MSN to close its chatrooms

I think the real sign of the times is not that it's a new and huge threat but that you and many people think it is.

Thank Dave, that sounds like it. I heard this on the news this morning and wondered why MS were really doing it.

I was really shocked that the BBC would report it without comment about how stupid MS's reason was. What are the beeb doing?

This was the top story on the Today programme this morning, and it was interesting to see that their reporting of it did change over the course of the programme. At first, they swallowed the whole "we're doing it for child safety" angle, but a couple of hours later they were at least giving a little look at the "MS are just doing it for their own benefit" side.

What didn't help, I guess, were all the child-welfare charities who jumped on board instantly to say "Woohoo! This is great! But we think all other internet chat rooms should be shut down too."

If we take that number seriously, the question is what percentage of the paedophiles in the UK actually went there and actually made an order? Well, how many have Internet access? Would saying more than 10% be stretching it? How many of those online would find that site? Could we say more than 50%? How many of those would actually give their details? Surely no more than 50% again. My crap calculations suggest there might be 4,000 of these people online = 40,000 in the country total. Is that really possible? It's a scary number, if so.

I hope it's way off the mark. I hope the media is generating a lot of hype. Even if the number were half that, it seems unacceptable... if it were even more, the mind boggles. Did society always have this many perverts floating around?

I haven't a clue how kids can effectively be protected online, really. I don't trust the ethics of anything Microsoft does, either. But it looks like a serious problem to me.

Has society always had this many paedophiles? Yeah probably, certainly if you take attraction to pubescent/teenage children into account too. It wasn't very strictly policed until relatively recently, and it would have expressed itself differently. I don't think the Internet is creating sexual desire for children in the minds of people who'd otherwise not have it. I do think that the ease and anonymity of finding porn online is making people more likely to use porn whatever their preferences.

If the problem is as bad as it seems, there must be something in the water, because I don't believe that percentage of human beings would naturally be inclined that way...

Of course, not everyone has internet access. 95% of the population (apparently) has some kind of net access, but the proportion with access suitable for downloading porn will be a lot less. At a guess, then, you could estimate that 0.02% of people are paedophiles, which is a tiny proportion - even a 'minority interest' like BDSM interests about 10%, and at least 1% of the population is transgendered in some way.

Yeah? Cool, how so?

i figure this is already being done and doesn't really affect anything

Has anyone else noticed how the big anti-paedophile flaps have only recently evolved from Renaissance-style witch hunts? I mean, literal witch hunts. Even ten or fifteen years ago, paedophilia was most often mentioned in connection with 'Satanic child abuse' cases, which were essentially 17th-century witch hunts carried out by modern-day social workers.

Aren't people checking out this stuff as potentially dangerous? Are they?

It is not impossible to find child porn online without looking for it, by the way. A site once turned up in FT's referrals that led to a picture of a naked pubescent girl. (It wasn't actually linking to us thank goodness, though how it got into our referrals I don't know.)

yes i'm sure there's a trade for child porn off the net also, but the automatic assumption that it is far larger than the net trade, by comparison with eg music fan-dom, doesn't follow

part of the hysteria seems to be the following argument: the NET WAS CREATED THIS MONSTER, plus IT'S ONLY THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG

well it can't be both: either the net caused it, in which case what we find (on the net) is what there is (obviously there may be more on the net than is known about), or it was a slumbering prior monster which the net has revealed (in which case the panic abt the net is misplaced)

ilx/ft etc = good
nasty people getting together = bad

My point about ILM... was that it's a single site. As far as I can recall, that 7,000 figure was from orders made to a single site. We can't assume that every single paedophile with Internet access went to that site, nor can we assume that every single visitor placed an order. How likely is that? So, I wasn't making a point about cause. Just about scary numbers.

!

and i'm saying this if this 90% is correc, it shd therefore NOT be included in this big nervous discussion: this 90% are the isolated technologically beached remainder, eg the same traditional playground-loitering perves that eg my mum and dad had to warn me and my sister against taking sweeties back in the day - not nice obv, and sensible to keep kids well away from, but not a dangerous mutating threat that requires any more panic measures than it did back then

If anything paedophilia is something being allowed out into the open in terms of discussion more than anything else, and this is a good thing.

It's much less than 90%, though. My boss loves to quote an Official Govt. Statistic that 95% of the British population have some kind of available internet access.

I live in a small town. I can make vague guesses: how many people are online in my street? There are maybe 200 people in this street. I doubt more than 10% of them are Internet users. In other areas, it'd be a lot higher, in some areas even lower. It seems unlikely to me that even 50% of the paedophiles in this country use the Internet (let's generalise: many of them are old and quite a few will be impoverished).

What the Internet has done is given us vague numbers to ponder. I never considered it to be anything like this common (for want of a better word) before. I guess it bothers me quite a bit.

I still thing the numbers are fairly small but that doesn't mean that something doesn't have to be done (in a non hysterical way).

i'm just saying that this is a very new crime and a new problem. downloading nasty internet pornography would never have happened if the internet did not exist or if it did not carry these images. also that the availablity may prompt people to go places they might not have done without said access i.e. if access were not so easy, maybe they'd have kept a lid on it?

Ronan you're being naive I think - the key factor though isn't the internet it's the availability of visual recording equipment (camcorders, digital cameras etc.) that mean producing pictures can be done with no third party involvement. So that makes me suspect there's more porn out there than before. Also from what I know of paedophiles (all gleaned from the Guardian etc.) the hardcore stuff generally isn't on the pay sites, it's more often traded amongst private networks, so in order to get onto Perv's Kazaa or whatever you need to bring some home-made stuff along.

This tallies unpleasantly with the statistic that the majority of child abuse happens within the family.

i'm really just querying the way the "rest of the iceberg" bit of her original extrapolation may make the situation seem much more frighteningly out of control than it might actually be, by including one section of the population being mapped in (as far as i can see) two columns at once:

(ie "unleashed by the net to slake their depraved hungers and network cunningly" but also "without net-access")

And that was my point about a single pay site: there's no evidence to suggest that paedophiles are mentally enfeebled, and I should think a lot of them would be too cautious to give details like that online. A lot of it seems to be very much underground.

I wonder if we do ourselves any favours by downplaying the numbers? I made my figures up on the spot and admitted they were crap, but I don't see much point in working overtime to make it seems less than it is, either.

Someone up thread said, educate, monitor and trust as the keywords in this situation, they are quite right.

Are there lesser offenders in this case? I mean as disgusting personally as I find this, I'm just keen to know if there are those who consume child pornography who are not considered threats to society at all? Should these people be punished for what they're doing? I still am not entirely comfortable with the "they are fuelling the industry" argument because on a human level it is surely easy for someone to do this and not feel part of the industry itself. You do hear stories of policemen or supposedly upstanding members of the community being caught.

I guess I'm also asking how big is the jump from someone checking out these images to them becoming a rapist?

I am quite sure there are probably good examples of this sort of action in other walks of life but I can't think of one this minute

I sound like I'm supporting paedophiles now, such is the sensitive nature of the debate but I do think there're interesting areas here as regards the nature of paedophilia.

What about treatment? How successful is it considered to be? What are people treating exactly? Is there any ILXpert on this subject? Perhaps this is still being naive but I don't really have any satisfactory answer to any of these questions, if there is one.

obv the hypothetical "you" is not actually you, y'get me?

Well, maybe there is commerce isn't always in money. Though I'm not sure.

(i'm not trying to dilute adult responsibility for sex crimes etc)

as it happens i suspect this deficit between adult and youthful competence in re technology will NOT simply grow wider, but will in fact at some point begin to narrow again (eg pinkpanther when she is a mom is way more computer-savvy than eg many current parents of 14-yr-olds... )

bullshit, particularly when a lot of this stuff isn't made or traded for profit.

You're right; I should have been thinking clearer. Trading is the same as selling. You're just exchanging for goods rather than for money.

But I would still argue that if you acquire it for free without trading (etc.) then you're not fueling any industry.

Which probably helps them grow up, be independent, be savvy, etc. I mean obviously some kids get harmed but I think a child who is online is more likely to be savvy about sex, and children (people!) who are more savvy about sex are less likely to get abused (though, yes, they are more likely to actually go and fool around with someone).

This may be so but is it really worth drawing that distinction?

Ed: I'm not sure that's true (most of the busts that I've read about involved rings of traders or producers, but then again, I'm no expert, maybe the media misrepresented what was going on), but obviously that distinction is worth making if it's a distinction between doing something injurious to children versus something that's not. It's the distinction between something that's wrong and something that's distasteful.

Because if not, then there's a pretty big inconsistency. Certainly this inconsistency exists in discourse surrounding this. Also I think people are very quick to register disgust and distance themselves as regards the porn industry when there are emails going around as jokes with pictures which are fairly fucking exploitative if you ask me.

Of course on some moral scale some porn is less exploitative than the rest, and when children become involved there is more cause for concern.

In fact as I think about it part of my problem with this is that I suspect that "normal" people descend into what we consider sick behaviour alot more easily than we might admit. I also find it a slippy issue to have to bring definitions of what is safe and what isn't into the matter, jesus it's all a very slippy issue but it also strikes me that fuelling abusive industries indirectly is something people do more regularly than it seems aswell.

And again god forbid anyone think I'm condoning paedophilia, I just find this an issue which seems to require absolutism and I'm not very good at that.

This sentence looks terrible but I think if you look at crime in reality it is true.

You're not likely to get disagreement from Dave and Pink, that's pretty much the core of their arguments.

I think a thing is that with non-consual or violent porn, you can't actually be certain (or more likely you can fool yourself) that what's happening is faked. And in many cases (snuff most obviously) there's good reason for this belief. With a lot of child pornography, there's no real fooling: a twelve year old girl is a twelve year old girl is not an eighteen year old girl.

Not that there isn't a lot of blurring that's worth looking at. From the Private Eye:

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Rebekah Wade, editor of the Sun, took time off from her ceasless hunt for paedophiles and pervs on 11 September to note the arrival of a new stunna on the social scene.

Half a page was devoted to a picture of Peaches Geldof, daughter of Bob and the late Paula Yates, wearing a miniskirt and a crop top, beneath the headline "Geldof junior a real Peach". The accompanying text noted that she is 14 - but, as it quite reasonably pointed out, "an onlooker said: 'she looked much older'"

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