From the category archives:

pedophiles

Report Finds Online Threats to Children Overblown (NYTimes)

by Viviane on 01/14/2009

in pedophiles

The Internet may not be such a dangerous place for children after all.

A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem.

The findings ran counter to popular perceptions of online dangers as reinforced by depictions in the news media like NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” series. One attorney general was quick to criticize the group’s report.

The panel, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, was charged with examining the extent of the threats children face on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, amid widespread fears that adults were using these popular Web sites to deceive and prey on children.

But the report concluded that the problem of bullying among children, both online and offline, poses a far more serious challenge than the sexual solicitation of minors by adults.

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Child Porn Arrests in Australia

by Jefferson on 06/05/2008

in pedophiles,pornography

Seventy people have been arrested in Australia in a nationwide operation to crack down on the use of images of child sex abuse posted on the internet.

The arrests, which include a policeman and several teachers, followed a six month investigation by police into paedophile communities online.

The probe was launched after 95 explicit pictures were posted by a hacker on a respected European website.

Over 76 hours, the site had 12 million hits from 150,000 users in 170 nations.

More than 2,800 internet protocol (IP) addresses were traced back to Australia and then identified by police.

The first arrests were made in cases where young people might be at risk and four children had been taken from their homes, investigators said.

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Mass deletion of communities on LiveJournal sparks revolt (C|Net)

by Jessica Gold Haralson on 05/30/2007

in bloggers,Blogging,incest,pedophiles

Thousands of LiveJournal customers are rebelling against the company’s recent decision to censor hundreds of sex-themed discussion groups, a broad swath that has led to the removal of literary critiques and fan-written fiction about Harry Potter.

LiveJournal, which is owned by San Francisco-based Six Apart, confirmed Wednesday that it deleted around 500 journals this week in hopes of better “protecting children.” It said the deletion was prompted by activist groups, including one called Warriors for Innocence that claims to track sites promoting pedophilia, the sexual abuse of minors, and other illegal activities.

Legal experts say LiveJournal is clearly not liable for fictional stories and related discussions posted by its users. But despite customer outcry, Six Apart is standing firm in its position that the deleted journals violate company policy.

“We did a review of our policies related to how we review those sites, those journals, and came up with the fact that we actually did have a number of journals up that we didn’t think met our policies and didn’t think they were appropriate to have up,” Barak Berkowitz, chairman and chief executive of Six Apart, said in a telephone interview. The site boasts about 13 million journals.

Some deleted LiveJournal communities went by names like childlove and little_children (a community permits multiple LiveJournal users to post entries, while an individual account is limited to one user). Others, however, broadly fall into the category of science fiction, fantasy or user-written “fandom” stories–and it is those that have sparked the outcry.

“As a queer, feminist writer who explores the darker aspects of human nature, many of my stories deal with incest, rape and child molestation,” a LiveJournal member named “bitterfig” wrote. “As such, I belonged to and contributed to several of the communities which have been suspended and frankly I’m pretty offended. I don’t like being lumped in with rapists and pedophiles and other ‘monsters on the Web.’”

Practically any attempt to sort works of fiction into tidy piles of acceptable and unacceptable material, of course, is likely to invite controversy. Works by noted authors such as James Joyce, Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs have been lauded as masterpieces–and at other times prosecuted as obscene.

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Can What You’re Reading Prove Intent to Commit a Crime? (Law.com)

by Viviane on 05/26/2007

in crime,law,legal,pedophiles

Howard J. Bashman

A man is arrested in Las Vegas on federal criminal charges of traveling across state lines with intent to engage in a sexual act with a minor and using an interstate communication facility to attempt to persuade a minor to engage in sexual acts. The evidence against the man consists of the transcripts of multiple online chats between the man and a police officer posing as a 14-year-old girl. On the date selected for their meeting, the man traveled from his home in Anaheim, Calif., to Las Vegas, where police apprehended him at the designated meeting place.

At trial, the man seeks to defend against the charges by maintaining that he believed that he was chatting with a 30- to 40-year-old woman who had been pretending to be an underage girl, and that he was expecting to meet that woman at the designated location in Las Vegas. When the man was arrested, he was carrying a personal digital assistant (PDA) containing more than 140 stories that described adults having sex with children. The prosecution sought to introduce many of these stories into evidence at trial, to rebut the man’s defense that he was not intending to meet an underage minor for sex. (more. . .)

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The Shame Game (Columbia Journalism Review)

by Viviane on 02/11/2007

in Dateline,ethics,law,legal,media,pedophiles

By Douglas McCollam

It was just before 3 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon last November when a contingent of police gathered outside the home of Louis Conradt Jr., a longtime county prosecutor living in the small community of Terrell, Texas, just east of Dallas. Though the fifty-six-year-old Conradt was a colleague of some of the officers, they hadn’t come to discuss a case or for a backyard barbeque. Rather, the veteran district attorney, who had prosecuted hundreds of felonies during more than two decades in law enforcement, was himself the target of an unusual criminal probe. For weeks the police in the nearby town of Murphy had been working with the online watchdog group Perverted Justice and producers from Dateline NBC’s popular “To Catch a Predator” series in an elaborate sting operation targeting adults cruising the Internet to solicit sex from minors. Dateline had leased a house in an upscale subdivision, outfitted it with multiple hidden cameras, and hired actors to impersonate minors to help lure suspects into the trap. As with several similar operations previously conducted by Dateline, there was no shortage of men looking to score with underage boys and girls. In all, twenty-four men were caught in the Murphy sting, including a retired doctor, a traveling businessman, a school teacher, and a Navy veteran.

Conradt had never shown up at the Dateline house, but according to the police, using the screen name “inxs00,” he did engage in explicit sexual exchanges in an Internet chat room with someone he believed to be a thirteen-year-old boy (but was actually a volunteer for Perverted Justice). Under a Texas law adopted in 2005 to combat Internet predators, it is a second-degree felony to have such communications with someone under the age of fourteen, even if no actual sexual contact takes place. Armed with a search warrant — and with a Dateline camera crew on the scene — the police went to Conradt’s home to arrest him. When the prosecutor failed to answer the door or answer phone calls, police forced their way into the house. Inside they encountered the prosecutor in a hallway holding a semiautomatic handgun. “I’m not going to hurt anybody,” Conradt reportedly told the police. Then he fired a single bullet into his own head. (more…)

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