Thought Crime, UK Style
31 October 2007Two articles from Sky News intend to expose what is clearly perceived to be “typical” paedophile behaviour. While they believe that they offering a shocking insight into the minds of paedophiles, they are merely exposing the deplorable state of a society which seeks to destroy those who have feelings which most people can’t understand.
The first article is titled,
The article claims that,
“[In Second Life] child-like avatars are not just playing on swings - they’re offering sex. These are virtual children of all ages - even toddlers.”
Although this will clearly sound frightening to any normal parent, the title is misleading; it actually refers to adults having virtual sex with other adults pretending to be children. Many people will consider this to be “sick” or “perverted”, but in reality, when both participants are adults, how is it different to men acting out a schoolgirl fetish with their wife? Or adults acting out a diaper fetish with each other? There was even a government advertising campaign on UK TV (encouraging condom use) which showed an adult playing a diaper fetish game with another adult. Are the fantasies involved in such similar kinds of role play explicitly different, or is the perceived moral difference based merely upon the “paedophile” label?
The journalist states that,
Sky News reporter Jason Farrell has been investigating the darker side to the virtual world Second Life - and found an area called “Wonderland” that is being used by child abusers.”
These are people who are engaging in virtual sex, all consenting adults, who are pretending to be children. The fact that the fantasy involves children is only abusive if one considers thoughts to be abusive, which this journalist clearly does. The view of a single journalist could be considered irrelevant, however we must not forget that journalists are writing for a target audience (in this case the British public). With this in mind, one can safely assume that the British public consider some thoughts to be abusive.
Jim Gamble goes on to state that,
“[The] concern is that when they step out of the fantasy world they bring that fantasy with them into the real world and they ultimately seek to act that out.”
This claim exposes the covert manipulation used by governmental organisations when trying to influence the public. During the “consultation on the possession of non-photographic visual depictions of child sexual abuse,” MPs admitted that there was no evidence to support their assertion that cartoon depictions of sexual abuse caused sexual abuse in real life. So, if they’re being dishonest about fantasy leading to abuse, what are they - and by proxy the voting British public - really concerned about? Thoughts. Fantasies.
Sky News also claims that,
But are they only trying to catch child molesters? No.
“Police hope clues gleaned from hundreds of hours of recordings will help them get into the minds of perverts before others have an opportunity to strike.”
Now, child molesters who are paedophiles will likely act - in some ways - similarly to non-offending paedophiles, even though there are differences which differentiate offenders from non-offenders. So what are the Police planning to do? Are they planning to harass someone simply because that person exihibits a degree of paedophile behaviour, without having any idea of the paedophile’s intentions?
Jacqui Smith states,
“We are going to build on [..] expertise, and we are going to analyse the way paedophiles and sex offenders work, so we can catch them and protect children”
If you are a non-offender and you believe that you are being harassed by Police because you are a paedophile, please see our latest campaign.
One Response to “Thought Crime, UK Style”
November 1st, 2007 at 10:14 pm
“Cues to Deception and Ability to Detect Lies as a Function of Police Interview Styles
If you were a police officer, what sort of interview style would offer you the best chance of detecting whether or not your interviewee was telling lies? Aldert Vrij and his colleagues ran a study to find out:
In Experiment 1, we examined whether three interview styles used by the police, accusatory, information-gathering and behaviour analysis, reveal verbal cues to deceit, measured with the Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA) and Reality Monitoring (RM) methods. A total of 120 mock suspects told the truth or lied about a staged event and were interviewed by a police officer employing one of these three interview styles. The results showed that accusatory interviews, which typically result in suspects making short denials, contained the fewest verbal cues to deceit. Moreover, RM distinguished between truth tellers and liars better than CBCA. Finally, manual RM coding resulted in more verbal cues to deception than automatic coding of the RM criteria utilising the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software programme.
In Experiment 2, we examined the effects of the three police interview styles on the ability to detect deception. Sixty-eight police officers watched some of the videotaped interviews of Experiment 1 and made veracity and confidence judgements. Accuracy scores did not differ between the three interview styles; however, watching accusatory interviews resulted in more false accusations (accusing truth tellers of lying) than watching information-gathering interviews. Furthermore, only in accusatory interviews, judgements of mendacity were associated with higher confidence. We discuss the possible danger of conducting accusatory interviews.
In the discussion, Vrij and colleagues summarise:
The present experiment revealed that style of interviewing did not affect on overall accuracy (ability to distinguish between truths or lies) or on lie detection accuracy (ability to correctly identify liars). In fact, the overall accuracy rates were low and did not differ from the level of chance. This study, like so many previous studies (Vrij, 2000), thus shows the difficulty police officers face when discerning truths from lies by observing the suspect’s verbal and nonverbal behaviours.
http://deception.crimepsychblog.com/?p=233
But does Jimbo care?
Does he f**k, he still gets paid.
WM