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Krystine Kercher's avatar

It's also pretty awful and ugly when all it takes for a child predator to get footage or images is for them to find a way to hide a camera in a bathroom or to hack someone's smart phone or TV.

Mommas get really mad when they find these things going on. Dads get even angrier. You want the justice system to take these incidents seriously, to deal with them with reasonable firmness because... the other option is parents turning into rage monsters and taking justice into their own hands.

When my kids were little, you can be sure that my first thought would not have been the police if I'd encountered something like that. It might have been after my friends sat on me and calmed me down. Maybe. HOURS LATER. And before you say, "But your friends would never lose their cool like that, they're smarter 'n you," Um... no. If it had happened to them, I would've had to sit on them too.

It's how parenting and feelings and reactions when you're a parent just really work.

Also, those child predator lists are utterly laughable as a deterrent. Most of the addresses are incorrect. No one in their right mind who's a registered sex offender is going to give out their correct address on a public list that makes them a target for vigilante justice, and quite frankly, their parole officers and the court have better things to do than to actually verify those addresses--as my parenting group discovered with the child predator lists in Colorado (and as has been mentioned more than once here in the news).

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Krystine Kercher's avatar

Hugh Heffner - you may be aware of who he was (the founder of Playboy, had the mansion with the Playboy "bunnies") - was a user of his own product. He became so jaded by porn that in his later years of life, he could watch the most disgusting of displays of inappropriate behavior in person and still not be able to get any physical excitement out of them.

This is what regular porn addiction does. It desensitizes people to sex, and in order to spur their sexual interest, they have to up the ante to view ever greater and more appalling depths of prurient sexual misbehavior. And, in the process, the mystery, the beauty, the holiness and joy in the procreation of life and the renewal of intimacy and affection are utterly lost.

If you want to have a healthy sex life, if you want to enjoy having a very long-term, healthy sex life (and have kids, a reasonable home life, and a happy wife--or husband!), your best choice is to get married, bend over backwards and do whatever it takes to stay married, and go out of your way to avoid porn at all costs. I know it isn't easy in our hyper-sexualized culture. It may mean getting rid of your TV, putting child safety settings on your computer, and being really diligent and advertent in working with an accountability partner, but--not screwing up your marriage and your life is worth whatever it takes to NOT DO THAT.

And yeah--I'm aware that a very high percentage of young men in Christian circles are now addicted to porn. It's become a serious problem in the dorms at Christian colleges. Something like 80% are caught up in that and so addicted, they couldn't walk away from it if they wanted to (which many of them apparently don't).

Viewing child porn takes this addiction to a whole new level. Viewing child porn really isn't enough for sex predators. They get excited by it, they want more of it, the endorphin boost fades, and... then they need to find ways to get their high back. And next thing you know, they're off in Thailand getting in trouble with the local authorities. The Thai have REALLY lost their patience with the sex tourists buying kids (it has really hurt their tourist industry), and Asian prisons and Asian ideas of how to treat people who get sent to prison for vile and disgusting acts are the stuff of nightmares, and really not something a reasonable thinking person wants to experience for themselves. But--that's the problem with an addiction--the addicted really aren't thinking.

And, if they lack the finances to take their criminal behavior overseas to some country where they think they can get away with it (like Thailand), they prey on the kids nearby.

Andrew, all that to say that there are some very good reasons why our laws are written the way that they are, why they're being enforced the way that they are. Porn is a very destructive thing. Child porn is even more destructive.

Worse, we've now got millions of illegals in this country from parts of the world where child marriage is a common thing and child rape is religiously approved and encouraged by the community if they're molesting the children of people who don't share their religious beliefs. This is what has led to the Muslim rape gangs in the U.K. that their country's ruling elite have been refusing to stop now for decades upon decades.

Don't think it can't happen here. Don't think that it isn't happening here. As a parent, I feel pretty strongly about this, and while I'm all for reasonable sentencing guidelines, I've gotta say that I don't want people getting away with a slap on the wrist for preying on kids, EVER.

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