BBM
Often that is done because it avoids making the kids or rape victims have to testify in the trial. It's a tough problem.
I think that a teenager who has sex with another teenager, consensually, who are both over 16 shouldn't be a full blown RSO type crime. However, I think many others should be. I agree with Impatientredhead about not releasing physical abusers back into society.
I read this article and I have little sympathy for the mother. I feel horrible that she has to go through this, if she didn't abuse him herself, and understand her parental pain. However, her son viewed child *advertiser censored* on the web. How many times did I do that? None. Granted the internet wasn't around when I was in college, but I wouldn't have viewed it if somebody wanted to show me some. I would have called the police. Looking at it would have made me vomit.
I would have a lot more sympathy for her if her kid was one of the 17 year olds who have sex with their 15 year old girlfriend than I do a college kid viewing child *advertiser censored*. I don't think a 17 year old having consensual sex with a 15 year old girlfriend should make them an RSO. A college student viewing child *advertiser censored*? Yeah, I think he should. I also agree with the close monitoring. A lot of these guys will eventually ramp up their fantasies with children to actual contact.
It's not like you can hit the wrong link and suddenly a child *advertiser censored* image appears on your computer. The guys who post images know the rules and change providers and web addresses frequently. IMO, you have to be deliberately looking for the stuff, and know how to find it for it to appear on your screen.
I know that love can be blinding, but it aggravates me when people commit heinous crimes and the evidence is inarguable and yet family members say that the perpetrator is a "good kid" or "good person". At the same time I don't think it helps someone released back into society to not have a family support system.
Putting the stigma on to brothers and sisters and other close family members isn't fair unless they were involved, people are different. Judge someone on what, you know about them and not another family member.
I guess to sum up I believe some sex offender laws need to be greatly tightened and others loosened. What this kid did isn't a crime I feel should be loosened. As I stated before it's not easy to find it. I've never looked for it, but I know you can't type it into a search engine to find it. IMO, it's like a secret society that you have to get into before you'll be given the web addresses and other things. You have to put some work into it before you can find it. JMO
First, to stay at least a bit on the OP topic - remember this about the mothers of the accused - they are almost universally blindsided by these charges, given that sex offenders don't exactly go talking about their predilections around the dinner table. Add in the fact that yes, many or most of these guys are in fact quite friendly or charming or even admirable in their daily lives, and you have a scenario that is quite a bit more complicated & confusing for the parents than the media reports & their little snippets of bite size info would make the public believe.
Obviously the above does not apply to repeat offenders - those parents IMO are the ones that are much more deserving of scorn.
As for CP being something you have to look for to be charged with it...actually, according to various articles & studies, there's a plague of people winding up with CP charges who did nothing more than neglecting to secure their wireless router, or who got infected by downloader malware or other background running 'hijacker' programs. Some of them are able to go into massive debt to prove their innocence, most plea out & wind up RSOs & parriahs through no fault of their own, but all of them suffer persecution just because prosecutors aren't legally obligated to use their resources to check for innocence, aren't being held to their ethical obligation to seek the truth, and refuse to do so on their own through either blind zealotry or an obsession with keeping their conviction rates sky high.
Then there are the 'portal' sites, which look harmless, get lots of regular traffick, but have CP and/or secret links to CP invisible in the background. Those can wind up leaving CP in your cache, and gain the attention of LE as a potential CP viewer.
In addition, you also have people pleaing out to CP charges on things that just aren't, like stories & comic books or normal, harmless kid images (think casual family photos) that happen to be on the same hard drive as prejudicial material like extreme (but legal) *advertiser censored* (which many courts allow into evidence in sex crime trials, when they won't in other classifications of cases).
Oh, and I shouldn't forget those who are charged & then have the case dropped because it was bogus - you'll see their names splattered across the news with colorful LE commentary on the alleged materials, but not a word when they are freed - that happens way more often in sex & drug crime cases than you would believe, and leaves the falsely accused as social pariahs who often have google-related problems finding employment.
All of these make CP charges much less straightforward than the general public assumes (unless they happen to be Lifetime Television addicts, they've covered several aspects of the subject quite admirably, though they've still only scratched the surface). And these dirty little secrets of our Justice System are also what make the public RSO databases into bloated crap-shoots.
That's why I believe that CP laws need to be left as is (every time they try to make them broader in application or 'tougher' they get tossed as unconstitutional, as they should), but oversight & limitations on Prosecutors need to be greatly strengthened (really, in all cases, but sex, drug & contempt of cop cases would be a great place to start). Don't get me wrong, I admire the heck out of most prosecutors, but with the near unlimited powers & immunities that they enjoy at the moment, IMO even the best intentioned of them can wind up becoming persecutors instead.
All JMO