Scott Brown's Story Reveals America's Greatest Concerns For Child Abuse

Surprise! It isn't brutalization at the hands of parents or family members.

No, it's having been briefly fondled by a camp counselor.

Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts recently revealed that he had been horribly physically and emotionally abused (but not sexually) by several different stepfathers, repeatedly, and over years (presumably, his mother must also bear some responsibility given her failure to protect her son).

He also said that he had been very briefly fondled by a camp counselor when he was ten. Several years later, he claims to have been traumatized by being propositioned by another boy in the woods.

So guess which acts of abuse got the lion's share of coverage by our news media?

You guessed it! ALL of the major media reporting on this story ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN, NBC, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, New York Times- all lead with headlines such as "Sen. Brown Reveals He Was Sexually Abused As A Child"!

Given his own descriptions, his sexual abuse allegations are absolutely trivial compared to his abuse at the hands of his mother's various husbands or boyfriends.

How on earth could anyone (in their right mind) think that being fondled or propositioned had a greater impact on a child than physical and emotional abuse by members of his own family? Apparently, the level of common sense required to grasp this notion is now beyond the capabilities of most people.

This just tells you how far we have come in putting "sexual abuse" well before other forms of abuse in our national consciousness.

Yes, apparently, Americans do honestly believe that a boy having his genitals fondled is far more "heinous" (a word they have fallen in love with) than that same boy being beaten and emotionally tormented by his parents.

Tell me, where's the science behind that?

The answer is that you won't find it because no respected authority on the emotional well-being of children believes it.

And those authorities will also make distinctions between fondling, on one hand, and forcible penetration by violence, on the other hand, even if the government and the media automatically conflates these two very different acts.

Viewers find the combined topics of children and sex to be much more interesting as a news story than child battering. I would dare say they find it titillating; although they will be quick to proclaim their shock and outrage.

As for Senator Brown's motives in pushing America's emotional buttons, we can only speculate upon any public relations benefits he hopes to gain.

It certainly can't hurt his personal narrative or his political career, despite all the "courage" ostensibly required to bare one's soul these days in proclaiming one's childhood traumas.

Indeed, he can now be said to have established his bona fides as a defender of children; a big help in future elections.

I do have to say that I'm glad Scott Brown won that election instead of that hideous creature, Martha Coakley.

In her previous role as prosecutor in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, she destroyed the lives of innocent people in her very own day care sex abuse witch hunt. It was heartening to see her career advancement, built as it was on the destruction of others, hit an eventual brick wall.

So, it is disturbing, but not at all surprising, that her victor now weaves familiar elements of childhood sexual victimization into his publicized life story.

More disturbing yet is a public which is incapable of identifying the glaring contradictions and deranged imbalances which lie at the heart of a social policy and prejudice.

A simple fact provides the most damning evidence of all: when children are themselves increasingly being accused of child sexual abuse and losing their freedom and their futures as a result, it is becoming clear that society's stated concerns for the well-being of children have very dark and unexamined motivations having little to do with a genuine regard for their welfare.

It is long overdue that we examine the true nature of these motivations and the dubious morality shielding them from public scrutiny.

What You Must Know: "Sexually Violent Predators" need not be violent to be called "Sexually Violent Predators"

You can be branded a "Sexually Violent Predator" by our government without ever committing any actual act of "violence". In every state using the term (as well as by the U.S. Federal government) it can mean having ANY kind of "sexual contact" with someone under the age of 14 or 13 (depends on the State), and even if no force or coercion was employed in the act.

Got that? The mere act of having "sexual contact" with someone under that age is, in the government's definition, "sexual violence". No actual "violence", as most sane people would understand the term, need be employed.

Combine that with the fact that "sexual contact" can consist of just about anything: kissing, touching (even through clothes and even if what is being touched are not genitals) and the government can utterly destroy the lives and reputations of lots more men and, increasingly, women.

The States and the U.S. government, having thus committed their own violence upon the rights of their people - not to mention upon the English language - can easily deploy the term "Sexually Violent Predator" to put away decidedly non-violent offenders, effectively, for the rest of their lives!

So now, when the government wants to put someone away forever, and for what may have once been considered inappropriate behavior, they have just the weapon to do it.

Its a weapon that not only guarantees the permanent incapacitation of the offender, but also the overwhelming support from a pandering press and a paranoid public.

What a great weapon!

"When words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom". -Confucius

Ohio's Supreme Court reverses an acquittal in yet another outrageous sex abuse prosecution.

Another terrific piece from Reason Magazine's Radley Balko.

Good riddance to the society of suspects

Ed: Is it possible the Brits are regaining a bit of sanity? After several decades of a spirited competition with the U.S. to see who could achieve an Orwellian fantasy soonest, it appears that there is growing concern for the costs it has exacted upon society. It would seem that they are somewhat less prone to having their motives impugned by speaking up against the witch hunt than are those of us in the States, where to decry an emerging police state is still regarded with suspicion.

You don't build a Big Society on the back of mutinous, resentful volunteers, nor in a climate in which all are treated with suspicion

"All men are rapists" was the pernicious slogan of radical feminists in the 1970s. "All adults are paedophiles" has been the governing rule of authority in the past decade. The two assertions are as false as each other and just as damaging, for they fill people with anger, fear and corrosive suspicion.

Society can't function without trust. Nor can individuals. As the sociologist Niklas Luhmann reminded us: "A complete absence of trust would prevent [one] even getting up in the morning." We generally assume that the commuter standing next to us on the platform won't push us in front of the train, or that the shopkeeper on the corner will give us the right change. A few paranoiacs have acute suspicion as their default, but most of us are more prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to others than we realise.

We might be scared, in the abstract, of a paedophile taking advantage of our child, but do we really think that the nice mother of our son's playmate is going to put her hand down his pants during a school trip? Of course not. So why should it ever have been necessary for her to undergo an expensive and intrusive Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check before she was allowed to give up her free time to help supervise the class on the bus?

It is deeply insulting to treat people as potential paedophiles when, out of sheer goodness, they want to help others. At the moment, anyone who has contact with children, even just helping out with football club or arranging the flowers in a cathedral, has to go through the CRB procedure. It was one of the most ill-thought-out and socially damaging laws that the last government brought in. Now, thankfully, the Coalition's Protection of Freedoms Bill will lift the requirement for all but those with "close or regular" contact, taking more than four million volunteers out of the net.

At the crudest level, it has hurt the very people it was supposed to protect. Adults have been deterred from volunteering, not because they have convictions for kiddy-fiddling but because they don't. The last thing most adults want to do with kiddies is fiddle with them. The assumption that they might even consider it makes them understandably livid. Why should they volunteer if they are going to be treated like dirt?

As a result, activities for children have been closing down all over the country for lack of volunteers. Who suffers? The budding football players and the children struggling with their reading. Real paedophiles can find other ways to ensnare their victims.

Even those volunteers who have obediently undergone their checks are left with a sense of grievance. A government which was asking us all to do more for others (yes, the last one was keen on it too) was at the same time impugning our motives as soon as we answered the call. You don't build a Big Society on the back of mutinous, resentful volunteers.

Nor do you build it in a climate in which we are all encouraged to treat each other with suspicion. The message the CRB checks have been sending is that we can never be too careful. That public-spirited dad who gives up his Saturday mornings for soccer coaching could be another Ian Huntley. But how many men – let alone women – really have sexual designs on children? Very, very few.

The reason child murders and sexual attacks get so much news coverage when they happen is precisely because they are so rare. To treat the innocent 99 per cent of us as potential Ian Huntleys is as grossly disproportionate as putting handcuffs on everyone who enters a bank in case they plan to rob it.

In fact, it's even worse. For this unjustified paranoia is infecting our children. They are growing up to believe that most adults are dangerous and that the world is unsafe for them. Of course they should be warned not to accept sweeties from strangers or to get into a car with someone they don't know, but beyond that, why should we poison their childhood with unnecessary fear? Only a vanishingly small minority of adults want to hurt them; all the rest of us are benign.

The trouble is that many of their parents have become infected too. That makes blameless adults scared of showing kindness to other people's children. Rush to help a child who has grazed his knee near you in the park and the mother is likely to advance on you, scowling. Smile at a cute little toddler and her father may misinterpret your motives. As a result, the paranoia becomes self-reinforcing: children encounter fewer acts of compassion from adults who aren't in their family, so they are even more inclined to view strangers as dangers.

Then, as they grow up, they suddenly become independent and find themselves exposed to far greater perils. A 16-year-old girl is much more likely to be sexually assaulted than a six-year-old one, simply because most men fancy post-pubescent, not pre-pubescent, females. And she is also much more vulnerable: six-year-olds don't walk back from the bus stop on their own or get inadvisedly drunk at a party. These are the risks we should be warning our girls against.

Instead, we are obsessed with paedophilia. Do we really want to live in a society where a teacher can't sit a five-year-old on her knee and give him a cuddle when he's crying? Do we really want to live in a Crucible-like climate in which fingers of suspicion are pointed at wholly innocent people – and by government, this time, not even teenage girls? We were shocked by the anti-Communist hysteria which swept 1950s America, yet we failed to prevent the anti-paedophile hysteria taking root in our own country.

This climate is really bad for adults and children alike. All the international studies show that countries with high levels of social trust tend to have lower crime and happier, more engaged citizens. And the more people engage, the more they come to understand that most strangers are as benevolent as they are. Yet the proportion of Britons agreeing that "most people can be trusted" has halved since the 1950s, and young people are the most mistrustful of all.

It's not a good idea to be completely credulous, but a default position of trust tempered by common sense is all we need to rub along together well. That was how my generation saw adults when we were children. Most of them meant well; a few were sadistic and a few were lecherous. We knew who the sadists and the pervs were, and we kept clear of them. You need to learn to discern; it's a useful skill for adulthood. It's a lot better than relying on a piece of paper, which might anyway clear a paedo who has never been caught by the police.

Thank goodness ministers have at last seen sense. Not much the Government does these days is popular. It can't spend any more and most of its cuts cause pain. But here is one initiative which saves money, reduces bureaucracy and – most importantly – could make a real difference to our lives. It deserves an unqualified cheer.

m.sieghart@independent.co.uk

Food For Thought

Wendy Kaminer recently asked this question and, I must say, it has me stumped. See If you can answer it:

"Can someone explain to me why it is a criminal offense to have sex with animals but entirely legal to kill and eat them? Surely laws against bestiality don't reflect concern about the rights of animals, (who would probably opt for sex over death.)"

Great question! I am reminded of the more hysterical of the satanic child sexual abuse "experts" some twenty-five years ago who frequently assured us that "child molestation is worse than murder!" Interestingly, I don't hear that claim much anymore, possibly because it was so obviously untrue and no sane person was really buying it. All we have to do is look to Oprah - a self-proclaimed child sexual abuse victim who went on to become one of the world's wealthiest entertainers - to see that it is nonsense!

Imagining the Worst: Just What Was That "Assault" Precisely?

The next time you read in the papers or, more likely, hear on television, of an adult male being arrested for the sexual assault of a juvenile male, take a moment to ponder what could possibly be meant by the term "sexual assault'' or one of several other terms, such as "rape'' or "molest".

If you're like most people, you probably imagine the worst, or something close to it, such as forcible penetration (of the youth) or forcible fellatio (of the man). In other words, a non-consensual act with a goal of sexual satisfaction for the man but with wanton disregard for the pleasure or welfare of the youth.

If these are the first possibilities that come to mind, then the government agencies responsible for investigating and prosecuting these cases are perfectly happy to have you believe so.

And, for that matter, those who pass for journalists today clearly take personal satisfaction in injecting additional scandal into any story involving "sexual assault" of a child. They are loathe to report any detail which either mitigates the circumstances or humanizes the adult "perpetrator". Getting public approval very much depends upon the level of outrage expressed by the reporter in any case involving children and sex.

But the reality is that simple "touching" of the youth of any part of his body-shoulders, arms, back, legs, hair- can and frequently do qualify as "sexual assault" or "molestation". Both parties can be fully clothed with all touching occurring over the clothes. It can still be charged as "sexual assault".

In their own assault on civil liberties, the grand alliance of sex-hating religious conservatives and sex-hating gender feminists have been wildly successful in defining "sexual assault" ever more widely. Indeed, they are still doing so. What was once considered to be affectionate became "inappropriate" and finally, "abusive" and "assaultive" and can now be prosecuted as a crime.

In addition to being distinctly inconvenient for the authorities to release those details constituting a "sexual assault", there is also a long-standing social taboo against openly discussing specific sexual acts in detail, especially when they involve children. This cultural prudishness further serves to obfuscate the true nature of a "sexual assault".

It should be obvious that any detail shedding light on the true nature of an alleged "assault" is necessary in forming an opinion upon its veracity. The media-consuming public seems unaware and unconcerned that they are being robbed of this opportunity.

So, the next time you read or hear of a case where an adult has been charged with "molesting" a child (or adolescent), ponder for a moment how little was actually communicated about the alleged "crime".

If Oprah's Lying About Being Sexually Abused As A Child, Who Else Might Be?

I want to be clear at the outset, I have no idea whether Oprah is lying about being sexually abused as a child or not. I have no way of knowing.

It has been alleged by her cousin, however, that she made the story up, as well as the story about growing up amongst filth, in order to help advance her career. Indeed, one could argue that Oprah's life-narrative of abuse and deprivation was essential in catapulting her to stardom and beyond.

Her cousin claims that, when asked why she had lied, Oprah replied "because that's what people want to hear" and that the abuse story "helped make me what I am today.''

But of course, I really don't know if she was abused or not. And I cannot know, since we only have Oprah's words asserting that she was abused and her cousin's words saying that she's a liar.

And that's just my point: hundreds of thousands of individuals, the great majority of them men, have been tried and convicted in this country for sexual abuse of children on the basis of their accuser's testimony and nothing else.

And often, the child accusers have themselves been arm-twisted into giving incriminating testimony by others, usually the police and prosecution team or even, perhaps, by one of their own parents.

Few people realize just how little evidence is needed to successfully convict someone of child sexual abuse.

After the Michael Jackson trial ended in an acquittal, many journalists, who should have known better, attributed his success in beating the conviction to "a lack of evidence.''

Actually, no. They're wrong. The evidence presented at his trial would have been plenty to convict him had he not had a defense "dream-team" and an adoring fan base who would have been scandalized to discover that it is really very easy to be convicted of sexual abuse in America.

Virtually everyone else of less-than god-like fame and fortune would be languishing in prison today with little hope of getting out within their lifetimes had they faced identical charges supported by identical victim testimony.

All it takes are words, painstakingly extracted from a kid on the stand, to convict. Testimony resulting from days of coercive coaching, cajoling and arm-twisting send men to prison in this country, in this day and age, for the rest of their lives. And it forever brands and marginalizes them should they ever be so lucky as to get out.

Let that truth sink in.

Family Extorts Paedophile of more than £50,000

THREE members of a family extorted more than £50,000 from a convicted paedophile by threatening to expose his sordid past.

Liverpool crown court heard their victim had turned his life around and had a good job after serving a jail sentence for indecently assaulting young boys in 1983.

But his life was thrown into turmoil after social services revealed his criminal past to his new “friends” – parents-of-six Kerry Edwards, 31, and her husband Leslie Johnson, 32, in June 2007.

Keith Sutton, prosecuting, told how over the next year the couple, and Johnson’s brother Edward Lawler, 38, threatened, intimidated and blackmailed him into handing over his life savings.

During the conspiracy, the scheming relatives sent “sackfuls” of threatening letters, warning their victim he would “leave in a body bag” if he refused to pay up.

Mr Sutton also told how he was marched to a cash machine in the middle of the night to hand over cash, while on another occasion he was assaulted and ordered to pay for a flat-screen TV and a child’s motorbike.

Judge David Boulton said when their victim eventually ran out of cash, a “wholly put up” allegation of child sexual abuse was made against him to police and he was arrested. It was only when he was released without charge he finally revealed the plot against him.

Judge Boulton said: “It was only when he was released he had the courage to produce sackfuls of letters which showed precisely what you had been up to over that year or so.

“It was little short of despicable.

“The threats were not only to reveal his previous convictions, which he had managed over the years to put behind him, but to threaten him with violence.

“One graphically put it that if he did not pay he would ‘leave in a body bag’.”

Judge Boulton told the gang blackmail was one of the “most vicious crimes in the calendar of criminal offences”.

He jailed Edwards, of Rappart Road, Wallasey, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to blackmail, to five years and four months.

Johnson, of Naples Road, Wallasey, and Lawler, of Balls Road, Prenton, who were convicted by jurors, were put behind bars for eight years each.

Barristers defending the men told how they maintained their denials, with Johnson putting the blame on his wife.

But Judge Boulton said they were found guilty on the “most powerful of evidence”.

Hand-writing analysis revealed Edwards had written many of the threatening letters, but Judge Boulton said he suspected she was not the “instigator”.

Mr Sutton told the court how a statement from their diabetic victim revealed how their crimes had left him financially ruined and afraid to leave his house.

He had become friends with Johnson and Lawler after moving to Merseyside in 2003 and had even loaned them up to £10,000.

But Judge Boulton said the family had “no prospect whatsoever” of repaying the cash and then, after learning of his background, used it as a “weapon” against him.

Gareth Bellis, defending Johnson, who has 20 previous convictions, said: “He denies any involvement in this offence as per his interview and his evidence-in-chief during the trial when he said this was Kerry Edwards’ doing.”

David Watson, defending Lawler, said his client only became involved at a much later stage, adding: “It seems clear Edward Lawler was not present at the inception of this offence.”

Lawler has 84 previous convictions, including 46 for theft.

Words Are Weapons -- Salem Revisited

This, from Norm Pattis' legal blog, www.pattisblog.com

There will come a time in which our incredulity about the words of children looks as troubling as the manner in which we treated accused witches in Salem, Massachussetts. In 1692, 19 men and women and two dogs were convicted and executed for consorting with the devil. These deaths were the product of the words of children who claimed to have been seduced by a Satan-worshipping household servant named Tituba.

Arthur Miller wrote a play about the trials in 1953, The Crucible. He viewed the Salem trials as a parable through which the activities of the House Un-American Committee's prosecution of Americans for disloyalty could be viewed. What gives so much power to mere accusation?, he wondered. Why are some times ripe for an hysteria that is so easily seen to be false in a calmer time?

I wish Miller were writing now. I'd like to see what he would make of the moral panic present in our courts whenever the state chooses to adopt the words of a child as a truth worth fighting for. We do not permit children to make contracts and regard them as incapable in most of life's serious affairs. But yet, if the state chooses to take the uncorroborated claim of a child as truth, to treat it as a disclosure based upon which it can and should deprive a man or woman of liberty, then a defendant is left often as helpless to combat the claims as were the true victims at Salem.
I re-read The Crucible a few weeks ago to prepare for a civil trial in which a client sued the mother of a child who made extravagant claims. The mother defended by saying that it was her job to believe and support her child. I asked the jury to conclude that it was also the mother's job to behave responsbily, and to provide guidance to her child. Treating children as oracles is always dangerous. We won, proving defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, known in some states as outrage. It was an encouraging verdict.

I read the following words from The Crucible to the jury during my opening statement and closing argument. "Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem -- vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law."

Children do not deserve privileged status in our courts. Perhaps it is time to reinvigorate the Mosaic "two witness" rule, once required in homicide cases, and apply it to child sex cases. In those cases in which liberty hangs solely on the word of a child, and in which there is no other witness or any physical proof of harm, it should simply be too risky to prosecute merely on the word of a child. Massachussetts learned that the hard way in Salem; why do we need to learn the lesson all over again?

"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us".
- William O. Douglas

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
- Noam Chomsky

"If you're uncomfortable about Blacks, you're a racist; uncomfortable about Jews, you're an anti-semite. But today, if you're uncomfortable about sex, you're a civic leader."

-Marty Klein

"We have reached a point in our history where lies are protected speech and the truth is criminal".

- Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow

"It is awful" to prosecute a 15-year-old girl who told a rape lie that got a boy arrested, says women's rights advocat

In the news story posted below, at the end of this post, a 15-year-old girl was convicted of attempting to pervert the course of justice for telling a rape lie that caused the boy she accused, who was just 14, to be arrested. She claimed she was raped, but the court rejected her defense, and she was convicted. Yet, according to the news story: "The decision to prosecute the girl, now 16, was criticised by anti-rape campaigners. Lisa Longstaff, of the campaign group Women Against Rape, said: 'It is awful that a girl so young has been prosecuted in this way.'"

Read that again, and let it sink in.

If the girl's lie had its intended effect, would anyone have objected if theboy had been tried (and in many jurisdictions, he might have been tried as an adult) for the rape of an innocent young woman? Would anyone have said "it's awful" that a boy so young should be prosecuted?"

The question scarcely survives its statement.

So, why the double standard, Ms. Longstaff? Why are you intent on treating 15-year-old young women -- who, on average, are more mature in every measurable way than 14-year-old boys -- as if they are infants and not free moral agents who ought to know better? Why is the sexual grievance industry so intent on shielding false rape accusers from the responsibilities of their vile acts?

For every other criminal act, our society believes that punishing the wrongdoer, among other things, has the effect of deterring other would-be criminals. Why is that not a concern when women lie about rape?

When anti-rape campaigners inject themselves into cases where there was no rape, when they advocate on behalf of rape liars, they aren't helping rape victims. In almost every false rape case, judges and police officers bemoan the harm done to actual rape victims by the lies told by false rape accusers. The advocacy here by Women Against Rape trivializes rape by conflating rape victims with false rape accusers; by enabling would-be false rape accusers to spin their lies and possibly hurt other flesh-and-blood men and boys; and by diminishing the integrity of every woman who legitimately cries rape. In short, this unconscionable advocacy hurts not only innocent men and boys but actual rape victims.

Somehow, it seems they don't care that their advocacy is having the opposite effect of its stated intent to help rape victims. How could that be, and what, exactly, is really going on here?

When anti-rape crusaders advocate on behalf of rape liars, they are pursuing what can only be described as a politicized, gender-divisive agenda that seems intended to announce to all that world that the victimization of our sons is not worthy of society's attention. When it comes to even far-fetched claims of rape, men and boys have no entitlement to the mantle of victimhood.

This mentality, of course, smells of feminist bloodlust, an ugly desire for payback for the purported past sins of the "patriarchy." Even though the 14-year-old male victim in this case is a real victim, and even though he had nothing to do with any past sins of the "patriarchy."

Shame on you, Lisa Longstaff. Your advocacy here is disgraceful.

I hope that Ms. Longstaff doesn't have a teenage son who someday might be falsely accused of rape. Perhaps then she will understand that the falsely accused are treated no better than flotsam, collateral damage in the "more important" war on rape. In "he said/she said" rape claims involving two teens, even though either one of the parties might be guilty of a crime (rape for him, perverting the course of justice for her) the boy alone is routinely arrested and charged, while the girl is treated as a "victim." Boys are often subjected to indignities in detention, inflicted either by the staff or other inmates. Even when they are exonerated, they are expected to just "take it like a man." The experience of being falsely accused of rape is inhumane generally, but doubly so when it happens to a teenage boy.

The district judge concluded that the girl knew that claiming she had been raped would get the boy into trouble. It was possible, the judge added, that the girl had lied because she feared she was pregnant or it could be that she had lied to "cover her tracks."

In other words, just another day in our false rape society.

(If you want to read more about how false rape claims are treated in 21st Century America, with all its supposed enlightenment, see here.)

Virginia lawmaker wants to castrate sex offenders, as alternative to costly state treatment programs

Ed: The underlying assumption behind all such hysterical and hateful legislation is that:

1. All of those sex offenders convicted and sent to prison are guilty.
2. Of those who are guilty, their crimes were "sexually violent", "heinous" or otherwise "castration-worthy". (please do see previous pieces defining "sexual violence")

Those sane individuals who understand this issue in sufficient depth to hold a rational opinion do not believe either of those assumptions.

They know that every aspect of the laws and social zeitgeist surrounding sex hysteria are informed by ignorance and an atavistic hatred of "other".

They know that the term "sexually 'violent' predator" is a complete perversion of language and a baldly cynical attempt to inflame the fires of hysteria, invariably with a hidden agenda of gaining power, funding, or influence.

The ultimate goal of those propagating such laws and ideas is TOTAL, SOCIAL COMPLIANCE, and it will NOT stop with sex offenders.

This can only get worse as society's ignorant and brutal classes organize and act while the rational and the intelligent sit on the sidelines merely observing.

DAILY NEWS
Virginia State Sen. Emmett Hanger has proposed a bill that would have Virginia state agencies study whether castrating sex offenders would save the state money.

Republican State Sen. Emmett Hanger's bill would have state agencies study whether Virginia should start castrating sex offenders instead of confining them to treatment programs after they get out of jail.

Former Gov. Timothy Kaine vetoed a similar bill in 2007.

Hanger's critics call the idea barbaric, but he said it would save the state money and could provide a cure.

"I don't think it's radical at all," Hanger told the Associated Press. "It's just something that's not typically the thing you want to bring up in polite conversation, but again the whole subject area is not for polite conversation.

"We're talking about people who are so driven because of the tendencies from the chemicals and the hormones inside their body to perform heinous acts."

Virginia is one of 20 states with a civil commitment program, whose purpose is to keep violent sex offenders off the streets by allowing the government to keep them in custody – in psychiatric hospitals, for example – after they are released from prison.

The state's commitment program ballooned to $24 million this year, up from $2.7 million in 2004, and Gov. Bob McDonnell wants to spend $70 million over the next two years.

Hanger's bill wants state agencies to study the option of physical castration – cutting off a man's testicles or removing a woman's ovaries. Louisiana and Texas have legalized physical castration, while six other states allow for some form of castration of sex offenders, including chemical, which uses pharmaceuticals to stop a person's sex drive.

The bill doesn't only aim below the belt, though.

It also would require the state to consider changing the criteria for entering the civil commitment program, as well as creating housing options for those released, who are forbidden from halfway houses.

Some critics argued that castration would not be effective because it would not address the motivation that causes sexual predators to act on their impulses.

"When abuse and mutilation of a human being is presented as an acceptable alternative to responsible treatment and housing for those deemed as sexually violent predators, there exists a fault of reason," Mary Devoy, founder of Reform Sex Offender Laws of Virginia, told the AP.

When A Boy Wants To Be A Man

Ours is not a time and place in which a man can easily wax rhapsodic about his childhood sex with married men and priests; but Sergio - an accomplished, handsome and quiet middle-aged resident of Wilton Manors, in a fifteen year relationship - wanted his story told, albeit anonymously. What happened to Sergio is not unique, but his conclusions constitute a confession usually never given voice. Over dinner, I recorded that story and deliver it to you in his own words. Without judgment. Without commentary.

“I grew up in a city on the Italian Riviera that had been devastated by World War II. It was rebuilt but it had lost its soul and its prosperity. My father struggled to find work to support his family of seven. In the 1960s, he took a second job running the movie theater owned by our parish church. My mother was the cashier and I sold candy in the lobby. My father was a deeply religious man. When the canisters of film arrived on Fridays, he would pre-screen them and if he saw a kiss or even a bedroom, he would cut and splice them. He didn’t know that I was downstairs in the theater watching the uncut versions. My job was to clean up the projection room for him. I would save the scraps he had cut and hold them up to the light in my bedroom. Very Cinema Paradiso.

“Parents dropped their kids off at the theater on Saturdays because it was safe. Before the movie started, the priest would get up on stage and make us say ten Hail Marys. The church was the center of our life and I was leader of the altar boys. We each had a card that the priests would sign every time we served Mass. After twenty times, we got a prize, like candy or a soccer ball. If you didn’t go to Mass on Sunday, you couldn’t play soccer on the church team or use the church recreation field.

“Even as a small child, I learned that sex was a sin. I confessed it all the time. There were seven priests in that parish. Each one had his own confessional with his name on it and a bell. When you rang the bell, that priest would come to the church and hear your confession. I went all the time because of sex and because they taught me that in confession I could wipe the slate clean. I had to lie in each confession because I didn’t want to admit I had just gone the day before. Each day I rang a different bell and confessed to a different priest so they wouldn’t know it was me again so soon, and I never said that I masturbated, only that I had ‘done bad things behind my mother’s back.’

“One of the altar boys who was my age took me alone into a room at the church youth center. He put my hand on his dick and taught me how to rub it. I loved it and wanted to do it every chance we got. Soon there were other altar boys in our group. This kind of fun is how we ended all our Catholic activities until one time, one of the boys ejaculated and that scared the shit out of us.

“When I was about ten years old, I was in the movie theater in the back row on the aisle. One of the priests was sitting next to me. He was the youngest of the seven, maybe 25 or 30, and he was in charge of the youth groups. The other altar boys were spread throughout the theater. I felt his knee against my leg. I didn’t move away. It felt very nice, all through the movie. Next week, the same thing, only I put on a lot more pressure. I started leaning against him. He took my hand and drew it into his robes and into his pants and I grabbed his dick, and I have to say it was the best thing I ever felt in my life. I didn’t want to let it go for the rest of my life. I didn’t move it. I just held it. I felt that either I had died and gone to heaven or that I was home. Next day, I went to the church and rang his bell. Instead of the confessional, he took me into the storage basement of the church where we were surrounded by statues and all the stuff used on feast days. The only thing I wanted was to take out his dick. I was really the aggressor. We did it frequently. I only knew that it felt good. He never asked me not to tell. He never forced me to do anything I didn’t want to do. Sometimes it was with the priest and three altar boys. Never kissing or hugging. Just the sex organ. No incentives offered, just my own pleasure. If I did not have that experience with the priest, I would have found it somewhere else.

“One time, my father kicked a man out of the theater because a boy said he had been touched by him, and my father chased him down the street yelling insults at him. The only thing I wanted to do was to run after that man, grab him by the hand and say, ‘Take me with you.’ I had fantasies about our family doctor, that he would take me away and we would live on an island where everyone was just like us. No wonder I live in Wilton Manors which is exactly that kind of island.

“After the priest, I started seeking other opportunities. There were always several married men at the church who I was having sex with. With one I had a code. If his wife was not home, there was a white towel on the door. With another one, I would go to the cemetery with him when he bought flowers to place on his wife’s tomb in the little chapel over the family vault, and that is where we had sex. In my little head it began to click that I should get married like them but still do this forever. The other altar boys I had sex with all got married. I did not want to be a priest. I hated the priests who came into our church to recruit for the seminary. They would take me for a walk and put their arms around me and say that Jesus was calling me.

“Also in my head it began to click that sex was forbidden by the church but that everyone did it anyway. We were strictly forbidden even to watch when the bull was brought to a neighbor’s house to stud the cows; but every time we saw the truck go by with the bull in it, all of us boys would say, ‘Okay, we know where we’re going later.’

“When I was 18, the pressure was on me to get married. For two years, I had a girlfriend who broke off our engagement because I would not have sex with her. I left the country and went to London where I joined a huge gay community. I met mostly older gay men and one friend brought me to an Anglican church that hosted gay nights with dances and raffles and events. My friend said, ‘Honey, you’re home.’ I went home with someone on my first night there. It’s funny that some church is always involved in the milestones of my sex life. The experience of religion is the experience of the erotic, and that is something people won’t talk about.

“They say we repeat our early sexual experience, but I would never have sex with a boy. I shy away from young people. I’m not comfortable. I don’t know why. I owe a lot to what some older guys did for me. Maybe I should be helping younger guys.

“I was absolutely not abused. After the first contact with his knee, I was going after that priest more than he was going after me. That is the truth. There is no doubt in my mind, that I wanted it more than he did. I have a very difficult time with these people who are suing priests because for me, there was no coercion. He didn’t even offer candy or gifts. There was no incentive but my own pleasure. All these years when all of these abuse stories came out, I never felt sympathy for those who brought charges against priests. I know that I was very young when it happened to me but I could have stayed with it or walked away. Some of my friends walked away. I didn’t. I went back. I rang that bell. I liked it.

“Today kids don’t have the same opportunity. Those married men would today be classed as predators. It never occurred to me, never crossed my mind that I would turn in any of them. I believe that now kids 12-16 are a lot more aware of things than I was. I think they have some malice that I didn’t have. I believe that what I was doing was not wrong. It was consensual. Some would say that you can’t have consensual sex when one of the parties is a kid. That’s bullshit. I was the aggressor. I had to ring that bell. I had to go up the stairs. I had to seek it out. Either I am a freak or there is something else that I either can’t explain or don’t understand.

“Sex comes with the baggage of guilt. The fact is that when I was a kid, I couldn’t talk about sex with anybody, and this sense of sin screws you up with your whole life. I think I am a better person because of what happened to me. That’s how I was able to understand who I was. That so many people in the church did what I did, there is not anything wrong with it. We are sexual beings. We can control our urges as we get older only because they diminish. The church gave me not just my sexual identity but my whole identity. It showed me that what they preach is not the truth, and I think the priests wanted me to know that. My experience freed me from big baggage.”

Comments

#4 Martin D. Goodkin 2011-01-24 13:39
JP, there is a difference--I, and in most cases Sergio,did the pursuing--we knew what we wanted and went for it.
I knew I was gay by the time I was 10--hey I played 'doctor' with the older boys of 12-13, not the girls--but didn't act on it til I was 12.
I was VERY active in NYC as a teenager going to the baths, bars, Rockefeller building 8th floor tearoom, the subway restrooms, etc. but, again, I did the pursuing.
I am sure some of the guys I picked up were predators but I didn't care--I got what I want.
I am, and always will be, indebted to those older men who taught me so much including not to be ashamed of who I am.
Sorry you had a 'bad' time and it sounds as if you are still carrying the baggage of what happened that long ago time.
Maybe I was lucky because all I have 50+ years later are kind warm thoughts and memories, including remembering many names, of those 'old' men.
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#3 JP 2011-01-24 13:08
Marina Fontanascura's story rang several bells for me since there were aspects in the narrative concerning my own pursuit of adults when I was a teenager. But I have to say that there were also aspects that disturbed me a little. As an eight year old I was sexually abused by the verger of the church where I was a choir boy and it was a very unpleasant experience. For someone that age, I truly did not have the ability to say "no' and although it would be wrong to say that the encounter coloured the rest of my life, it did awaken my sexuality at much too early an age which brought its own problems. The other important point is where the person telling the story says he has a difficult time with the people who are bringing cases against the priests. I think it's worth pointing out that for a heterosexually inclined boy, being molested by a man would have the same adverse effect as a homosexually inclined boy being molested by a woman. It is a trifle naive to believe that all children have the ability to resist. Recently there was a TV program concerning four middle-aged men who had been systematically abused by a school master. As they recalled the abuse, their distress was absolutely genuine and very hard to watch. One man said that the worst thing about it was that he felt terribly guilty for enjoying the attention the abuse was giving him. I think when young, it is extremely difficult to sort out emotions aroused in these sort of encounters. We are all different and we all react to situations in different ways which is why I sincerely believe that adults have an absolute responsibility concerning the way they treat young people and therefore no form of sexual abuse of the young should be tolerated.
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#2 sam 2011-01-21 20:44
I have to agree. When I was a kid of about eleven or twelve I started actively pursuing older men. I remember one man I knew liked me, he was my father's friend, but he kept turning me down. Finally one weekend I knew his wife was out of town I went over to his house and succeeded in my quest. I was thirteen at the time. Those are the best memories of my life.

Because of the hysteria, the gay community of America has become extremely hostile to boys who want to express their sexuality. It's really sad, and I think very damaging.
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#1 Martin D. Goodkin 2011-01-21 11:38
At the ages of 12-13 in the late 40s I was cruising 'old men' of 20, 21 in the Bronx at the local movie theatre. By the time I was in my mid-teens I was going to the bars and baths in Manhattan going after the older men in their 30s-40s.
I looked older, was never questioned about my age, and agresively pursued the older man. I have many tales and in fact wrote a book called "The Free Prisoner", published a couple of years ago telling the story.
Having always gone for older men now at 75 I am not finding too many!!! LOL

Who Screams For Justice For 12 Year Old Jonathan Foster?

Ed: Since first announcing the disappearance of Jonathan Foster amid her speculation that a (male; of course) sex criminal might be responsible, Nancy Grace went strangely silent when Mona Yvette Nelson, female and black, was arrested for the crime. Especially surprising given the extraordinarily vicious means of snuffing out the 12 year old boys life: murder by immolation using a welding torch. Even more baffling, other major news media uncharacteristically went quickly into "dead-silent mode" on news of the boy's horrific murder. I am left to speculate why this may be. And I am surprised and shocked at the conclusions to which I have unavoidably arrived.

A. She is a woman. A woman unrelated to the victim. This is not what we want to hear as a society. These horrendous crimes are necessarily committed by men. Especially such vicious crimes against children.

B. She is, at least at times, a lesbian. And very, very butch. A former professional boxer. This is not what journalists want to think about. They are, of course, condescending to their audience to assume that their readers/viewers will react with homophobic rage upon learning this information. Yes, this will be used by those with a gay-hating agenda but will not influence anyone else with a brain. And the inconvenient and discomfiting truth is that there are pathologically man-(and boy-) hating women who express great unbridled rage at the male sex. Many are lesbian. Fortunately, very, very few seem to act on their worst impulses. Sorry, but the truth is what it is. And, by the way, this writer is gay.

C. She is black. The victim is white. Black people are historically victimized in this society but sometimes they ARE the victimizers. That's just what it is.

D. The victim was a boy. He was twelve years old. He was white. White boys are supposed to be victimized by unrelated perverted white men, not sadistic black lesbians.

So those are the uncomfortable facts of this case as it is known so far which, when taken in their aggregate, apparently silenced the press and quickly averted the attention of the bloggers, comment-writers, and general public to other, more "acceptable" outrages such as crazy young guys shooting female politicians.

Let's face it: some people, whether victims or victimizers, are worth more than others. And this case simply failed to reinforce the prejudices of the public as well as its conveyors of news and outrage, rendering both the victim and victimizer of lesser value. They just don't fit into "the narrative".

A postscript: Can there be any doubt that her defense at trial will include claims of having been sexually molested as a child, thereby shifting ultimate blame to a predatorial male? This is just "de-riguer". This WILL happen. We don't even have to wait.

----

Hours after Christmas Day dinner at her sister's Third Ward apartment, Mona Yvette Nelson, a nomadic 44-year-old maintenance worker, was jolted by a TV news report detailing the disappearance of 12-year-old Jonathan Foster from a ramshackle Garden Oaks enclave.

"I know those people," she reportedly told her sister, Angie Johnson, 62, after watching Jonathan's mother, Angela Davis, plead for help in finding her son.

Four days later, Nelson found herself in a Harris County jail cell, charged in the boy's slaying as veteran homicide detectives with uncharacteristic candor painted her a monster.

"She is a cold, soulless murderer who showed an absolute lack of remorse in taking the life of Jonathan Foster," said Michael Miller, the lead homicide detective on the case for the Houston Police Department.

With that, the evil that had visited the impoverished pocket of Garden Oaks on Christmas Eve had a face, and a nickname that went viral on the Internet: "Mona the Monster."

Since her arrest, a much more nuanced picture of Nelson — the daughter of a retired schoolteacher and deceased mortician - has emerged. There are hints of the alleged monster. Her Face­book page described an affinity for the movie Saw. Her boxing nickname was "Iron Fist." But those details are troubling only when taken in the context of Jonathan's grisly death.

Nelson's family, her defenders, paint her as a patsy who dumped what she thought was a bag of trash at someone else's request. She's a mother, a grandmother of five. Doing this, to a boy the age of one her own grand­babies?

No way, they say.

"She is not a monster," insisted her mother, Mary Lee Preston, of Mount Pleasant.

Whether Nelson is the cold-blooded killer, the raspy voice overheard in Jonathan's last phone call to his mother, remains to be seen. She has been charged with capital murder and kidnapping but has admitted only to dumping the boy's body, saying she thought it was "garbage."

Possible accomplice?

The key piece of the puzzle in the case - the motive - is elusive, or at least still a well-guarded secret. And then there's this: If Nelson didn't do it, she must know who did. She must know the Monster.

Somewhere along the six miles between the rundown apartment where the boy had lived with his mother and the weedy ditch near the Hardy Toll Road where his scorched body was dumped lie the vexing and scant details.

"This is the only person (Nelson) we have evidence on for the murder," Assistant District Attorney Connie Spence told the Houston Chronicle when asked if it was possible there was an accomplice.

At first, the Foster case seemed unbelievably random. A boy spending Christmas Eve day at home - alone while his mother worked - playing computer games, watching cartoons. Neither police nor anyone who knows her have an explanation for why Nelson might have killed Jonathan.

Interviews with family and friends who saw her in the days after the boy disappeared say Nelson was not nervous.

She was, though, worried about money.

"I asked if she was coming home (for Christmas)," said Preston, Nelson's 79-year-old mother. "She said, 'I don't know. I'm trying to save up money to buy something for my truck.' "

The day after Christmas, Nelson received a $20 pay advance from her boss so she could fill her truck with gas. Nelson's adult daughter, who also lives in Mount Pleasant with her five children, said Nelson was strapped for cash.

"The Tuesday after Christmas, she called, checking up," said Ava Nelson, 27. "She said she couldn't come up there because she didn't have any money."

Caught on video

The biggest break in the case for police came after the missing boy was found dead.

Security video in the area shows Nelson getting out of her silver pickup and placing what was later determined to be Jonathan's body in a culvert at 6 p.m. Christmas Eve, about four hours after he was last seen.

Traction on Jonathan's disappearance was hampered initially because of conflicting stories from Jonathan's family. His mother, Angela Davis, who once struggled with drug addiction, first told police the boy was left in the care of her roommate, when he actually was home alone.

On Dec. 14, some 10 days before Jonathan disappeared, Davis and her son moved out of the Villa Nueva apartment complex on Oak Street where they had shared a home with David Davis, her husband and Jonathan's stepfather.

Davis said her husband had hit the boy. With Jonathan in tow, she moved to a dumpy duplex next door with her friend Sharon Ennamorato, whom Jonathan called "Aunt Sharon."

According to interviews, David Davis dropped by the apartment at 1:45 p.m. Christmas Eve to check on the boy and found him playing games on the computer.

Enter Mona Nelson, who allegedly came to the house some time later looking for Ennamorato. Instead, she found Jonathan, who called his mom at work, supposedly at Nelson's behest, and talked to a co-worker, saying he needed to get "Aunt Sharon's" phone number.

Angela Davis called her son back moments later. A "raspy-voiced woman" answered. Davis told the woman she was Jonathan's mother, and the woman asked Jonathan: "Is Angela your mother?"

"Yes ma'am, Angela's my mother," he reportedly said.

The phone went dead.

And Jonathan was gone.

Since the killing, Ennamorato has been evicted from the duplex she shared with Angela Davis and Jonathan. She appears to be the only person who connected Nelson to Jonathan and his mother and stepfather, police say.

Police believe Nelson knew Ennamorato well before Jonathan and his mother arrived on Ennamorato's doorstep. Ennamorato, who had a felony drug record, said she met Nelson when Ennamorato was living in the Tiffany Oaks Apartments on Oak Street, where Nelson worked in maintenance.

Angela Davis says she never met Nelson until she showed up at the duplex about 7 p.m. Christmas Eve - an hour or so after she was captured on video dumping the body. Nelson reportedly offered to look for Jonathan, saying she had stopped by earlier in the day, before he disappeared, looking for Ennamorato. She said he answered the door shirtless, and she suspected someone else was in the house.

Started on good path

Mona Yvette Nelson was the ninth child, the youngest, born to Mary Preston, a longtime elementary school teacher in Houston's Third Ward. The man Nelson called her father, mortician James Russo, never married her mother. Though Preston said Russo was part of Nelson's life, Russo's grown children said they never heard of Nelson until a year and a half ago, when she turned up at the family's mortuary claiming to be kin.

Nelson started out on a good path, Preston said. She was a tomboy who loved sports and volunteered at the MLK Community Center as a teenager. At 15, she met her future husband, Mike Nelson, a construction worker. At age 16, Nelson was a pregnant high school dropout. Two months after they married in 1983, she had twins, a boy and a girl, born three months early.

By the time Nelson was 19, she was in serious trouble. She was arrested in the aggravated robbery of a barbecue restaurant. She told police a man forced her to do it, that she feared he was going to hurt her if she didn't. Nelson pleaded no contest in 1985 and was given 10 years of deferred adjudication, which would revert to prison time if she committed another crime.

"Oh, my God, that almost killed me," Preston said of her daughter's arrest.

But Nelson was just getting started.

Some time in the ring

Four years later, in 1989, she was caught by federal officials driving Mexican nationals through the Sarita, Texas, checkpoint, for $600 per person. Her federal arrest resulted in her return to prison because of her robbery case.

For the next 20 years, Nelson would be arrested in nearly a dozen more minor incidents ranging from criminal mischief and theft by check to operating a stolen vehicle and marijuana possession.

Nelson divorced, and her children lived with their father. She began a relationship with another woman, Danita Morris, and they lived together as a couple for about 10 years, raising Morris' young children in East Texas.

Nelson was arrested in 2001, accused of assaulting Morris and three neighborhood children she was baby-sitting, but Morris dropped the charges.

"She's always been there for me and my kids no matter what," said Morris. "She's not what they're claiming her to be."

At nearly 5-foot-11, weighing more than 225 pounds and with crewcut hair, Nelson is an imposing figure who failed on the women's boxing circuit. After winning her debut bout in Syracuse, N.Y., in 1997, she went on to lose three more matches in 2003, 2004 and 2006. According to her Texas boxing license, which expired last year, she chose the nickname "Iron Fist."

Nelson's daughter, Ava Nelson, declined to press charges against her mother after Mount Pleasant police found her with a blackened eye and a bloody face in 2008.

"It was a misunderstanding," Ava Nelson said this week, adding that despite her mother's faults, she is a good person.

"This is the lady who helped me raise my kids."

For the past year, Nelson had worked as a handyman for a management company that took care of odd jobs at various apartment complexes, including the Tiffany Oaks Apartments, just across the street from the duplex where Jonathan and his mom lived with Ennamorato.

Nelson was paid by the job but was on call around the clock. Also a welder, she collected scrap metal at the various apartment properties and was allowed to keep half of what she could get for it.

About three months ago, Nelson moved into a garage apartment near the Hardy Toll Road, about 10 minutes from the ditch where Jonathan's body was found. Still, she hung out on Oak Street when she didn't have a job to do.

Alibi offered, but . . .

Maintenance worker Frank Nickles, 47, said on Christmas Eve he was hanging out with Nelson, drinking beer outside his Tiffany Oaks apartment from about 10:30 a.m to 2:30 p.m. - and she didn't leave during that time. But that conflicts with what witnesses told police.

Except for Nelson, "everyone else in the case is accounted for," said HPD's Miller.

Early reports cast suspicion on Jonathan's stepfather, but he is captured on security video at a nearby bar, the Catty Corner Ice House on Wakefield. "His time is accounted for," Miller said.

At the time of Nelson's arrest, Quanell X, an advocate for people accused of crimes, asserted that Nelson was innocent of the crime, and a drug debt was at the heart of the boy's disappearance and killing.

Miller scoffed at the suggestion: "We don't have any evidence of that at all. I've never had a case where an individual who owed up money had their child killed. That's a fantasy."

Police said a "wealth of evidence" shows Jonathan was burned at Nelson's apartment.

They reported finding burned carpet and twine like the kind used to tie Jonathan's hands at Nelson's apartment, along with welding equipment they believe she used to burn the body postmortem.

A skilled welder, Nelson owned torches, but nothing inside her apartment was burned, her landlord, Gary Arnold said, noting that it had tile floors.

On whether Nelson has given them the name of an accomplice, Spence added, "We're not saying."

The day after she interred her son's ashes, Davis called Jonathan's accused killer "cold."

"God will punish her," she said.

Surprisingly, Davis also offered her absolution.

"I forgive her," she said, explaining that she could afford to because Jonathan is now free from harm. "My son's safe. He's not hurting."

Eek! A Male! Treating all men as potential predators doesn't make our kids safer.

By LENORE SKENAZY

Last week, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Timothy Murray, noticed smoke coming out of a minivan in his hometown of Worcester. He raced over and pulled out two small children, moments before the van's tire exploded into flames. At which point, according to the AP account, the kids' grandmother, who had been driving, nearly punched our hero in the face.

Why?

Mr. Murray said she told him she thought he might be a kidnapper.

And so it goes these days, when almost any man who has anything to do with a child can find himself suspected of being a creep. I call it "Worst-First" thinking: Gripped by pedophile panic, we jump to the very worst, even least likely, conclusion first. Then we congratulate ourselves for being so vigilant.

Consider the Iowa daycare center where Nichole Adkins works. The one male aide employed there, she told me in an interview, is not allowed to change diapers. "In fact," Ms. Adkins said, "he has been asked to leave the classroom when diapering was happening."

Now, a guy turned on by diaper changes has got to be even rarer than a guy turned on by Sponge Bob. But "Worst-First" thinking means suspecting the motives of any man who chooses to work around kids.

Maybe the daycare center felt it had to be extra cautious, to avoid lawsuits. But regular folk are suspicious, too. Last February, a woman followed a man around at a store berating him for clutching a pile of girls' panties. "I can't believe this! You're disgusting. This is a public place, you pervert!" she said—until the guy, who posted about the episode on a website, fished out his ID. He was a clerk restocking the underwear department.

Given the level of distrust, is it any wonder that, as the London Telegraph reported last month, the British Musicians' Union warned its members they are no longer to touch a child's fingers, even to position them correctly on the keys? Or that a public pool in Sydney, Australia last fall prohibited boys from changing in the same locker room as the men? (According to the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, the men demanded this, fearing false accusations.)

What's really ironic about all this emphasis on perverts is that it's making us think like them. Remember the story that broke right before Christmas? The FBI warned law-enforcement agencies that the new Video Barbie could be used to make kiddie porn. The warning was not intended for the public but it leaked out. TV news celebrated the joy of the season by telling parents that any man nice enough to play dolls with their daughters could really be videotaping "under their little skirts!" as one Fox News reporter said.

This queasy climate is making men think twice about things they used to do unselfconsciously. A friend of mine, Eric Kozak, was working for a while as a courier. Driving around an unfamiliar neighborhood, he says, "I got lost. I saw a couple kids by the side of the road and rolled down my window to ask, 'Where is such-and-such road?' They ran off screaming."

Another dad told me about taking his three-year-old to play football in the local park, where he'd help organize the slightly older kids into a game. Over time, one of the kids started to look up to him. "He wanted to stand close to me, wanted approval, Dad stuff, I guess. And because of this whole 'stranger danger' mentality, I could sense this sort of wary disapproval from the few other parents at the playground. So I just stopped going."

And that's not the worst. In England in 2006, BBC News reported the story of a bricklayer who spotted a toddler at the side of the road. As he later testified at a hearing, he didn't stop to help for fear he'd be accused of trying to abduct her. You know: A man driving around with a little girl in his car? She ended up at a pond and drowned.

We think we're protecting our kids by treating all men as potential predators. But that's not a society that's safe. Just sick.

Ms. Skenazy is a public speaker and author of the blog and book, "Free-Range Kids" (Wiley, 2010).

'Stranger Danger' and the Decline of Halloween

Wall Street Journal

No child has ever been killed by poisoned candy. Ever.

By LENORE SKENAZY

Halloween is the day when America market-tests parental paranoia. If a new fear flies on Halloween, it's probably going to catch on the rest of the year, too.

Take "stranger danger," the classic Halloween horror. Even when I was a kid, back in the "Bewitched" and "Brady Bunch" costume era, parents were already worried about neighbors poisoning candy. Sure, the folks down the street might smile and wave the rest of the year, but apparently they were just biding their time before stuffing us silly with strychnine-laced Smarties.

That was a wacky idea, but we bought it. We still buy it, even though Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, has researched the topic and spends every October telling the press that there has never been a single case of any child being killed by a stranger's Halloween candy. (Oh, yes, he concedes, there was once a Texas boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix. But his dad did it for the insurance money. He was executed.)

This Halloween, costumes based on "Jersey Shore" stars Snooki, DJ Pauly D and The Situation are flying off the shelves. WSJ's Elizabeth Holmes reports.

Anyway, you'd think that word would get out: poisoned candy not happening. But instead, most Halloween articles to this day tell parents to feed children a big meal before they go trick-or-treating, so they won't be tempted to eat any candy before bringing it home for inspection. As if being full has ever stopped any kid from eating free candy!

So stranger danger is still going strong, and it's even spread beyond Halloween to the rest of the year. Now parents consider their neighbors potential killers all year round. That's why they don't let their kids play on the lawn, or wait alone for the school bus: "You never know!" The psycho-next-door fear went viral.

Then along came new fears. Parents are warned annually not to let their children wear costumes that are too tight—those could seriously restrict breathing! But not too loose either—kids could trip! Fall! Die!

Treating parents like idiots who couldn't possibly notice that their kid is turning blue or falling on his face might seem like a losing proposition, but it caught on too.

Halloween taught marketers that parents are willing to be warned about anything, no matter how preposterous, and then they're willing to be sold whatever solutions the market can come up with. Face paint so no mask will obscure a child's vision. Purell, so no child touches a germ. And the biggest boondoggle of all: an adult-supervised party, so no child encounters anything exciting, er, "dangerous."

Think of how Halloween used to be the one day of the year when gaggles of kids took to the streets by themselves—at night even. Big fun! Low cost! But once the party moved inside, to keep kids safe from the nonexistent poisoners, in came all the nonsense. The battery-operated caskets. The hired witch. The Costco veggie trays and plastic everything else. Halloween went from hobo holiday to $6 billion extravaganza.

And it blazed the way for adult-supervised everything else. Let kids make their own fun? Not anymore! Let's sign our toddlers up for "movement" classes! Let's bring on the extracurricular activities, travel soccer and manicure parties for the older kids. Once Halloween got outsourced to adults, no kids-only activity was safe. Goodbye sandlot, hello batting coach!

And now comes the latest Halloween terror: Across the country, cities and states are passing waves of laws preventing registered sex offenders from leaving their homes—or sometimes even turning on their lights—on Halloween.

The reason? Same old same old: safety. As a panel of "experts" on the "Today" show warned viewers recently: Don't let your children trick-or-treat without you "any earlier than [age] 13, because people put on masks, they put on disguises, and there are still people who do bad things."

Perhaps there are. But Elizabeth Letourneau, an associate professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, studied crime statistics from 30 states and found, "There is zero evidence to support the idea that Halloween is a dangerous date for children in terms of child molestation."

In fact, she says, "We almost called this paper, 'Halloween: The Safest Day of the Year,' because it was just so incredibly rare to see anything happen on that day."

Why is it so safe? Because despite our mounting fears and apoplectic media, it is still the day that many of us, of all ages, go outside. We knock on doors. We meet each other. And all that giving and taking and trick-or-treating is building the very thing that keeps us safe: community.

We can kill off Halloween, or we can accept that it isn't dangerous and give it back to the kids. Then maybe we can start giving them back the rest of their childhoods, too.

Ms. Skenazy is the author of "Free-Range Kids" (Jossey-Bass, 2010). She blogs at www.freerangekids.com.

'Vulnerable' man lured to death with offer of sex act

Ed: Here is another example of deeply evil people attaining release for their sadistic pleasures by targeting those who are both vulnerable and unpopular in the eyes of society.

The cultural narrative has been, of course, that these poor people (the murderers) had doubtless been the victims of childhood sexual abuse themselves and that, while regrettable, it's understandable why these things happen. Thus the inevitable psychologist's reports to the court claiming "early childhood victimization". This will soften the legal blows that fall upon them and further reinforce the myth that sadists who kill sex offenders (or, in this case, suspected "nonces") are motivated not by their own sociopathy or sadism but out of a deep "wound" resulting from some sex act experienced in childhood. It is time to put this mythical narrative, recognized as such by countless reputable mental health professionals, to rest!

Mr Rossington's body was found on grassland in Lincoln

A 21-year-old man described as "vulnerable and gullible" was beaten to death by a gang who considered him a paedophile, a court has heard.

Shaun Rossington, of Lincoln, was lured to Searby Road in the city by a 13-year-old girl on the promise of a sex act, Nottingham Crown Court heard.

His body was found face down on grassland on 3 June. He died from lack of oxygen, the court heard.

Continue reading the main story

Related stories

'Vulnerable' man lured to attack

Two men, two girls and three boys deny murder.

'Kicking hard'

The jury was told the seven defendants lured Mr Rossington, beat him and then hatched a plan to cover up their involvement.

The seven include Nicholas Shelbourne, 27, of Edinburgh House, Laughton Way, Lincoln; Mark Jackson, 20, of Yarborough Road, Lincoln, two girls aged 17 and 14 and three boys - two aged 17 and another aged 16.

Prosecutor Richard Latham told the jury one of the 17-year-old boys had pleaded guilty to manslaughter and perverting the course of the justice, while the other 17-year-old boy admitted perverting the course of justice.

Nottingham Crown Court heard the gang originally told police they had stumbled across Mr Rossington's body, claiming he was a stranger.

Mr Latham said when police investigated they found Facebook conversations between the 13-year-old girl and Mr Rossington less than two hours before it is believed he was killed.

Pizza order

The court heard the 13-year-old girl told police the other girl in the group texted Mr Rossington pretending to be her and offering to perform a sex act on him for £100.

The girl told police she had no intention of performing the sex act, but planned to "get the £100 and run".

Mr Latham said at the end of the attack, all seven defendants must have known the 21-year-old was seriously hurt, but did not call for help.

The court heard the group all gave slightly different accounts of events that night, claiming they only left the flat to order a pizza, which prosecutors said was a lie.

The trial continues.

Judge Weinstein Takes On Child Pornography Laws

New York Times

In his 43-year career as a federal judge, Jack B. Weinstein has come to be identified by his efforts to combat what he calls “the unnecessary cruelty of the law.” His most recent crusade is particularly striking because of the beneficiary: a man who has amassed a vast collection of child pornography.

Judge Weinstein, who sits in the United States District Court in Brooklyn, has twice thrown out convictions that would have ensured that the man spend at least five years behind bars. He has pledged to break protocol and inform the next jury about the mandatory prison sentence that the charges carry. And he recently declared that the man, who is awaiting a new trial, did not need an electronic ankle bracelet because he posed “no risk to society.”

There is little public sympathy for collectors of child pornography. Yet across the country, an increasing number of federal judges have come to their defense, criticizing changes to sentencing laws that have effectively quadrupled their average prison term over the last decade.

Last week, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit vacated a 20-year child pornography sentence by ruling that the sentencing guidelines for such cases, “unless applied with great care, can lead to unreasonable sentences.” The decision noted that the recommended sentences for looking at pictures of children being sexually abused sometimes eclipse those for actually sexually abusing a child.

Judge Weinstein has gone to extraordinary lengths to challenge the strict punishments, issuing a series of rulings that directly attack the mandatory five-year prison sentence faced by defendants charged with receiving child pornography.

“I don’t approve of child pornography, obviously,” he said in an interview this week. But, he also said, he does not believe that those who view the images, as opposed to producing or selling them, present a threat to children.

“We’re destroying lives unnecessarily,” he said. “At the most, they should be receiving treatment and supervision.”

The man he has spent three years trying to save from a long incarceration is Pietro Polizzi, a married father of five who collected more than 5,000 graphic pictures of children. If prosecuted in a New York State court, he would have faced a maximum prison sentence of four years. Instead, in federal court, he faced a minimum of five years and a recommended sentence of 11 to 14 years. Because of Judge Weinstein’s intervention, he remains free as he awaits another trial.

“I don’t see Judge Weinstein as a judge,” Mr. Polizzi said during an interview as tears rolled down his face. “I see him as my father. He helps people. He doesn’t destroy lives the way the prosecutor has. He’s the one who is going to set me free from the court.”

The child pornography industry has flourished through the Internet, with the number of federal cases growing from fewer than 100 annually to more than 1,600 last year. As the number grew, Congress increased the recommended prison terms and established a mandatory minimum sentence of five years for anyone convicted of receiving child pornography. According to the federal defenders office, the average sentence was 91 months in 2007, up from 21 months a decade before.

But the tough penalties have chafed at many judges, echoing previous battles over drug cases. Last year, judges imposed sentences below the recommended range in more than half of all child pornography cases.

“What has caused concern in courts across the nation is that we have a lot of relatively law-abiding individuals sitting in the basement downloading the wrong kind of dirty pictures facing not just prison sentences but incredibly long prison sentences,” said Douglas A. Berman, a professor at Moritz College of Law, who studies sentencing issues.

In one recent case, James L. Graham, a United States District Court judge in Ohio, sentenced a 67-year-old man who had suffered a stroke to a single day in prison, along with restrictions on computer use and registration as a sex offender. As part of a deal with prosecutors, the man had pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography, which carries no mandatory sentence.

“When you have to sit there on the bench and look at someone like my stroke victim and say, ‘I have to send this man to prison for six years,’ it just doesn’t feel right,” he explained in an interview. “It’s not right.”

Child advocates like Ernie Allen, the president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, are upset by such thinking. “Real children are harmed in the production of these images,” he said, “and these same children are harmed every time these images are downloaded and viewed.”

At 88, Judge Weinstein is one of the longest serving members of the federal bench. Supporters praise his taking unusual actions in pursuit of his notions of justice, like for a time refusing to handle drug cases out of opposition to mandatory minimums. Critics say that in the process, he disregards the law.

(On Thursday, he made headlines by refusing to dismiss a lawsuit by a public school teacher removed from the classroom for allowing students to use vulgarities during a lesson on H.I.V. He ruled that she appeared to have followed the spirit of a state syllabus that directed that students be encouraged to use sexual terms they understood.)

“Jack is somebody who will step out and do what he thinks is right and take his chances of being overturned by an appeals court,” said John S. Martin, who cited his disagreement with mandatory sentences when he retired from the federal bench in Manhattan. “He sees the injustice in these things and he tries to do something about it.”

Both sides point to his efforts in the Polizzi case as quintessential Weinstein.

In 2005, Mr. Polizzi signed up for a child pornography Web site. He began obsessively stockpiling thousands of images, mostly of prepubescent girls. When F.B.I. agents arrived with a search warrant, he led them to the two-story garage where he kept his collection behind locked doors, saying, “The pictures of the children are upstairs.”

Child pornography cases almost always end with guilty pleas. But when the case was assigned to Judge Weinstein, Mr. Polizzi’s lawyer recommended that he go to trial.

The lawyer used an insanity defense, claiming Mr. Polizzi had been repeatedly raped as a child and had collected the pictures not for sexual gratification, but in hopes of finding evidence of his own abuse — claims the prosecution dismissed as implausible. When the first of the images were shown in court, Mr. Polizzi collapsed and was taken to a hospital.

The jury was given the standard instruction not to consider possible punishment during deliberations. After three days, on Oct. 5, 2007, Mr. Polizzi was convicted of all 12 counts of receipt of child pornography and 11 counts of possession. Then Judge Weinstein broke from the script with a question almost never posed in court: If the jurors had known about the minimum prison sentence, would they have voted to convict?

Five jurors spoke up against imprisonment. Two said they would have changed their votes. Judge Weinstein tossed out the guilty verdict on the more serious receipt counts and ordered a new trial. He sentenced Mr. Polizzi to a year in prison for the possession counts, which Mr. Polizzi has served.

Judge Weinstein declared that Mr. Polizzi had a constitutional right to have a jury know the punishment that would accompany a guilty verdict, a right he said he had violated. He pledged to inform the next jury of the mandatory minimum sentence. That idea, floated by a federal judge in Manhattan several years earlier in another child pornography case but rejected on appeal, would give jurors the option of refusing to convict if the punishment seemed disproportionate, as several jurors had indicated they believed it was in Mr. Polizzi’s case.

“That was quite an unusual way of handling it,” said Amy Baron-Evans, the national sentencing resource counsel for the federal public defenders’ office. “Usually the judges are just stuck with the mandatory minimum.”

The Court of Appeals last year overruled Judge Weinstein’s order of a new trial, but left unresolved whether it was permissible to tell the jury about the punishment. The case was remanded, and Judge Weinstein, after consulting with other District Court judges, again ordered a new trial, though this time on different grounds. And again he pledged to inform the jury of the mandatory minimum sentences. That decision is under appeal.

In the meantime, the cases keep coming.

On Wednesday, Judge Weinstein dealt with a man who had pleaded guilty to receipt of child pornography. He imposed the mandatory five-year minimum prison term, though unhappily.

“This is an unnecessarily harsh and cruel sentence under the circumstances,” he said. “The court has no alternative under the statute. This defendant requires treatment and a stable life outside of prison. Prison will only harm him and will do nothing to protect society, since he does not constitute a risk of crime or any acting out towards children.”

“I’m sorry,” he added, “there is nothing I can do in this case.”

Worst-Case Thinking

"Our society no longer has the ability to calculate probabilities. Risk assessment is devalued. "

by Bruce Schneier

At a security conference recently, the moderator asked the panel of distinguished cybersecurity leaders what their nightmare scenario was. The answers were the predictable array of large-scale attacks: against our communications infrastructure, against the power grid, against the financial system, in combination with a physical attack.

I didn't get to give my answer until the afternoon, which was: "My nightmare scenario is that people keep talking about their nightmare scenarios."

There's a certain blindness that comes from worst-case thinking. An extension of the precautionary principle, it involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then acting as if it were a certainty. It substitutes imagination for thinking, speculation for risk analysis and fear for reason. It fosters powerlessness and vulnerability and magnifies social paralysis. And it makes us more vulnerable to the effects of terrorism.

Worst-case thinking means generally bad decision making for several reasons. First, it's only half of the cost-benefit equation. Every decision has costs and benefits, risks and rewards. By speculating about what can possibly go wrong, and then acting as if that is likely to happen, worst-case thinking focuses only on the extreme but improbable risks and does a poor job at assessing outcomes.

Second, it's based on flawed logic. It begs the question by assuming that a proponent of an action must prove that the nightmare scenario is impossible.

Third, it can be used to support any position or its opposite. If we build a nuclear power plant, it could melt down. If we don't build it, we will run short of power and society will collapse into anarchy. If we allow flights near Iceland's volcanic ash, planes will crash and people will die. If we don't, organs won't arrive in time for transplant operations and people will die. If we don't invade Iraq, Saddam Hussein might use the nuclear weapons he might have. If we do, we might destabilize the Middle East, leading to widespread violence and death.

Of course, not all fears are equal. Those that we tend to exaggerate are more easily justified by worst-case thinking. So terrorism fears trump privacy fears, and almost everything else; technology is hard to understand and therefore scary; nuclear weapons are worse than conventional weapons; our children need to be protected at all costs; and annihilating the planet is bad. Basically, any fear that would make a good movie plot is amenable to worst-case thinking.

Fourth and finally, worst-case thinking validates ignorance. Instead of focusing on what we know, it focuses on what we don't know -- and what we can imagine.

Remember Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's quote? "Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know." And this: "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Ignorance isn't a cause for doubt; when you can fill that ignorance with imagination, it can be a call to action.

Even worse, it can lead to hasty and dangerous acts. You can't wait for a smoking gun, so you act as if the gun is about to go off. Rather than making us safer, worst-case thinking has the potential to cause dangerous escalation.

The new undercurrent in this is that our society no longer has the ability to calculate probabilities. Risk assessment is devalued. Probabilistic thinking is repudiated in favor of "possibilistic thinking": Since we can't know what's likely to go wrong, let's speculate about what can possibly go wrong.

Worst-case thinking leads to bad decisions, bad systems design, and bad security. And we all have direct experience with its effects: airline security and the TSA, which we make fun of when we're not appalled that they're harassing 93-year-old women or keeping first graders off airplanes. You can't be too careful!

Actually, you can. You can refuse to fly because of the possibility of plane crashes. You can lock your children in the house because of the possibility of child predators. You can eschew all contact with people because of the possibility of hurt. Steven Hawking wants to avoid trying to communicate with aliens because they might be hostile; does he want to turn off all the planet's television broadcasts because they're radiating into space? It isn't hard to parody worst-case thinking, and at its extreme it's a psychological condition.

Frank Furedi, a sociology professor at the University of Kent, writes: "Worst-case thinking encourages society to adopt fear as one of the dominant principles around which the public, the government and institutions should organize their life. It institutionalizes insecurity and fosters a mood of confusion and powerlessness. Through popularizing the belief that worst cases are normal, it incites people to feel defenseless and vulnerable to a wide range of future threats."

Even worse, it plays directly into the hands of terrorists, creating a population that is easily terrorized -- even by failed terrorist attacks like the Christmas Day underwear bomber and the Times Square SUV bomber.

When someone is proposing a change, the onus should be on them to justify it over the status quo. But worst case thinking is a way of looking at the world that exaggerates the rare and unusual and gives the rare much more credence than it deserves.

It isn't really a principle; it's a cheap trick to justify what you already believe. It lets lazy or biased people make what seem to be cogent arguments without understanding the whole issue. And when people don't need to refute counterarguments, there's no point in listening to them.

This essay was originally published on CNN.com, although they stripped out all the links.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/05/12/...

Security conference:
http://www.ewi.info/dallas

Precautionary principle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

Iceland volcano affects organ donations:
http://www.cbsnews.com/...

Areas where we tend to overestimate the threat:
http://www.schneier.com/essay-170.html

New particle accelerator may annihilate the planet:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9905448-7.html

Movie plot threats:
http://www.schneier.com/essay-087.html

Rumsfeld quote:
http://www.defenselink.mil/Transcripts/...
Possibilistic thinking:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/...

Making fun of the TSA:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/05/...
The TSA harasses a 93-year-old women:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHxy5GattLY

The TSA keeps a first-grader off airplanes:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/...
Steven Hawking on communicating with aliens:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36769422/

Frank Furedi on worst-case-thinking:
http://www.frankfuredi.com/index.php/site/article/326/
http://www.frankfuredi.com/index.php/site/article/386/

How we are easily terrorized:
http://www.schneier.com/essay-124.html

Christmas Day underwear bomber:
http://www.schneier.com/essay-304.html

Times Square SUV bomber:
http://www.schneier.com/essay-315.html