this makes me feel physically sick

[ssd]

I read today in the paper that internet sites showing child abuse are growing at an alarming rate

The abuse was the worst form, rape, sadism and bestiality

I really felt sick reading about this and I feel sick posting this now

How cruel adults can be towards children seems to hold no bounds

I want to keep my children in at home all the time but they must have a childhood and that includes going out to play

These poor poor children, I can't even bear to think about their suffering

I hope the perpatrators and those who choose to look at this sickness rot in hell

I don't mean people shouldn't be severely punished for it - of course they should - they should be scared of the consequences - though I'm anti dealth penalty so can't agree with some of you about that.

The reason I think education and awareness is more important though is that child sexual abuse is so very, very common and widespread and is often perpetrated by people who have never been and may never be caught. It is also a very difficult crime to get convictions for because it relies on evidence from traumatised children. It is also subject to the dangers of false accusation. So you can't shoot them all, can you? Even if you wanted to - it's not possible.

They should all be castrated.

Um - as I say below. How? How do you know who they all are? What if someone has a vendetta against someone else so falsely accuses them of being a paedophile?

"They should all be shot/castrated/sent to live on Mars" does not work as a solution.

Neither physical nor chemical castration does not work 100% actually, so I reject it.

I agree about the death penalty, partly because in a lot of crimes one is never 100% sure, but also because it's not cruel enough.
50 years in a concrete box living on food that has been intentionally made revolting but healthy is a good start, and I'm told force feeding is not nice at all.

The death penalty is not observed to be a good deterrent, and contrary to what you might think is often more expensive than locking people up for life.

Getting good testimony from kids is indeed a nightmare, so I'd not want to do something permanent. But there are cases where there is not even the remotest possibility of error.
Yet those who make a living out of letting serious criminals walk the street assure us that this is an "acceptable risk".

Another reason I am deeply sceptical of "education" is that when we look at the failure of "education" in things like drugs millions have gone in, and nothing has come out. Normal sex education doesn't seem to have reduced teenage pregnancies all that much, some even claim it's made it worse. Kids are now taught to respect other cultures, but race attacks have gone up.

May education will help a bit, but let's be honest, it's camouflage by those who pander to the welfare of dangerous criminals.
"Education" implies that it's lack is somehow the fault of the victim, indeed judges have lowered the sentences of those who have raped adults because the woman was a bit "reckless".

Good for you Squeaky, let us know what happens.

I haven't got time for a big reply but let me just say I do not for a moment imply that lack of education means it's the victim's fault if they're abused, or anyone else's fault but the abuser. What a ridiculous argument against education.

Actually the CC companies are doing things about their cards being used in this way.

But it's very very difficult, since these sites don't exactly say up front what they do.

A far better approach is a classic bit of computer security known as a honeypot. You set up a site with very very mild stuff on public display.
You track who uses the site multiple times. Then after a few visits they are asked if they want something "stronger", mave it 100% clear what they are getting and let them choose to pay by card.
You then have a clear path back to them.

Okay I may be flamed for this, but I really think the medias over hyped attitude to child porn / paedohlia is the root cause of such statistics.
I suspect 98% of people who use internet search engines for porn and end up looking at such things are just teenagers or people who are interested to see what the hype is about. Or those that click on it accidentally.
If you view crime statistics then you would see that offenses towards children are dropping.

Many countries still impose the death sentence for homosexulity (in Iran last year two teenage boys were hung for it) . Women are regularly stoned to death for sexual activity with other women.
This punishment doesn't stop it (though nor should it in such cases) so why would you expect it to work as a control against paedophiles?

Certainly the police seem to spend a quite a large amount of effort on child porn cases, presumably because it hits a sweet spot where they fell good about it, the nature of the crime leads to good clear up statistics and they get good PR about finding people with millions of images.
The "operation ore" was a fiasco of police dishonesty, fabrication of evidence and media hyped up by PR hungry police.

I'm not yet convinced that the effort brings a proportionally good reduction in attacks on kids, indeed it may well actually increase them.

I'm sceptical of any statistics in this area because of reporting issues, but in the absence of anything better I accept the notion of a downward trend. Whereas attacks within the family are hard to measure accurately, attacks by strangers are usually reported, and these seem to be roughly constant over time.
But of course the attacks by strangers are "no-one's fault". No one anywhere. Not the courts who gave the criminal an easy sentence when he first offended, not the parole board who ensured he didn't even serve that, not the social workers who had as much idea about how to manage their case as how to create cold fusion, and certainly not the home office ministers who don't build enough prisons and would rather spend money on a centre for national sporting excellence than on prisoner rehabilitation.

Oh FFS kerrymum I was not comparing them in terms of what is acceptable, just brought up the situation for homosexuals as an example of where many legal systems are too defensive and too harsh. It is all too obvious and cliched to bring up the witch trials but I will anyway.
Imagine if say, your father was accused of paedophilia, sentenced to death, then it turned out it was a false accusation?

babyonboard, it's interesting how a topic like this gets people baying for blood and completely losing track of the reality of what "just" killing or castrating etc. "them all" would mean in practise.

I think what some people on here mean is wouldn't it be nice of all paedophiles just didn't exist. Yes it would, but "just kill them all" is not a practicable answer. As babyonboard says, what if there was a false accusation? Just this morning the news carried a story about people hijacking other people's wireless broadband - and how what someone else downloads on your broadband account could be tracked to you. So that's totally innocent people with a record of child porn being viewed through their internet connection - in fact by a total stranger, but that doesn't show up on the account. Let's castrate them, shall we? Kelly and Paula, are you happy to be taken out and shot, or have your DPs castrated, if some criminal taps into your internet connection? Hmm, maybe not...

And Dominiconnor, yes there is corruption and there is incomptetence, but you really are amazingly cynical. Police and social workers are humans like us you know - humans who in the main abhor these evil things and want to solve them, within the extremely tough constraints and guards that are quite rightly set on their work to prevent abuses of power. i don't think they set out to free criminals and encourage paedophiles to walk free.

Sorry I meant Kerry not Kelly

Snowleopard, social workers, parole boards, et al are put in an impossible position which even if they didn't have deeply dodgy ethics.

You have sitting in front of you someone who you know for a fact has sexually abused children.

Exactly what would convince you to write that it is an "acceptable" risk for them to be let out ?
Time goes by and you see the effects of your work. You read reports as part of your work that half the violent people who are let out reoffend.
We all make mistakes, and you learn that a few dozen of the people you have let out have re-offended. This is not shoplifting, but a child raped or otherwise injured.

But here you are sitting at your desk writing a report saying "the risk is acceptable".

Come on snowleopard, you say you are like these people, let me in on how you could do that ?

Well, I still can't believe it's because they have an evil agenda and actually want children to get hurt, as you implied earlier.

Probbly more likely a shartage of prison spaces? A legal system that doesn't allow people to be locked up indefinitely at the drop of a hat? The concept that rehabilitation might actually be something worth aiming for? Whether paedophiles can actually be rehabilitated is a moot point but there are some who want to be. Yes, mistakes are made and things need adjusting - but what I'm taking issue with is your implication that these agencies actually want to unleash evil paedophiles on us for some kind of kicks. That's very nasty to anyone who spends their lives trying to deal with these people and convict them and keep them under control - in the vast majority of cases in good faith and doing their best.

I implied they were indifferent to the harm done to children, and more interested in looking good to the people they worked with. That's a common human attribute, and pretty harmless if you work in a ship, but every day thousands of people are harmed when it is applied to letting criminals out.

Under British law (and most other systems) being reckless to the consequences of your actions is the same as intent. Thus if you throw a container of acid out of a window and it hurts someone, it doesn't help your case if you didn't aim it at one particular person.
Their ethical position sucks. No work is without risk to the general public, but I can't think of any job where every day a single indivdual is directly to blame for getting a child raped, or a pensioner getting beaten up (and/or raped), or a random person put in hospital, yet be subject to no sanctions at all.
That's not an exaggeration. Social workers, and the white trash on parole boards deal with several cases per day. Given the high % of criminals who offend again that means every day they get someone hurt, sometimes more than one.

They are not uniquely to blame, there is indeed a shortage of prison places, but that's really easy to fix.

But snowleopard, given they are just like you, could I repeat my question of how you could justify doing this in the certain knowledge of the consequences ?

Outsource keeping paedophiles locked up to India or China. Really deeply unpleasant, and cheap.

Erm I never said they were just like me, I said they were human, like us. Not, in the main, evil monsters. But I don't know what it's like to be them.

It's phrases like this I'm objecting to:
"parole boards who do it for a bit of a laugh"
"those who make a living out of letting serious criminals walk the street"

I don't think you can afford to be so vitriolic unless you've tried to do these jobs yourself. Have you?

As for "the white trash on parole boards" - that confirms you're not really having a rational argument. Two extremely crap and racist assumptions underlying that statement:

1. there are no non-whites on parole boards.
2. trash is normally black, so you need to define white trash with the adjective "white" - as in "male nurse". That's the origin of this extremely dodgy phrase.

No need to reply DC as I think I need to tear myself away from this.

I can tell you now that lots of this is superimposed if that helps. People are taking image library pics and turning them into something else. I know it's not going to help the paedophiles out there not to look. But hopefully less children are being abused to get the images.