entrapment or not

That is fuckin' hilarious--Bill has never looked at the subject, he's just ranted about some tee-vee show he saw. He's been given the facts relating to sexual abuse, and all he offers is his own "emotional bullshit" about men with high-paying jobs being torn from their families, just because they tried to make a date with someone they thought was 13 years old.

i would fully expect if i was caught in one of those stings my wife would ask me to leave or she would leave and take any children with her, regardless of weather i had harmed my children or not

i never watched to catch a predator, but the morning radio show i listen to talked about it regularly and had the host on a few times, the funniest thing, one night they bust a guy and while they're talking to him he says he's a fan of said radio show and really liked the hosts appearances

How can we possibly consider judging someone by their words and/or deeds?!?!?!?!?

Here is the beginning of having some facts on this subject.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/28029.html

Fears of Internet predators unfounded, study finds
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By Frank Greve | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON " A lot of parental worries about Internet sex predators are unjustified, according to new research by a leading center that studies crimes against children.

"There's been some overreaction to the new technology, especially when it comes to the danger that strangers represent," said Janis Wolak, a sociologist at the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

"Actually, Internet-related sex crimes are a pretty small proportion of sex crimes that adolescents suffer," Wolak added, based on three nationwide surveys conducted by the center.

Two of the surveys contacted 3,000 Internet users aged 10-17 in 2000 and again in 2005. The third sums up findings from 612 interviews with investigators at a nationally representative sample of agencies that deal with Internet sex crimes involving children.

In an article titled "Online 'Predators' and Their Victims," which appears Tuesday in American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association, Wolak and co-researchers examined several fears that they concluded are myths:

Internet predators are driving up child sex crime rates.

Finding: Sex assaults on teens fell 52 percent from 1993 to 2005, according to the Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey, the best measure of U.S. crime trends. "The Internet may not be as risky as a lot of other things that parents do without concern, such as driving kids to the mall and leaving them there for two hours," Wolak said.


Internet predators are pedophiles.

Finding: Internet predators don't hit on the prepubescent children whom pedophiles target. They target adolescents, who have more access to computers, more privacy and more interest in sex and romance, Wolak's team determined from interviews with investigators.


Internet predators represent a new dimension of child sexual abuse.

Finding: The means of communication is new, according to Wolak, but most Internet-linked offenses are essentially statutory rape: nonforcible sex crimes against minors too young to consent to sexual relationships with adults.


Internet predators trick or abduct their victims.

Finding: Most victims meet online offenders face-to-face and go to those meetings expecting to engage in sex. Nearly three-quarters have sex with partners they met on the Internet more than once.


Internet predators meet their victims by posing online as other teens.

Finding: Only 5 percent of predators did that, according to the survey of investigators.


Online interactions with strangers are risky.

Finding: Many teens interact online all the time with people they don't know. What's risky, according to Wolak, is giving out names, phone numbers and pictures to strangers and talking online with them about sex.


Internet predators go after any child.

Finding: Usually their targets are adolescent girls or adolescent boys of uncertain sexual orientation, according to Wolak. Youths with histories of sexual abuse, sexual orientation concerns and patterns of off- and online risk-taking are especially at risk.



ON THE WEB

i would fully expect if i was caught in one of those stings my wife would ask me to leave or she would leave and take any children with her, regardless of weather i had harmed my children or not
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See the study already posted and does it seem that such people are a likely threat to their own children to you?

What your wife would do or not do is kind of beside the point as we are not talking about a married break up but a court ordering the father out of an intact home.

so in your opinion what is the acceptable number of child molestations, abductions or maybe murders in your eyes

1 murder, 3 abductions, and 10 molestations per 100, 000

i could give a **** about some institutes study, one of these pieces of **** gets busted or, if we're lucky, offs himself, good

http://www.csicop.org/si/2006-05/panic.html


Why the Hysteria?
There are several reasons for the hysteria and fear surrounding sexual predators. The predator panic is largely fueled by the news media. News stories emphasize the dangers of Internet predators, convicted sex offenders, pedophiles, and child abductions. The Today Show, for example, ran a series of misleading and poorly designed hidden camera “tests” to see if strangers would help a child being abducted. [1] Dateline NBC teamed up with a group called Perverted Justice to lure potential online predators to a house with hidden cameras. The program’s ratings were so high that it spawned six follow-up “To Catch a Predator” specials. While the many men captured on film supposedly showing up to meet teens for sex is disturbing, questions have been raised about Perverted Justice’s methods and accuracy. (For example, the predators are often found in unmoderated chatrooms frequented by those looking for casual sex"hardly places where most children spend their time.) Nor is it surprising that out of over a hundred million Internet users, a fraction of a percentage might be caught in such a sting.

Because there is little hard data on how widespread the problem of Internet predators is, journalists often resort to sensationalism, cobbling a few anecdotes and interviews together into a trend while glossing over data suggesting that the problem may not be as widespread as they claim. But good journalism requires that personal stories"no matter how emotional and compelling"must be balanced with facts and context. Much of the news coverage about sexual predation is not so much wrong as incomplete, lacking perspective.

Moral Panics
The news media’s tendency toward alarmism only partly explains the concern. America is in the grip of a moral panic over sexual predators, and has been for many months. A moral panic is a sociological term describing a social reaction to a false or exaggerated threat to social values by moral deviants. (For more on moral panics, see Ehrich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda’s 1994 book Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance.)

In a discussion of moral panics, sociologist Robert Bartholomew points out that a defining characteristic of the panics is that the “concern about the threat posed by moral deviants and their numerical abundance is far greater than can be objectively verified, despite unsubstantiated claims to the contrary.” Furthermore, according to Goode and Ben-Yehuda, during a moral panic “most of the figures cited by moral panic ‘claims-makers’ are wildly exaggerated.”

Indeed, we see exactly this trend in the panic over sexual predators. News stories invariably exaggerate the true extent of sexual predation on the Internet; the magnitude of the danger to children, and the likelihood that sexual predators will strike. (As it turns out, Attorney General Gonzales had taken his 50,000 Web predator statistic not from any government study or report, but from NBC’s Dateline TV show. Dateline, in turn, had broadcast the number several times without checking its accuracy. In an interview on NPR’s On the Media program, Hansen admitted that he had no source for the statistic, and stated that “It was attributed to, you know, law enforcement, as an estimate, and it was talked about as sort of an extrapolated number.”) According to Wall Street Journal writer Carl Bialik, journalists “often will use dubious numbers to advance that goal [of protecting children] . . . one of the reasons that this is allowed to happen is that there isn’t really a natural critic. . . . Nobody really wants to go on the record saying, ‘It turns out this really isn’t a big problem.’”

Panicky Laws
Besides needlessly scaring children and the public, there is a danger to this quasi-fabricated, scare-of-the-week reportage: misleading news stories influence lawmakers, who in turn react with genuine (and voter-friendly) moral outrage. Because nearly any measure intended (or claimed) to protect children will be popular and largely unopposed, politicians trip over themselves in the rush to endorse new laws that “protect the children.”

Politicians, child advocates, and journalists denounce current sex offender laws as ineffective and flawed, yet are rarely able to articulate exactly why new laws are needed. Instead, they cite each news story about a kidnapped child or Web predator as proof that more laws are needed, as if sex crimes would cease if only the penalties were harsher, or enough people were monitored. Yet the fact that rare crimes continue to be committed does not necessarily imply that current laws against those crimes are inadequate. By that standard, any law is ineffective if someone violates that law. We don’t assume that existing laws against murder are ineffective simply because murders continue to be committed.

In July 2006, teen abduction victim Elizabeth Smart and child advocate John Walsh (whose murdered son Adam spawned America’s Most Wanted) were instrumental in helping pass the most extensive national sex offender bill in history. According to Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the bill’s sponsor, Smart’s 2002 “abduction by a convicted sex offender” might have been prevented had his bill been law. “I don’t want to see others go through what I had to go through,” said Smart. “This bill should go through without a thought.” Yet bills passed without thought rarely make good laws. In fact, a closer look at the cases of Elizabeth Smart and Adam Walsh demonstrate why sex offender registries do not protect children. Like most people who abduct children, Smart’s kidnapper, Brian David Mitchell, was not a convicted sex offender. Nor was Adam Walsh abducted by a sex offender. Apparently unable to find a vocal advocate for a child who had actually been abducted by a convicted sex offender, Hatch used Smart and Walsh to promote an agenda that had nothing to do with the circumstances of their abductions. The two high-profile abductions (neither by sex offenders) were somehow claimed to demonstrate the urgent need for tighter restrictions on sex offenders. Hatch’s bill, signed by President Bush on July 27, will likely have little effect in protecting America’s children.

The last high-profile government effort to prevent Internet predation occurred in December 2002, when President Bush signed the Dot-Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act into law, creating a special safe Internet “neighborhood” for children. Elliot Noss, president of Internet address registrar Tucows Inc., correctly predicted that the domain had “absolutely zero” chance of being effective. The “.kids.us” domain is now a largely ignored Internet footnote that has done little or nothing to protect children.

Tragic Misdirection

i could give a **** about some institutes study, one of these pieces of **** gets busted or, if we're lucky, offs himself, good
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That the problem blind emotions sitting public polices and ending up doing way more harm to children and families then the underlining problem/acts.

We are going to do things that make us feel better driven by fear and misunderstanding and the need for TV shows to have high ratings.

Shame on you for allowing your emotions to take control instead of looking at the facts.

This is pretty weak.

The vast majority of these crimes are committed by men. How many molestations are you willing to endure in order for men to live in the same homes as children?

In fact, perhaps men are so dangerous that they should be isolated from women and children entirely....

Oh speaking of fear driven laws ending up harming the very people it was suppose to protect do you not love young teenage girls being charge under the the child porn laws for sending "dirty" pictures of their own bodies to boyfriends!

if it's strictly one to one i don't see a problem provided both are under 18

In fact, perhaps men are so dangerous that they should be isolated from women and children entirely....
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That where the "logic" and emotions seem to be leaving to here.

When are we as a population going to stop people from pushing our emotions buttons for their own benefits?

Ratings for a TV show and DAs and other public officers looking to forward their own carreers.

if it's strictly one to one i don't see a problem provided both are under 18
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You might not see the problem but that does not mean that this law is not now being used to harm the very people that it was design to protect.

Oh what if the girl is 16 and the boy is 19?

In my state they can have sex all day long and not break the law but if he had a nude picture of her he and she are both in trouble!

BillRM

I have to say that the arguments you have been making on this thread are unbelievable. They are so flawed and so vacuous that I am having a hard time believing that you are seriously presenting them.

Have innocent adults been convicted of sex crimes which they never committed? Yes.

Is there any evidence that our society is seething with hysterical or malevolent witch-hunts that are leaving ruined innocent lives scattered all over the landscape? No.

Whether or not the individual in this scenario will be able to successfully avail himself of the entrapment defense is immaterial as respects the picture when can paint of him. I don't believe he will. There are numerous gaps in the scenario but if we make reasonable assumptions to fill them in, we do not find someone who was entrapped, and we certainly don't find someone who is innocent.

This is a man who engaged in sex filled communication with someone he very likely believed was a child before her age was revealed and even if this is not the case, continued the sex talk after he learned she was 11 years old.

You'll note that the end of the scenario was not when he learned she was 11 and said "This can't continue." No, the seductive little vixen kept him slavering in the chat room despite his earnest best intentions, and what's more, convinced him to arrange a meeting with her.

What did he intend for the meeting?

Did he plan on warning her, in person, of the dangers of internet chat rooms and have a long talk with her parents?

Did he enjoy her unique theories on human sexuality and simply wish to continue their fascinating discussion over cups of latte and blueberry scones?

He went to meeting with the thoughts of having sex with an 11 year old girl running through his head. Fortunately he met the detective and not a girl, but what would have happened if she really was an 11 year old girl?

Maybe he only hoped to see her in person, to hear her voice, and perhaps stroke her hair or hand so that his sexual fantasies involving her would be that much more vivid.

Maybe he only intended to expose himself and masturbate.

Maybe he truly thought he had hit the jackpot and found an 11 year old girl with the sexual appetites of a woman with whom he could have sex. (Of course any such poor creature would have to be the damaged product of prior sexual abuses, but so what)

Maybe he intended to kidnap rape and kill her.

Whatever he intended, he went to meet a child on the basis of his sexual desire for her. This makes him at the very least a despicable creep; not an innocent dupe entrapped by overreaching police.

Whatever fevered sex fantasies dance, scuttle or lurch through a person's mind, the thoughts alone do not represent a crime and if thoughts alone were what this fellow and others like him were being prosecuted for I would be sympathetic. When these folks attempt to ensnare within or impose upon innocents, incompetents, and the unwilling, they've crossed a very bright and important line.

If this man lost his reputation, his family and his job as a result of being arrested it will be because he desired to involve a child in his sexual perversions, not because the police unfairly tricked him.

Frankly, the notion that the detective was guilty of entrapment because she presented herself as this man's ultimate fantasy - an 11 year old girl with the libido of a 21 year old woman is sickening.

Speaking about vacuous, how many false arrests does it take to have a system out of control? Id say that more than one is endemic of a systematic failure. Your use of the superlative makes it sound like "a little murder is really ok, if the ends are justified".


REMEMBER, this entire thread was a "setup" argument and was based upon everyones pre conditioning to protect kids. Im seeing that we might as well pitch the entire presumed innocence POL. WHile there certainly are predators, the law had better be damn well super tight in its modus o capture and how it builds its case against an ALLEGED perp..
The amount of actual cases of entrapment seem to be growing and the amount of false witness cases from evil little girls who are seeking revenge on overly strict teachers is also growing.

POwer will almost always be used when it is available, and sex law does go far to change the power structure in relationships, both intimate relationships as well as other types. When we give the victim power play the ability to work above all other power plays then you can be damn sure that lots of victims will materialize. It is time to realize that the child saviour community has gotten far too much of what it wanted, and that these resulting laws weaken us all. The allegation of abuse should count when deciding what to do and what is right, but it should be one factor among many. All too often alleging abuse is a game winner in and of itself.

TRUE DAT. I gave a talk (I was invited) to a bunch of 4th grade kids. I was talking about microfossils and I had a binocular scope and a projector. I projected the thin sections onto a screen and gave my talk. A bunch of the kids wanted to see through the scope so I let em and they were all crowded around the scope. I showed one kid a thin section of some Diatoms and as I held the slide the kid was touching the slide and , I held the slide in his hand so he wouldnt drop it or worse, cut himself \.
The teacher, some PC wombat, took me aside and lectured me about how "We dont touch the kids and I shouldnt have had that contact with the "scholar" (It was a fancy schmancy private school where kids are trained never to take a **** until they are 21).
I told the teacher, (quietly) that maybe she didnt want me to finish this lecture and if I want to not hav some kid cut his little hand on the edge of a glass slide, Ill take whatever means I feel is proper. We ended my entire, albeit brief tenure at that school with me , teacher, and headmaster in some fruitless threeway (discussion) about propriety . I said that such "rules ought to be expressed and written out before "entrapping" some clueless guest lecturer in some bogus hyped up witch trial,
Im not afraid to pat a kid on the head cause I think they react positivelt to touch. My kids were the kind that would crawl all over you when it was story time, and we never made our kids fear contact . We did teach them safety with strangers but not to the extreme that all adults were EVIL PREDATORS.


OH WELL,

Your hysterical fear of police entrapment and evil little girls seems similar to the hysterical fear of sexual predators you, and others decry.

Perhaps I missed something, but I don't know what you mean by this thread being a "setup"argument.

It's a simple matter.

If you engage in sex talk on the internet with someone you believe to be an 11 year old girl and then show up at a meeting you have arranged with her, should you find yourself confronted by the police, you have not been entrapped and society is better off having you apprehended.

This is not a scenario where someone who is making a presentation to a room full of 4th graders pats a kid on the head and is then charged with sexual molestation.

Obviously you have no familiarity with situations where parents are parents, and kids are kids, and the kids tell the parents that if the kids don't get what they want then they will call child protective services.

Obviously you have no awareness of situations where neighbor relationships go bad, and one neighbor decides to call child protective services alleging that the neighbor that they are pissed off at is abusing their kids. This actually happened to me, and Child Services came out, talked up and down the street, and demanded to tour my house with no notice. Had they found or heard anything that they did not approve of I would have been fucked, this I promise you.

Three years ago my daughter was playing on the HS basketball team. Two sets of parents decided that the couch was not playing their kids right. Went to coach complaining, coach said that this was his team and he was doing what he thought was best for the team. Right on schedule both girls went to the principal alleging inappropriate contact with the coach. The coach was suspended for two months during an investigation. He was cleared, the administration finally decided to agree with all of the other kids and parents that were involved with the team, with the conclusion that these two families were trying to run the team. The coach of course moved out of state. He was a very good coach, took the team to State.