113 points

My sister was nearly put on the registry when she was 15 for slapping a friends butt in school who had decided she didn’t want to be friends with her anymore but hadn’t exactly communicated it. She chose to communicate that by accusing her of SA.

My sister avoided the registry by a mix of community service and counseling, but I always thought it was wild that she was at risk while under 18.

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64 points

You aren’t old enough to consent to sex but you are old enough to be charged with sex crimes. Bizarre

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25 points

I don’t really think it’s bizarre. Sex crimes and consensual sex are two very different things. The issue here is that some people seem to be facing consequences that last a lifetime for ‘crimes’ that seem pretty insignificant. But if someone raped another person you’d expect them to face consequences even if they are underage when committing the offence.

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8 points

Sexting though?

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5 points

I think it’s pretty reasonable to say that, if someone can’t consent to sex because they’re underdeveloped, they probably also don’t know what they’re actually doing with regards to sex crimes. In that case, yeah, I think charging someone under 18 with a sex crime is bizarre.

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40 points

Yeah, I remember when everyone was starting to get decent camera phones and then news articles started popping up about high schoolers being picked up by the FBI for producing child porn by sending nudes, and their girlfriend/boyfriend for seeing them. There was a bit of panic, that was then promptly ignored because “it’d never happen to us”.

Can’t imagine how different someones life would be if they were tagged as a sex offender before even turning 18.

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19 points

“Did you or did you not ride your big wheel within 100 ft of an elementary school? Just answer the question Timmy.”

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4 points

This brings up a pretty surreal question. If an 8 year old is out on the registry how the fuck do they go to school or daycare or anything? If they can’t go within certain distances of these areas. Imagine not being about to take your 9 year old to the fuckin park.

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14 points

Pretty sure that’s the biggest reason why zoomers turned into such prudes

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3 points

I feel completely disconnected… do you mean that zoomers are prude compared to previous generations (I didn’t know that) and that’s because of the fear of getting caught on camera for making saucy jokes/comments?

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0 points

Prudes? How so

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82 points
*

So, some context as to why this happens: the US does not give a fuck about how old someone is if they’re involved in the production of csam, nor does it care if it was voluntary. This means that, in the eye of the law, a teenager sending nudes to their boyfriend is just as much of a pedophile as the man shooting child porn; and their boyfriend is just as much of a pedophile for viewing and possessing them. I’m guessing that OP likely posted this after reading an article like this: https://apnews.com/article/child-images-police-columbus-cf377933b5be55297cf88c923b8f0b92

It doesn’t stop there though. I have been told to never, ever try to submit evidence to the FBI of someone being a child predator. The reason for that is because the FBI does not give a fuck. They will prosecute you as a predator, even if you’re just trying to do the right thing. Combine that with the fact that an accusation of being a predator is life-ending, even if you’re found innocent, and it encourages people to destroy evidence and stay quiet.

Finally, if there’s any csam on your PC, whether or not you’re aware of it, regardless of whether you received it voluntarily (like temp browser files from accidently viewing a hijacked website with cp on the page), you are automatically a pedophile in the eyes of US law. This is especially destructive when it comes to a video, where each frame is counted as an individual piece of csam. This means you can potentially be taken to court for hundreds or thousands of pieces of child pornography because someone embedded a clip of cp in a movie.

Fuck pedophiles, but the law needs an overhaul. In addition to the number of people who got put on the registry as kids, there are probably a lot of people who’ve gotten fucked because they were legitimately trying to do the right thing.

Edit: I could be wrong about this, the law may have changed or I may have been misinformed. It’s been a long time since I was told this, but it’s in line with the article I linked and the one OP linked, so it’s unfortunately far too believable to disregard. If there are any legal experts who can counter this, please speak up.

Edit 2: someone has replied telling me that I’m at least partially wrong, which I’m happy to hear. Still, stay safe. It seems like using csam to fuck with people, especially those in marginalized communities, is becoming more popular. Report it, clear your cache and/or temp files directory (whichever is associated with the program you had the misfortune of viewing it through), and move on. Or, to put it another way, treat it as if you accidently picked up an unshielded bar of plutonium by the side of the road. Put it down, leave the area, report it to authorities, thoroughly clean yourself off (then maybe go to the hospital).

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122 points
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Um, yeah, most of this is made up.

If you encounter CSAM on the web, just report it to https://report.cybertip.org/ and clear your cache. You don’t have to fill out all the detail fields; just give 'em the URL that linked to it.

But mostly, don’t go looking. Don’t try to be a brave vigilante willing to subject yourself to awfulness in order to protect children. That’s not how it works. If you go looking, folks will assume you’re participating.

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41 points
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Deleted by creator
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59 points

Clear your cache because you know how to, and you really don’t want a copy of that stuff; not because you’re trying to make yourself look better.

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12 points
*

I was mainly talking about submitting evidence, like a discord screenshot of someone posting cp. I might still be wrong there though.

Edit: like, the issues Lemmy has had with people spamming csam is an example of how someone might come across it unintentionally. Someone might feel compelled to actually submit a screenshot or the video itself as evidence to the FBI, which I’ve been told is a very bad idea.

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34 points

NCMEC is the legally designated place to report it. Don’t go to any more trouble than you need to. There are folks whose job it actually is to track this stuff down, take it down, and prosecute the people creating it. Let them do their job.

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-22 points

Yeah it’s just absurd. The offender registry is full of victims. Sure it is. /s

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45 points
*

There is some grain of truth in his otherwise mad babbling.

Ohio treats sexting between underage teenagers as manufacturing child pornography https://www.tribtoday.com/news/local-news/2019/01/teen-sexting-is-child-porn/

and there was the cunt bitch of a cop recently that threatened a guys 11 year old girl with arrest cause he called the police to report a guy grooming her. https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/20/us/columbus-ohio-police-officers-under-investigation/index.html

I cant find it, cause the previous story about the girl is most the searches, but I also seem to recall a story about a kid from…michigan? i think? being labeled a child porn producer because of nudes between him and his girlfriend or something, I dont know, its been a few years.

And lets not forget that you can end up on the sex offender registry for harmless things such as public urination (which tends to only happen in places that make it very difficult to access bathrooms…surely not by purpose /s) and prank streaking… and theres also been some cases of people being like…a year and a half a part in age, together from the early gate, but the second one dings 18, some disgruntled family member reports them and they end up arrested, tried, and on the sex offender registry for acts against a minor.

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16 points

What the FUCK

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3 points

Mens rea is a legal requirement, isn’t it? Like don’t they have to prove intent?

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5 points

lol

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2 points

There are things called strict liability offences, for which intent is not required to prove guilt.

Possession of CSAM is one of those, although I’m not sure about the US (most other countries it is).

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78 points
*

The problem isnt the registries per se, it is that they are extremely poorly administered if children are being put on them. The criteria for adding an individual to such registries needs to be strict and with a reasonably high threshold, so that nobody gets on one for things like pissing outside, or accidental exposure, or minors sexting each other, or for accidentally having a few CSAM images that they had downloaded unwittingly etc

I had some involvement with a local registry some years back, and we only inluded adults who physically offended against minors and with a significant age difference, and adults who were actively and deliberately involved in the production and distribution of copious quantities of CSAM. Most had track records involving multiple offences and multiple victims

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35 points

The criteria for adding an individual to such registries needs to be strict and with a reasonably high threshold

I think this needs to be part of the law itself. If it’s at the discretion of people in charge of administering it, that’s easily subject to corruption.

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5 points

Agreed

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5 points

What does csam mean?

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17 points

“Child Sexual Abuse Material”

It’s the new PC term for child porn. It actually is more accurate, to be fair.

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-3 points

It is just a longer term, not better.

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-4 points

Thank you for educating me. I hate the constant churn of PC terms. It makes communication less effective, doesn’t help the problem in the slightest, and actually hampers solutions. I hope I’m not alone in this.

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5 points

Child Sex Abuse Material

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1 point

They shouldn’t exist. If someone is a danger to reoffend they shouldn’t be let out of prision in the first place.

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13 points

This is what you get with a justice system focused on punishment, not justice, and a for profit penal system fixated on money not rehabilitation.

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11 points

They need treatment and rehabilitation, not incarceration for the sake of filling beds

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8 points

We do the rehabilitation/ treatment thing here. It does not work, at least long term - not surprisingly really given that it is an innate defect of laregly biological origin. The best solution is perhaps not prison per se but some kind of community where they can live somewhat normal lives but are isolated away from children and have filtered net access so there is no possibilty of their reoffending

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6 points

Technically everyone is capable of reoffending.

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1 point

This would be the ideal solution, yes

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In my state they put you on the sex offender registry if you get caught pissing outside

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23 points

To my mind, this sort of thing (no pun intended) waters down the entire meaning of the thing.

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51 points

We’ll eventually see this period of history as being as extreme with sex crimes as the 80s were with seeing satanic cults everywhere.

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5 points

Some day we’ll look at all this and laugh just as we do with that “Satanic Panic”

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3 points
*

With the difference that the huge number of satanic cults people assumed and talked about did not exist.

While the huge number of sexual assaults, rapes and sexual harassment sadly does exist.

I feel people are now starting to care more about putting the lid on it, by various degrees, without there being any real progress in the number of cases. People are “more aware” didn’t really lead to more empathy or more help for sexual abuse survivors. There seems to be a bigger push into the direction “well it’s just a part of life, stop talking about it already”.

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11 points

I don’t think so, especially considering that we have 8 year olds on sex offender registries which is just retarded.

The problem with rape is that many times its very hard to impossible to prove, especially when time has passed. Sometimes it’s possible with messages sent to and from, sometimes with a rape kit.

But what if there was a rape without witnesses where she was so afraid that she didn’t move, and later je “simply” claims she was a consenting partner?

What if she actually was a consenting partner and then retroactively claimed it was rape?

Things get very muddy and dicey very quickly and we’re still living in a “innocent until proven guilty” society, thankfully, but it does make rape a very complicated subject

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-5 points

Well, what do you propose?

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-14 points

We can add the anti-vaping nutjobs to that list too.

Anyone screaming “think of the children!” should always be viewed with suspicion.

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29 points

What’s any of this got to do with not liking vaping?

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-21 points

All research shows vaping to be essentially harmless, especially compared with cigarettes. But governments and private interests are pushing to get it banned, taxed, and are otherwise attacking it. All because it “harms children”.

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