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[kaijyuu]

Just give them all the death penalty already. It's what everybody wants.

We should use concentration camps for that. They already carry badges around and have to announce to everyone their sex offender status. Not to mention being forced to live in the worst places in cities, in some cases that being under a bridge.

[Sirus]

Ok, did no-one see the word "some"? I'll bold it next time, so people can see and comprehend it.

Of course not everyone in online gaming is a sexual predator, and not everyone gets on the list because of online gaming. But it is a risk.

In order for a sex offender to find a victim, they'd have to breach that wall somehow (probably in a guild)

You'd be surprised how open some people can be about their age, gender, etc. It's a stupid thing to do, but there's a reason the acronym "asl" exists, and that's because people will respond, truthfully in many cases.

and manage to travel huge distances to find that person.

I remember a story in which a pastor drove 200 miles, packing condoms, to meet an underage girl he met online (the girl was thankfully a police decoy). Long distances aren't a deterrent to everyone, and the distances aren't even that large sometimes. The larger the online community, the more likely you are to find someone nearby. And again, some people are stupid about online privacy and safety.

We already subject sex offenders to a lifetime of torment and exile from normal life, now we're taking away their right to freaken' entertain themselves.

They can entertain themselves with single-player games. Besides, I don't have much sympathy for people who take molest children or grope strangers without their consent.
Now, the ones who are falsely accused or whatever, they're a different story. It's the way I'd feel about anyone falsely accused of a crime. But honestly, if you're wrongfully labeled a sex offender, not being able to play WoW should be the least of your worries.

The sex offender system is absolutely out of control and is ruining two lives for every rape instead of reconciling one while rehabilitating the other.

Clarify? Aside from the trauma the victim suffers (which, by the way, would be the same no matter how fair and great the justice system is), who's life is getting ruined? The rapist, should he/she get caught, richly deserves a ruined life in my opinion.

@B TSG: To put it bluntly, your friend and his girlfriend(?) were idiots. No, assuming the story is factual, he does not deserve sex offender status, especially since both parties were minors. And no, it's not a perfect system. I've never tried to claim that, and in fact have repeatedly stated the exact opposite at various times and in various threads.

[kaijyuu]

I think the logical disconnect here is you believe vengeance to be acceptable, and not only that, preferable to rehabilitation.

[Sirus]

I think the logical disconnect here is you believe vengeance to be acceptable, and not only that, preferable to rehabilitation.

Show me some statistics that rehabilitation succeeds, and I might change my viewpoint. You can't cure someone of being gay, so I'm not sure how you'd cure someone of an unhealthy domination fetish or pedophilia, but hey, surprise me.

[kaijyuu]

Rehabilitation != curing. Any drug addict that has kicked the habit can tell you that.


Rehabilitation is getting a dangerous member of society to be able to live in society again without trouble. I don't think I need to prove to you that that is possible. How to do it effectively, though... that's something that can be argued for days. And in my opinion, our current methods are far from effective; they're more about punishment than prevention.

[Kilroy the Grand]

Just give them all the death penalty already. It's what everybody wants.

[Sirus]

I don't think drug users and sex offenders are comparable. Most people (yes, there are some who genuinely do not) have a sex drive and something that turns them on. Unlike drugs, sex drives are perfectly natural and very hard to change. If some sick dude gets off on rape - the real thing, not a certain pornographic subtype - I'm not sure how much rehabilitation is gonna help. Thus my homosexual example.

[kaijyuu]

If some sick dude gets off on rape - the real thing, not a certain pornographic subtype - I'm not sure how much rehabilitation is gonna help.

Help with what?

If the dude's rehabilitated, that means he's not a repeat offender. So... what's the problem, at that point?

[Sirus]

If some sick dude gets off on rape - the real thing, not a certain pornographic subtype - I'm not sure how much rehabilitation is gonna help.

Help with what?

If the dude's rehabilitated, that means he's not a repeat offender. So... what's the problem, at that point?

A dude who gets rehabilitated can screw up, especially since he's still gonna be attracted to the same things as before. If he can stay rehabilitated, good for him. Maybe implement a new law in which he can be dropped from the list after a certain number of years, and get back to a mostly normal life. On the other hand, if he falls off the wagon, that's at least one more rape victim.

I think we're working at opposite ends here. I don't like rapists, sex offenders, whatever. If there were a way, with a decent success rate, to rehabilitate them to the point that they wouldn't commit those crimes anymore, I'd vote for higher taxes to pay for those services. At this point however, I'm not sure how you could reliably tell which offenders were sorry and wanted to (and had the will to) change, and which wouldn't simply do something horrible all over again.

[kaijyuu]

Well if we can rehabilitate some than it's certainly worth the effort, no?


And as for reliably determining who will fall back into old habits or not... well to answer that we'd have to jump into how we rehabilitate in the first place, which I said a few posts back could be debated all day. If ya wanna jump into that, sure, let's rumble.

[Sirus]

Yeah, no thanks. (thankfully?) I'm not up on modern rehabilitation techniques; my only personal experience with the matter is my dad, who got treated for alcoholism when I was much younger. All I remember of the process is him being gone for a couple of weeks, and him going to AA meetings for a while. It stuck, and he remains sober to this day, but I know that he's one of the lucky ones.

[PhantomSpaceMan]

I'm just casually waltzing into this thread to say this: if you can get on the sex offender registry for pissing in public, or mooning someone, or doing any number of silly and sexual things as a young adolescent, than the practice of admitting someone to the sex offender registry is in dire need of reform.

As for reforming sexual deviants, such as pedophiles and rape fetishists, I recall reading somewhere(citation needed) that a link between pedophilia and feelings of inferiority and inability to socialize with peers. So pedophilia can be the result of a dysfunctional upbringing, in my opinion, not something you're born into and can be treated with therapy, for example. The sex offender registry should be reserved for individuals who have committed rape or have otherwise sexually assaulted someone, as they are very likely to re-offend.

[kaijyuu]

If we can determine that they're very likely to re-offend, I must ask what they're doing outside of a mental facility.

If they're not likely to re-offend, I must ask why all the surveillance/restrictions/forced confessions/etc are necessary.



And yeah it's all sorts of fucked up right now, as evidenced by what started this thread: banning them from online social games. I think there's laws against them joining chat rooms, too.

[Mech#4]

Hnn, I don't know whether I should get involved in all this, but I'm going to anyway.

From my view, we tend to seperate people who are criminals, sexual or theft type, from the rest of the population as if they are completly different people. From this view it follows that we should be able to preempt crimes as those who perform them were going to anyway.

Ugh, this is why I'm kind of loathe to comment, it's difficult to express my views accurately through text.

Plowing on. I'll use the example of surveillence cameras. These were implemented to curtail crimes, catching people when they're performed as well as keeping watch over an area to discourage crime. As far as I can tell this hasn't had as great an impact on crime prevention as people thought, and I would hazard a guess that this is because they're generally ignored. Due to that, more people are caught after the crime, but the prevention of crime in the first place is not something they stop.
From that, the logical path would be to keep tabs on everyone so they can perceive crime before it's even perpetrated. That is a less than feasable or desirable action, because everyone is now a suspect.

If you read the above, then I might say that my view is that there's not much you can do to prevent crime with police or like, other than deal with it when it occurs. Now, don't follow the train of thought that I'm suggesting that then we shouldn't do anything, because I've had that happen before, and it's a rather unfair dismissal.
Now, I would suggest that the rise in crime is due to the increase in population. (a larger population means that there's a greater percentage of people who would perform crime, but that isn't specific people. Factors might contribute it, but it's down to the individual person to decide). This increase in population has meant that there is less of a community amongst neighbours. This drop in community would mean that there'd be less self policing, if that makes sense. If people know each other, than they can evaluate peoples personalities and judge those who are likely to do such things before they do.

It's difficult to foster a community over an entire city, thus we tend to see such closeknit communities in small villages, or in direct neighbours in a street. There is a lot of distrust protrayed over the news and media that makes people paranoid about going out and talking to each other, this would contribute quite heavily to the loss of community. People don't talk because they are suspicious of those they don't know.

Blah blah blah, has that all made sense? I hope people aren't going to judge me completely on a few sentences of musing. 

[kaijyuu]

Made sense to me!


As for crime:population, actually, cities have a lower crime rate per captia than rural areas. So, you're more likely to become a criminal by growing up in a small community than a large one. The reason cities are seen as full of crime is simply the volume of people; while any individual is less likely to commit a crime, you've got a much larger number of people in the same area (thus more criminals total).

It's hard to determine why. There are like a billion factors. For crimes motivated by desperation (IE stealing food), cities have more things like homeless shelters to deter the need. For crimes more... recreational in nature (drugs/etc), it's probably because cities simply have more things for people to entertain themselves with.

For sexual crimes, it actually has a much larger correlation with sexual repression than anything else. Someone can probably find better statistics than this, but you can go here and sort by rape. Basically, the more open the culture is about sexual related things, the less likely people are to commit sexual crimes.  So, if it's "roots" of the problem we're after, that should probably be the first thing to focus on: more openness about sex.