To feel completely gutted that one of my favourite authors said this (warning: child abuse) [titled edited by MNHQ]

[lougle]

Daily Mail

I've bought practically all his books. I love his writing. Yet I can't quite believe that I have read this. John Grisham has claimed that 'white guys his age' are being punished too harshly for downloading child pornography and it doesn't make them paedophiles.

I went on two days of training last week about identifying sexual internet offending and associated risk assessment. I honestly have difficulty believing he really said/believed this. No one should minimise what is one of our most serious and growing areas of offending behaviour.

I despair. Prominent figures, who should no better, saying things like this helps legitimise and validate the criminals who are deliberately downloading (quite hard to accidentally download thousands of images...which is generally what it takes to have a hope of a conviction) images of children being sexually abused. Shame, I used to always buy his books when they came out. Based on the public reporting of his own words, looks like I'll be accidentally never buying another one.

Would a bonfire of the ones I already have seem petty? How can the man who wrote A Time to Kill say this?!

Told you he'd be sorry. His agent has probably gone up the wall.

I thought it was nigh on impossible to 'accidentally' download child abuse images? Do people get away with that excuse?

Is John Grisham the bloke who writes all the samey courtroom dramas?

Thanks to the poster's here who have educated me regarding the term 'child pornography'. I will never use that particular wording again.

I've been using the internet since the 90's - nothing has ever downloaded itself onto my computer, and I've never accidentally downloaded images. The only people I've heard that this happens to are people caught with chid abuse images.

Until he stops calling it child 'porn' I am not interested in his justifications. ?#?ItisnotchildpornItischildabuse?

Not surprised actually. My perception of the extent to which there is a network of very powerful, wealthy men involved in all of this has been reinforced by those comments. When I was 8 I was molested by a boy in his late teens who did get charged for it but received was basically a slap on the wrist. They had just moved to the area at the time. Recently I learned (after years of not talking about it), from my father, that the boy's father had been involved in similar and was actually kind of protected by the police as they were quite well-off (wealthy enough to move every time their reputation was made known). Or perhaps they were well-off be because the police would look the other way when it came to them. My dad got upset when I told him that for years I thought they hadn't tried to pursue it further because thry had, just that they did not want me to know the details of what they had found out.

I wonder how possible it really is to access these sites by accident? My job means that I have to spend a lot of time on the internet looking for all sorts of things and I have never, thank god, accidently clicked on one of those sites. I would imagine you have to pay to view.

I think it's very hard indeed. I've spent too much time online often googling stuff about children/ girls/ boys as a parent and have never even come across words, let alone images.

Can I just ask, do posters here feel that looking at or downloading sexual images of ten year olds is the same crime if the images are of sixteen year olds?

Because I absolutely don't. I was sexually active at 15. When I was ten, I was a child.

Surely there is a vast difference there.

Sadly, typing "teen hookers" or something into google might well get results. I imagine that if JG's friend had done that, clicked on the "sting" page of seemingly 16 year old girls and then gone and read the news or whatever, he wouldn't have got a three year jail sentence.

The sting would've been to put various men on the radar of the FBI for closer monitoring, I'd've thought, and it may well have been a search term with the phrase "underage" or "child" that brought it up, of course.

Why is he still saying pornography!

this link

The images included children under 12. But beware of reading the link, the language used is dreadful.

'An undercover agent who asked for some of Holleman's pictures over the Internet earlier this year received 13 images, all of children under 18, some under 12' so he was sharing hard core images of abuse of young children - not just accidentally clicking.

If a man in his fifties wants to look at images of later teens (that is: he's justifying that they are not young children so he's not the same class of monster as someone who wants to look at a 10 year old for example) why the need to look at images of under 18s? What's so different about 18 and 19 year olds to the 15/16 age group?

There's not a justification. These people are all scum. Trying to say you are a better class of pervert because you look at older children (well at least that's all you've been caught looking at) doesn't make you less of a scum.

What a dickhead, children are raped and forced to expose themselves to the cameras for the pleasure of men like his 'college buddy', they are then abused over and over by thousands of scumbags sharing those photos over the internet. They can never escape from the fact that vile photos of their abuse and their naked bodies are displayed all over the net. That in itself is possibly just as or more pschyologically damaging as the abuse itself.

If 'middle aged white men' think that's acceptable, contribute to that abuse and get off on it, they deserve to go to prison. So does every other disgustingly evil pervert. They have done something seriously wrong and all normal men recognise that.

This man has exposed himself as having a very sick attitude, that he doesn't realise how abnormal he is says a lot more about him and his associates than it does about men in general or the majority of middle aged white men that he seems so concerned about. He seems to be under the illusion that if it's normal in his social circle amongst his peers to view child porn then everyone within that demographic must have the same problem. He's wrong on that and wrong on images of child abuse. Nobody 'accidentally' ends up on websites dedicated to raping children and if a normal person did they would be sickened and horrified, not erect.

I was sexually active at 15. When I was ten, I was a child. Surely there is a vast difference there.

Oh FFS - every time this issue is raised someone rears up with this totally redundant argument.
This is not about consensual sexual behaviour.
This is about the pornography industry which exploits and abuses.
We have an age of consent for a reason - to protect the vulnerable.

And the bottom line is that if someone is looking for images of pubescent girls that look like hookers then they are a complete fucking scumbag.

MorrisZapp He was prosecuted for it, so yes, it is the same as looking at a younger child.

I guess it was your choice to be sexually active at 15, all of these children don't have a choice whether to participate in abusive images/films.

Therein lies the difference.

To me, a three year sentence for viewing images of naked 16-year old girls is excessive. Personally I think viewing such images is pretty gross, but I can think of worse activities that would generally attract lighter sentences. It's not that long ago that the Sun used pictures of semi-naked 16-year old girls on page 3.

But I do agree with people's other point, which is that you don't tend to "stumble" across these images - you usually have to look quite hard for them.

Hackmum, they weren't just naked, they were being RAPED for heaven's sake!!! As were the other children in the images, some who were under 12!!!

However unseen newspaper reports of Mr Holleman's trial in 1997 obtained by the Telegraph from the local Sun Herald newspaper paint a far more serious picture of the case than Mr Grisham.

An undercover agent who asked for some of Holleman's pictures over the Internet earlier this year received 13 images, all of children under 18, some under 12. They depicted children during sexually explicit conduct, including intercourse," said the report from November 1997, quoting a US justice department lawyer, Kathy McLure."

Sorry, bold passage was from here

Linked to below too.

No doubt I will be flamed for saying this, but...

Looking at pictures of 16-year-old girls (not children, legally or physically) is not the same thing as lusting after children with children's bodies, or participating in the abuse of children who are not old enough to give consent.

An older man who has sex with a 16-year-old is not committing a crime, because she is legally an adult who can consent to sex. It's creepy and vomit-inducing, but it is not a crime. So why is it a crime to look at sexual pictures of one?

If it is not legal to hire 16-year-olds for work in pornography, then those people should be punished. It is not reasonable to expect everyone to know that something illegal is being done there and punish people who enter those websites with images of girls (not children) old enough to legally have sex with.

different - Was there an indication on the website that some of those girls were under the age of 16? If it claimed they were all 16, I'm not sure it is reasonable to expect everyone to just know that they were lying.

(Going by personal experience here - At 12, I was as tall as I am now and had as much an adult female body as I do now)

Again, it's creepy and disgusting for a 60-year-old man to be looking at sexual images of teenagers, but I really don't think it makes him a pedophile if the girls in question are (1) supposedly over 16, and (2) fully adult in appearance.