Tuesday, July 7, 2009

prize for the most misleading headline, from Dr. J

http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/jul/05/na-child-porns-dirtysecret-dads-often-behind-lens/news-breaking/

“Nearly twice as many children in a nationwide child-porn database were photographed by their parents as were victims of online enticement. The number victimized by parents was nearly seven times that of children exploited by strangers.”

Later in the article, we learn: "What law enforcement tends to be seeing is that the children who are being used to produce these images are kids being abused in bedrooms and basements and living rooms across the United States and elsewhere," said Michelle Collins, executive director of the Exploited Child Division of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The division is a clearinghouse for law enforcement to share information when children depicted in pornography are identified. Collins said this helps prevent defendants from arguing that the children in their pornography collections aren't real.

Since the program started in 2003, more than 2,300 children have been identified in pornographic pictures and videos, Collins said. Of those, 27 percent were photographed by parents or stepparents; 24 percent by neighbors or close family friends; and 10 percent by other relatives.
Just 4 percent were photographed by strangers. The rest were photographed by coaches, babysitters, their parents' boyfriends and girlfriends, or by themselves, often after being enticed by someone they met online.”

Please note the sleight of hand: at the beginning, we hear about “parents.” only at the end of the article, do we learn that “parents” includes stepparents and biological parents. most studies that break this down by step, bio and cohabiting parents, find that bio fathers are MANY times safer than step parents or mothers’ boyfriends. So the 27% were photographed by “parents or stepparents” and the 4% photographed by strangers, is the basis for the statements that “The number victimized by parents was nearly seven times that of children exploited by strangers.” But almost certainly that 27% is dominated by non-biological “parents.”

I looked at the website for National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and could not find the original data on which these statements are based. If anyone else can find it, please post a comment to that effect. This anti-parent screed should be exposed for what it is: an attempt to frighten people into thinking that parents pose the greatest threat to their own children, and that only the state and its bureaucratic allies can be truly trusted to have the child’s best interest at heart.

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Friday, June 26, 2009

You Tube remains Porn friendly

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow

The Culture and Media Institute claims YouTube is not keeping its commitment to be family-friendly. According to the Institute's spokeswoman Colleen Raezler, YouTube's definition of family-friendly content is apparently opposes that of the average parent, who is concerned about what their children experience on the Internet.
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=577594

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Thursday, June 11, 2009

U.S. can't adopt China's porn policy

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow -

China is ordering all new personal computers sold within the country to have software that blocks all online pornography. All pornography is unacceptable, according to Rick Schatz of the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families. But he says adopting China's policy would not work in the U.S.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=561920

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Tuesday, May 19, 2009

A new sexual revolution

Marcia Segelstein - Guest Columnist -

We are awash in sex. We, and our children, can't escape it. The teen clothier Hollister prominently displays Maxim, a "soft core" pornographic magazine on a shelf next to publications devoted to skiing and skateboarding. Urban Outfitters, another retailer targeting teens, has naked models in its catalog. Victoria's Secret TV commercials, which run during supposedly family-friendly fare like American Idol, show high-heeled models strutting down runways in suggestive barely-there underwear. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, available annually at your local drugstore chain, has become an American icon. Sexual references and innuendoes abound in television shows and movies. "Women's" magazine cover headlines regularly promise to reveal secrets to better sex. Hotel chains make huge profits from their in-room X-rated movie offerings. Hugh Hefner -- who almost single-handedly brought pornography out of the shadows and into the light of day (making himself a fortune along the way) -- is just another celebrity.

We have "mainstreamed pornography," as author Michael Leahy puts it. Our hypersexualized, pornographic culture has all but obliterated a vision of what healthy sexuality is. So it shouldn't come as any surprise that the intentional viewing of pornography has become commonplace on college campuses and in the workplace. Michael Leahy documents these trends in his books, Porn University and Porn @ Work. Leahy is also a self-described recovering sex addict whose immersion in pornography nearly destroyed his life.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Perspectives/Default.aspx?id=533912

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Wednesday, May 13, 2009

The Right and Wrong Responses to "Sexting"

by Mary Graw Leary

A proposed law in Vermont will not only do little to solve the problem of “sexting,” but actually risks resulting in making even more children vulnerable to sexual exploitation.

The issue of so-called “sexting” has captured the attention of the media and, now, the legislatures. But the way the media has handled the complicated social issue of children sending pornographic pictures of themselves to others has brought the Vermont legislature to the verge of creating a bad law. The Vermont proposal would exempt the trading of self-produced images of child pornography from some child pornography statutes. The issue of self-produced child pornography (which is defined as a minor creating a picture of him or herself which meets the definition of child pornography: i.e. engaged in sexually explicit conduct) is a complex one. The Vermont legislature seems more concerned with the secondary problem of unwise prosecutions than it is with the behavior itself. However, by neglecting the main problem, the legislation risks significant damage to the children engaged in this behavior and undermines the broader battle against child pornography.

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2009.05.12.001.pdart

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Saturday, May 9, 2009

Child porn websites on the decline - but remain vigilant

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow -

The Internet Watch Foundation's annual report reflects a decline of nearly 10 percent in the number of international websites with child porn. That may be because some countries such as Britain are pressuring or forcing the Internet providers to remove them. But Pat Trueman, special counsel to the Alliance Defense Fund, warns that people should not be complacent, even though the reduced figure is welcome news.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=519548

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Sexperts only a text away from curious teens

Carolyn Moynihan

Adolescent health experts in the United States think they have made a great leap forward in sex education. Since the vast majority of teenagers have cellphones, and since an awful lot of them appear to be sexually active, programmes have been set up in several states to receive and answer questions about sex by text message. The beauty of the scheme is that kids can ask the rudest and the most serious questions about sex without bothering their parents.

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/sexperts_only_a_text_away_from_curious_teens/

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Monday, April 27, 2009

'Sexting' prosecutions in limbo

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow

Questions are being raised over court jurisdiction in cases involving teens who are "sexting" -- sending nude and semi-nude pictures of themselves via cell phones. A Pennsylvania district attorney planned to charge the teens under child pornography statutes, but the American Civil Liberties Union successfully sued in federal court to block the prosecutions. Pat Trueman, special counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), believes the judge was out of order.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=502786

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Saturday, April 18, 2009

'Safe sexting' - permission over principle

Pete Chagnon - OneNewsNow

The special counsel to the Alliance Defense Fund is outraged over a Vermont state bill he says effectively legalizes production of child porn. Vermont Senate Bill 125 will make "sexting" legal for teens ages 13 to 18. Sexting refers to the sending of nude photographs via cell phone -- a growing phenomenon among teenagers. Some teens who have been caught sexting have faced penalties ranging from expulsion from school, to child pornography charges, to having to register as sex offenders.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=489510

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Dear editor: there is a life after palooza

Michelle Martin

Newspapers may be killing themselves by capitulating to porn.

There is something reassuring about the ritual of fetching the Hamilton Spectator from our doorstep each morning and having a quick browse through the local news. And we really want to support our local paper-- but Sexapalooza has made it tough.

Yep, after running banner ads all last week for the consumer show, there is an article this morning on Sexapalooza complete with photograph. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it, but we find this sort of thing hard to laugh off. We'd be sorry to drop the Spec, but it's tiresome childproofing it every day. We stopped subscribing to home delivery of the Globe and Mail years ago for that reason.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/dear_editor_there_is_a_life_after_palooza/

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Saturday, April 11, 2009

University of Maryland statement on screening of porn film

The University of Maryland is a diverse learning environment that respects the right of a free society to offer opinion, including opinions that may differ dramatically from the larger community.Last week, following cancellation of this movie as a university-sponsored event, we pointed out that we would explore other ways to return to the topics of responsible decision-making and effects of pornography in our society.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/college/bal-umdstatement0406,0,5604320.story

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Monday, April 6, 2009

ACLU defends teens charged in 'sexting' scandal

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow

A temporary restraining order has been issued by a federal judge, who found that the three girls accused of sending child pornography via text message would likely win in a civil rights lawsuit against George Skumanick, the attorney who threatened them with felony charges. He had hoped the girls would be forced to participate in a five-week educational program to learn about the negative effects of their actions. The ACLU is representing the girls and their parents who allege the photos were not child pornography.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=472172

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Friday, April 3, 2009

Campus porn nipped in the bud

Pete Chagnon - OneNewsNow

A questionable alternative to a night of binge drinking has been canceled at the University of Maryland. The student union at the University of Maryland-College Park planned to show a triple-X film starting at midnight Saturday. According to an article in The Baltimore Sun, university officials say the film was offered as an alternative to late-night binge drinking and other dangerous activities.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Education/Default.aspx?id=475366

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Thursday, February 26, 2009

A Parent's Prayer

by Marcia Segelstein

Writing about the dangers of internet pornography and children for my column today reminds me what a frightening world we live in. My “St. Augustine’s Prayer Book” includes this wonderful prayer for parents trying to protect their children:

"O Heavenly Father, I commend the souls of my children to thee. Be thou their God and Father; and mercifully supply whatever is wanting in me through frailty or negligence. Strengthen them to overcome the corruptions of the world, to resist all solicitations to evil, whether from within or without; and deliver them from the secret snares of the enemy. Pour thy grace into their hearts, and confirm and multiply in them the gifts of thy Holy Spirit, that they may daily grow in grace and in knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ; and so faithfully serving thee here, may come to rejoice in thy presence hereafter. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen."

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Blog/Default.aspx?id=426232

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What parents need to know about porn and their kids

Marcia Segelstein - OneNewsNow Columnist

Most people probably don't picture kids when they think about who's viewing pornography. But according to statistics cited by the non-profit advocacy organization Enough Is Enough, the largest group of viewers of Internet pornography is children between the ages of 12 and 17. And there's more. The average age of first exposure to Internet pornography is 11. Eighty percent of 15- to 17-year-olds have had multiple exposures to hardcore pornography. Nine out of ten children between the ages of 8 and 16 with Internet access have viewed pornographic websites, sometimes inadvertently in the course of looking up information for homework.

Continue...

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Monday, February 9, 2009

College wrong to host week of 'sexploration'

Pete Chagnon - OneNewsNow - 2/9/2009

The University of Cincinnati is coming under fire for hosting a weeklong event promoting pornography.

"UC Sexploration" week was sponsored by Pure Romance and the University of Cincinnati Wellness Center. The event featured lectures by so-called sex experts, free sex kit giveaways, and a "Pizza and Porn" night. David Miller is the Vice-president of public policy with Citizens for Community Values (CCV), an Ohio-based family advocacy group.

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Friday, February 6, 2009

Selfish adults ruining childhood, says UK report

by Carolyn Moynihan

Yet another British report on how bad things are for children in that country blames most of the problems now facing young people on a culture of "excessive individualism" that has developed in recent decades. The Good Childhood Inquiry says the "me-first" attitude of adults is causing family breakdowns, competition in eduction, a growing gap between rich and poor, unkindness among teenagers and premature sexualization through advertising.

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Soft Core Porn in Urban Outfitters Catalogue

by Marcia Segelstein

Some of you may remember the uproar caused when teen clothing retailer Abercrombie and Fitch published a catalogue with outrageous photos of young men and women in various stages of undress.Well another clothier has followed suit.

Urban Outfitters, which sells clothes to teenage boys and girls, has just published a catalogue with photos any sane person would call soft core pornography, especially considering the age of the target audience.

Continue...

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Thursday, January 22, 2009

High court says no to protecting minors from porn

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow - 1/22/2009

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to revive the Child Online Protection Act, designed to protect children from sexual material and other objectionable content on the Internet.

Pat Trueman, who was a pornography prosecutor in the Ronald Reagan administration, is now special counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund. He objects to the decision by the nation's highest court on Wednesday not to revive the federal law that would have barred websites from making harmful content available to minors over the Internet.

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Technology, teens, and trouble

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow - 1/21/2009

Years ago a wink was considered flirting. Today young people use technology instead.

The current trend among youth is to transmit nude or semi-nude photos or videos via cell phones. Marisa Nightingale of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy explains the phenomenon.

Continue...

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Friday, January 16, 2009

Is Playboy Marketing to Children?

by Marcia Segelstein

According to LifeSiteNews, members of the Scottish Parliament are calling for an investigation into whether Playboy is marketing sexually-themed products to young children. Some of the products in question include sexually themed children’s T-shirts, animal-print high-heeled slippers for babies, and pink pencil cases with the Playboy logo on them.Playboy denies that the merchandise was intended for children, according to the BBC.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Blog/Default.aspx?id=385924

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Thursday, January 15, 2009

A porn industry bailout? It's laughable...

Charlie Butts and Jody Brown - OneNewsNow - 1/14/2009

A requested $5-billion bailout for the pornography industry is likely a joke, says one pro-family leader. Several news outlets reported last week that pornographers Larry Flynt (Hustler) and Joe Francis (Girls Gone Wild) stated their intentions to ask Congress for a $5 billion bailout of the "adult entertainment" industry.

Continue...

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Google to China: 'We're sorry for the porn'

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow - 1/13/2009

The Internet search engine Google has bowed to China's demand that it clean up its act. Google and other major Internet sites were threatened by China because of the proliferation of pornography. But Pat Trueman of Alliance Defense Fund reports Google formally apologized.

Continue...

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Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Tis the season for porn?

I will be called names for writing this column. It always happens. Raise the issue of the pornification of the culture and its fanatical devotees will come gunning for you. If they hope to be intimidating, they've forgotten what delete keys are for.

It's Christmastime and the Fox News Channel, the most conservative of the major media outlets, is running an ad for PajamaGrams, "the only gift guaranteed to get your wife or girlfriend to take her clothes off." The ads feature soft porn images of women disrobing and tossing slips and bras to the floor. The ads run at all times of the day and night. Thus do we usher in the season supposedly devoted to the Prince of Peace and the Festival of Lights.

We all know how far the pornification has gotten. A mainstream movie apparently treats the subject as cute and fun (Zack and Miri Make a Porno) and it runs at the multiplex next to Four Christmases and Madagascar. Hotels offer pornographic movies and omit the titles from the final bill. Victoria's Secret graces every mall — and its windows resemble the red light district of Amsterdam. Viagra and its imitators are hawked ceaselessly. Television, music videos, and supermarket checkout magazines contain the kinds of suggestive words and images that would once have been labeled soft porn.

We know this. But what is less well understood is the world of hard-core porn that was once the province of dingy "adults only" stores in the harsher parts of town but is now available to everyone at the click of a mouse.

Earlier this month The Witherspoon Institute convened a conference on pornography at Princeton University and invited scholars from a variety of fields to contribute. The statistics are mind-numbing. Pamela Paul, author of Pornified, reported that "Americans rent upwards of 800 million pornographic videos and DVDs per year. About one in five rented videos is porn....Men look at pornography online more than they look at any other subject. And 66 percent of 18- to 34-year-old men visit a pornographic site every month."

Read "The Social Costs of Pornography" (The Witherspoon Institute)

They are not, Paul and others explained, looking at Playboy magazine-like images of naked women. Instead, they are descending into darker and darker realms where sadism, fetishes, and every imaginable oddity are proffered. Sex and violence are offered together. Women are presented in a degraded — not to say disgusting — fashion.

Surely only people with peculiar sexual tastes are drawn to this sort of thing, right? Not exactly. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, author of The Brain That Changes Itself, noted that pornography use actually changes the brains of consumers. Like other addictions, pornography use breeds tolerance and the need for more intensity to get the desired result. He quoted Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, in which a college kid asks casually, "Anybody got porn?" He is told that there are magazines on the third floor. He responds, "I've built up a tolerance to magazines...I need videos." Tolerance is the medically correct term, Doidge notes, which is why pornography becomes more and more graphic.

The men (and they are overwhelmingly men) who become hooked on this bilge are often miserable about it. They know that it affects their capacity to love and be loved by real women. As Doidge explained, "Pornographers promise healthy pleasure and a release from sexual tension, but what they often deliver is an addiction, tolerance, and an eventual decrease in pleasure. Paradoxically, the male patients I worked with often craved pornography but didn't like it." Hugh Hefner, the godfather of mainstream porn, apparently does not have normal sex with his many girlfriends. Despite the presence of up to seven comely young women in his bed at a time, he uses porn for sexual satisfaction. Think about that.

Internet pornography truly is, as one researcher put it, "a hidden public health hazard." It isn't cute or funny. Relationships are crashing, women are suffering in silence, and men and boys are becoming entrapped by it. The Witherspoon Institute has done a valuable thing by starting a more public conversation about this cultural poison.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Perspectives/Default.aspx?id=363046

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Saturday, December 20, 2008

Porn company dupes advertisers, gets caught

A pro-family organization is responsible for dismantling what it calls a pornography scam involving major advertisers.

WorldNetDaily reports Florida Family Association founder David Caton discovered that major American companies were giving their advertising dollars to support the porn industry, and most of them were unaware of it. A pornography company based in Belgium, says the report, "slipped onto the vendors' site lists with non-entertainment, scientific descriptions that masked their true content."

"We learned that an international pornography company is attempting to move the industry from a subscriber-based type of user service to an advertiser-based service," Caton explains.

The switch in advertising strategy allowed the pornographer to offer the inappropriate content free-of-charge because of advertising support, so even children could access it through generally safe websites. Caton contends the operation was a blatant deception.

"The Internet sites that they had had applied for various advertising network buys," he points out. "They got their description changed so that the people who were buying the big mainstream companies did not know the content of these particular websites."

Once Florida Family Association notified the companies -- including Allstate, Bank of America, and JC Penney -- the advertisers cancelled their ads and are taking steps to prevent promoting porn in the future.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=358622

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Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Global porn bust rescues dozens of abused children

A worldwide child porn investigation has resulted in 170 arrests, 61 of them in the United States.

Eleven girls were rescued during Operation Joint Hammer, ranging in age from three to 13 years old. According to news reports, dozens more were located in Europe, where Operation Koala eventually led authorities to producers, distributors, and customers in nearly 30 countries.

Pat Trueman, special counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund, is thankful and hopes the trend continues. "One hundred seventy people sounds like a lot, but in reality it's a drop in the bucket," he says.

The multibillion-dollar-a-year business is fueled by those who use it, and Trueman knows that experimentation with child porn increases the desire and the demand. "The more perverted you are, the more perverted you will become -- and your lust is never satisfied," he adds. The result, says the former federal porn prosecutor, is "an endless number of children who are molested" in order to meet the demand.

Trueman says there needs to be more prosecution. "What we need is more tools for the law-enforcement community," he contends. "Much of this material starts right here in the United States, and yet [we have] just a fraction of the resources, financial and otherwise, that we need to go after those trafficking in child pornography."

The multibillion-dollar pornography business represents thousands of abused children.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Legal/Default.aspx?id=354820

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Monday, December 15, 2008

'Responsible' online pornographers - an oxymoron

The Family Online Safety Institute has apparently struck a sweetheart deal with pornographers.

Pornography companies have the opportunity to become associate members of the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI). Bob Peters of Morality in Media explains how the system works. "FOSI says to the pornographers, 'We want you to use our rating system so that parents can block you out if they choose to do so. In return, we are going to recognize you as responsible online companies,'" he notes.

According to a Morality in Media news release, an associate member should exist to support FOSI's two objectives -- "protecting children from potentially harmful material and protecting free speech on the Internet." Peters calls it an oxymoron that pornography companies could qualify to protect children, even if they use explicit labels through the Internet Content Rating Association.

"Now in my opinion, pornographers -- and particularly the hardcore pornographers -- aren't responsible whether they use the rating system or don't use it," Peters contends.

Moreover, he notes that a person can circumvent the system and access the pornography, including children. "You know we talk about going to a place where you'll shovel coal for the rest of your eternity -- and that's where I think this particular bargain was birthed," he concludes.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=350490

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