'the light of our lives'

[blue]

'Police have rescued 31 children from abuse after smashing a global Internet paedophile ring with more than 700 suspects worldwide.
It follows a ten-month police investigation involving agencies from 35 countries around the world.

The paedophiles used an Internet chatroom called "Kids the Light of Our Lives" to swap photos and videos of children being subjected to horrific sexual abuse.'

Personally I wish we could institute a kind of 'internal exile' for these perverts, along the lines of Stalin's gulags.

[sound world]

Chances are they were abused themselves as kids.
Education has to be the answer.And learning ethics.
God that's horrible.I was reading about this the other day-it seems the UK cops can infiltrate these rooms,but in other countries it's illegal.
Invasion of privacy,apparently.
(*Pause for dramatic irony*)

[RobB]

I hear Ian Huntley is finding being in prison boring and wants a move.

[sound world]

I'm sure there's a great deal of people who'd like to suggest somewhere he could go.

[blue]

Chances are they were abused themselves as kids.

Which makes their adult choice to inflict abuse on children, in full knowledge of exactly the depth and permanence of the damage they're doing, even greater reason to lock them up until they die, as far as I'm concerned.

I don't buy the 'I was abused myself' excuse, personally. It's the vilest of excuses, and I don't buy it for a second. Lots of people, unfortunately, experience abuse when they are children, and the vast majority of them don't go on to commit abuse when they are adults. At some point, a choice is made. People choose to abuse. They don't do it because they experienced it themselves, they do it despite having experienced it themselves. Which makes them the closest things to demons on earth, in my book.

[sound world]

I agree completely,except for the fact that I'd always rather show mercy than vengefulness.My partner works with many people who have been abused as children-thankfully I'm not able to know (and don't want to know) the details,except that all of them have mental health problems and thus aren't able to make trustworthy choices for themselves.
But,along with far-right snakes,child-molesters are the people who make my blood boil most.I'm inclined to agree with you,Beth,that all of us are given the basic tools to make choices of conscience,and abusing children is the most flagrant disregard of humanitarian conscience.But there must be better ways than the lynch-mob mentality it brings out in us.

[blue]

I think there's a rational middle-ground between the lynch mob and the bleeding heart, though, and for me that's the recognition of the depth of harm these creatures inflict, the deliberate, wilful nature of it (sexual abusers of children devote great time, thought and energy to the achievement of their aims, it doesn't 'just happen', in any context), and the resolution to deal with it effectively. Society has twisted its sense of moral obligation so far in favour of 'helping' these predators that the suffering of their victims has been allowed to become a secondary consideration. It's time a rational balance was restored, which is all most people want. There needs to be a recognition that society's obligation to its children outweighs its obligation to their abusers, a willingness to confront that reality head on and take the necessary steps to make it as difficult as possible for abusers to operate. Removing them permanently from society once they're convicted of sexual offences against children would go a long way to achieving that, and would help to prevent the lynch-mob mentality taking over.

It might also make the credit-card perverts, the ones who don't actively participate in the sexual abuse of children but who collude with it by paying to watch it on their computers, think twice before they click. Do you know how many credit card numbers the FBI collected from child abuse sites during Operation Ore? Over half a million. That's just from one operation. That makes the sexual abuse of children a very lucrative business, one reason it has become organised on an international scale.

Now, these perverts who fund child abuse as a way of earning a very good living, the ones who just sit at the computers and click; at present, if they're caught, they can expect to receive at most a short prison sentence and compulsory registration on the sex offender's register. After they've served any sentence handed out, they're free to disappear back into anonymity and carry on with their lives as if nothing had happened. The public are not allowed access to the sex offender's register, so provided the offender moves to a different area, there's no danger of being exposed for what they are. Result. Now, imagine if these same individuals knew that, if convicted of watching child abuse on their computers or DVD players or having photographs of it in their possession, they would lose their liberty - for life. They would be taken out of their ordinary lives in society, removed to a secure facility and kept there until they died. I'm willing to bet that a fair number of them would take the decision not to click, thereby making it a bit less lucrative for the hardcore organised predators. And those who carried on would have proved themselves deserving of being removed.

There's absolutely no reason for much of the child abuse out there to happen, other than the unwillingness of so many to face it, and deal with it.

[alx5962]

about the credit cards, it's very easy to find a number generator. and if the found numbers are usually linked to an account, sometimes it matches a real account number.

[blue]

Do you mean someone could use someone else's credit card to access those sites, Alex? But any images viewed/downloaded wouldn't be on that person's computer would they, they'd be on the machine belonging to the person who used the false details to access them? Credit card numbers allow the authorities to track down the addresses belonging to them, but the evidence needed to convict someone is on the machine.