation to the most depraved sexual perversion. Most guys who look at Playboys will not end up pedophiles, and trotting out the old "pornograhpy causes pedophilia" argument prevents them from making the truly important argument - the one you made.
Christian guys are struggling with pornography. It's an epidemic. As you note, they feel guilty because they know its wrong. Articles like this one, however, make them feel afraid to admit they're struggling - they're afraid they'll be ostracized for admitting that they like to look at pictures of naked women. So, they suffer in silence alone.
What the Church needs to do is tell guys that looking at pornography damages our relationships with our wives and girlfriends, but we recognize the addictive hold it holds upon men. We've got to ditch the smarmy judgmentalism and help the hurting guys. We've got to stop pretending it isn't a problem, but also stop acting shocked that guys like to look at pictures of pretty naked women. That, IMHO, is the only way we can break the stranglehold pornography has upon the lives of so many men - including many I know.
Porn is a problem for men and women. Men get the kicks out of it, but women tend to get self righteous and judgmental about it.
If it's a problem it's a problem for all of us.
>And in spite of this, I'm sure that many libertarians will show up on this thread to explain how "harmless" their "hobby" is.<
Not only "libertarians", but scads of "librarians"!
Do you have proof that this is true?
susie
It's not a matter of "should." Irresponsibility always brings us more government. Freedom is not free.
I'm afraid you've confused forums, you want fascistrepublic.com not freerepublic.com
I'm with you on this. I've seen a little bit of porn, and a small sampling on the web; my cousin introduced it to me as a child. Being a female, I thought it was primarily a guy thing, but some females get off on it, I think. It is a big turnoff to me, what I have seen.
I think it is a very serious problem; it becomes like a gambling addiction for so many, and the stakes are so much higher.
It isn't going to be outlawed and will probably get worse, much worse. We all need to be concerned about our children and especially the adult males in our families who could fall victim to it.
People should not need porn to get turned on. It is sick and expoloits, some are all too willing to be exploited because of the money.
Furthermore, I think regular interest in porn does something damaging to the psyche that affects the person adversely in their relationships. You get hooked on it and need more and more and sicker and sicker in order to keep getting stimulated.
Historically there has always been porn, but not the wide access to it there is now. I'll be glad when this phase of "enlightenment" is over, but I won't live to see it if it ever comes.
This may be no place for a lady, but I'm here to tell ya -
Pornography is an insidious and evil lure to an unshakable addiction! They don't say "a picture is worth a thousand words" just for the heck of it! Once something is pictured through the lens of the mind, it never, NEVER, goes away, but stimulates a hunger for more. If you don't think Satan is at the bottom of pornography you are falling into his infamous trap. Enough said.
[Pornography is merely a symptom. The core problems are lack of identity and purpose, and in desperate fashion this yawning gulf inside the soul is filled with perversion. Belief in God, not censorship, is the solution to the problem.]
Child molesters, like other criminals, lack discipline and self control and simply feed their own desires without regard to who they hurt in the process.
A sincere belief in God (and his teachings) should lead one to use self control in life, but there are other routes to self control than religion.
In my opinion, a good knowledge and understanding of natural human sexual behavior and how it is similar to other animal species' sexual motivations is invaluable to sexual self control.
Those particular religions which teach young people that the normal sex urges they experience so powerfully are put into their minds by the devil to tempt them into sin are only encouraging them to go down a road into sexual deviancy.
You would take police away from catching real child molesters in order to crack down on what you perceive as wicked pictures of nekkid wimmin. Guess again, the American people will never allow it.
-ccm
And selfishness, not money, is the root of all evil.
[The most censored book in America is the Bible.]
I don't understand this statement. Are you saying there are Bibles in America which are government censored?
Sex inside a loving married life is rapidly unsatisfying for many, too. That's why there's porn.
-ccm
(NB I do not include myself in this category.)
[Historically there has always been porn, but not the wide access to it there is now.]
Exactly right and it should be regulated as to where people have access to it just as alcohol is and now the use of tobacco. By denying people access to porn in public libraries does not mean censorship to me. People can still access it at home or in adult stores or movie theaters.
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