to fire of a letter to the editor of our local free tabloid

[LynetteScavo]

DS1 (9)has just picked the free newspaper up of the door mat and read the front page article, with the head line "Child pervert is sent to jail" which incldes the sentence

"Most photographs showed children posing naked, but 60 showed adults having sex with children and two pictures were defined as acts of sadism or beastiality."

I'm sure you can guess which words he asked for the definitions of.

Maybe I'm just really sensitive to the subject matter.

YANBU - that's surely far more detail than is given normally in reports of that nature. I'd imagine that there are plenty of adults who wouldn't particularly want to know the details of what happened to those poor children but if something's on the front page it's rather difficult to ignore.

YANBU

There must be other ways of conveying the news without such graphic detail.

YANBU

Yes...I think the paper should report the crime and yes, that can be on the front page.
No...I cant see why they need to put such explicit details of an assault on front page.

Lalalong...I dont think the OP said anything about censoring anything!

YANBU

I think it normalise paedophilia and is only being written for some terrible sort of sensationalism that goes on in the press.

Who needs to read this, why did anyone need to know the details. It could have just as easily said pornographic images containing children, why the detail?

though I wouldnt have as much of a problem explaining bestiality or sadism, in comparision to explaining why they were having sex with children.

YANBU. Why do we need to know the content of the pictures? It was a paedophile that has taken some hardcore pictures and has been locked up for it.

As for the Baby P comments, I'm not watching TV at the moment because there is no need at all to go into the details of what that poor child went through. It's not too difficult to say he sustained multiple injuries that resulted in his death, what good does it serve anyone to go into great detail? Apart from the incitement that I'm also trying to avoid reading on the internet at the moment.

YABU. I don't think knowing about these things will scar your son for life.

I had quite a good reading age when I was a child and used to get all sorts out of the library. It opened my eyes but didn't kill me.

It might not scar the child, but no one needs to know that much detail. TBH I think it scars all of us reading a way reading it.

I think that we can't "edit" our children's lives, but we have a responsibility as parents to put things into context. My SIL won't let her children see the news at all (her eldest DD is 9), and I think that is wrong. My DS aged 4 is interested in things like the fire on the Eurostar and the fact that the ferry company we use sometimes has gone bust...I don't think it is right to have children in a little fantasy world.

However, wrt OP's paper, perhaps the description was unwarranted, and I agree with others who have said that the level of detail given is often unnecessarily gorey or inappropriate. And when it is like that we don't need to know.

DS came down unexpectedly the other night when we had news on. He saw a bit of MMumbai bombings and poor Baby P, which I had to very briefly explain, without making an issue of it. He hasn't mentioned either again.

The OP doesn't state that she wants it for her son, she just said what happened.

The Baby P case was secret until after the trial and now there are graphic illustrations everywhere of what he went through. Who does it serve to have that flying around or to go into detail of what pictures a paedophile has? It's gratuitous and nothing more than incitement and morbid interest.

There were no children named or otherwise identified, so how was anyone's privacy invaded?

From the point of view of a victim of this type of crime, I would rather people were aware that there are people out there committing these crimes and that they can be much more disturbing than a normal person can imagine. The alternative is people defending child pornography as a lesser crime than actual physical abuse, because they don't realise what it truly means. I would rather these things were in the open because in the past people found it too easy to brush under the carpet.

Perhaps it's the spelling of bestiality you're complaining about?

The only thing you can do is to ask the newsagents not to deliver free papers to your house and get one of those signs to post to the door.

Agree with the posters who say keep your explanations simple.

I do sympathise with the OP though, it is a shock when you're not expecting it and it kind of puts you on the spot!!!!

Nobody has picked me up on the poor grammer in the last sentence of my OP.

Iv'e just got our other free paper through the door. The same story is reported on pg 13, with the headline "Man is caught with indecent images"

This paper has chosen to report

"Prosecutor Iain Willis old the court Vessey down laoded a total of 432 idencent photos of children aged between nine and 11 onto four mobile phones found at his mome. Most were of the least serious level one category, showing children posing naked, but 60 were level four images and tow pictures were level five."

Teh story has been reported, the facts are all there, but IMO, the whole article is less "tabloid".

I agree, far better. I do think we have far too much information given to us, the world is bad, we know that but how is the information more in the public interest in the first article than the second?

I've seen the NSPCC monkey ad today for the first time. The more information we're given the more we need to be given to be shocked about it.