Peter Ansell wrote:
On 01/02/2008, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Much of this is a matter of trying to find a middle way between the nutcases and paranoiacs. There is no evidence to show that the proportion of nutcases is any higher than it ever has been. They just have more tools (as do we), and the media relishes giving them more importance than they deserve. There's something dreadfully wrong when we cannot perform normal acts for the sole speculative reason that we might be face-to-face with a nutcase. Being overly protective of children is damaging too when it prevents them from gaining normal life experience.
In a case where it is letting a child go to the park on their own or letting them walk home from school on their own I would disagree that you are in anyway giving them life experience as a fair rational payoff for the risks.
I grew up at a time when it was normal for kids to walk to school, and I can't recall a single situation where any child came to harm thereby. In hindsight I know that these things happened, but let's not blow them out of proportion. Even now, speaking as a member of the executive of a district parents' association for a district with about 23,000 students, reported actual incidents are fairly rare. There may be only a couple suspicious behaviour warnings per year. The risk of pedophilia is much greater in trusting relationships than with complete strangers.
Driving kids to school creates additional risks. I've seen parents let their kids out of the car from the driver side into traffic. The likelihood of serious consequences is much greater from that act than from stray pedophiles. Having children walk to school has additional benefits in combatting childhood obesity. The dangers from that are rarely immediate, but they do have a cumulative effect.
I see photos on the internet as having the same bad qualities without any of the supposed good to the child when they find out people did things to a photo of them when they were little, and their parents explicitly encouraged them to do it by licensing the photo a certain way.
Sure a real picture of a child being abused may show the child with an expression of pain on his or her face. So I can understand the situation where someone might photo-shop a happy face into that picture. Normal people provide an infinite choice of happy faces that could be used for that purpose; they mostly don't post pictures of their child in pain. Licensing does not matter; there is more in the pornographer's behaviour to go after than some vague pretext of copyright violation. One does not seriously combat the problem of pedophilia by putting heavy limits on normal behaviour.
Ec