It’s Always About The Children, Isn’t It?

There are two stories that came to my attention that prompted today’s post:

1. Via Instapundit, Perry de Havilland finds an interview of a UK official, who discusses his interest in creating a “child-safe” Internet in conjunction with the Obama administration.
2. Scientists discuss the effects of “third-hand smoke” on children and how it may lead to universal indoor smoking bans, even in private residences.

Emotional manipulation is a powerful thing.  If you want somebody to do something for you or give you something they might not ordinarily be inclined to give you, one of the easiest ways to facilitate that is to prey on their emotions.  It usually starts with fear (”There’s a market for pictures… pictures of your children…naked!“).  You overblow it, make it seem like a common occurence (”This market is everywhere. Your neighbor could be trying to find these pictures!”).  After letting the fear sit just long enough to make the target uncomfortable, the next step begins - offering the solution.  You’ve reminded your intended victim that fear is unpleasant. You’ve shown them that what they fear could be just around the corner.  Now you give them an out.  You comfort them.  You let them know that you - and only you - can make that fear disappear.  Then you tell them how.  By getting them to fixate on that fear, they become consumed by it, or at least consumed by it just enough to not question the solution.  Stunted child development?  Toxins?  We have to make them stop! Never mind that we’re effectively talking about criminalizing one more common recreational drug, something which will invariably hurt far more children far more directly than third-hand smoke.  You think light contact to carcinogenic toxins is harmful to children?  How about watching family members end up in jail?  How about foster care?  The important thing is that you consider the cure in an empty vaccuum, one in which there’s no such thing as an unintended consequence, where the phrase, “The cure is worse than the disease” is never uttered.

Whenever somebody mentions children, you can almost universally guarantee that somebody wants you to do something you wouldn’t ordinarily do.  Children are the easiest way to get adults to experience fear.  We don’t have a financial offender registry - if you embezzle money from work, you’re not put into an online-accessible database, nor are you forbidden from living within 1,000 yards of a bank.  We do, however, have a sex offender database, Megan’s Law, Amber Alerts, laws that restrict where sexual offenders can live, and so much more.  Why?  The answer is simple:  fear.  We fear that our children will be harmed and we will do just about anything to make sure that feeling goes away, no matter how many people we hurt in the process.  Politicians know this and happily use this both against ourselves and against each other - after all, if you’re running against a politician, do you want to be the sane one talking about preserving freedom of speech and balancing the need to protect our children with the need for a free and open communication medium, or do you want to be tough on crime?  Do you want to talk about balancing the need to prevent exposure to harmful chemicals versus the damage that would be caused to children by inflicting the legal system against their families, or do you want to be tough on toxins and big tobacco corporations?  As Frank Herbert once put it, “fear is the mind-killer”.  He wasn’t kidding.

UPDATE: It’s a bad day to be a sex offender, that’s for sure.  From Slashdot:

“Privacy advocates are questioning an aggressive Georgia law set to take effect Thursday that would require sex offenders to hand over Internet passwords, screen names and e-mail addresses. Georgia joins a small band of states complying with guidelines in a 2006 federal law requiring authorities to track Internet addresses of sex offenders, but it is among the first to take the extra step of forcing its 16,000 offenders to turn in their passwords as well.”

From the news article:

State Sen. Cecil Staton, who wrote the bill, said the measure is designed to keep the Internet safe for children. Authorities could use the passwords and other information to make sure offenders aren’t stalking children online or chatting with them about off-limits topics.

Staton said although the measure may violate the privacy of sex offenders, the need to protect children “outweighs a lot of the rights of these individuals.“

There it is, folks.  The need to protect children is more important than the Bill of Rights and due process.  The need to keep the Internet “safe for children”, even though it isn’t, never was, and never will be justifies any abuse we choose to heap on those who were committed as sexual offenders.

I want to be clear about something here:  I don’t have any pity for sexual offenders.  What they did is incredibly heinous.  That said, we are setting an extremely poor precedent here.  If we don’t believe they can be trusted to conform to society’s legal norms of sexual behavior, why are we letting them out of prison?  If it’s due to some sort of mental illness, why aren’t we putting them in asylums?  Either they’re in or they’re out.  Otherwise, we’re setting ourselves up for all kinds of circumnavigations of the Bill of Rights.  How long will it be until we come up with another class of crimes that, even after their sentencing is completed, will lead to lifelong probation with severely reduced rights?  After all, if smoking is harmful to children, couldn’t we just as easily justify tracking all credit card purchases of smokers to “protect the children”?  Cigarettes are addictive, after all - we can’t be too careful.  They might relapse at any moment.

Strawmen aside, we need to make a decision:  If we believe that somebody shouldn’t be trusted in public around children and shouldn’t be trusted online, they shouldn’t be put in a position where they could be around children or online. That means increasing the terms of incarceration or possibly labeling them “criminally insane” and locking them up in a psychiatric ward somewhere.  It does not mean we pretend that our Constitution doesn’t apply to them - the instant we start doing that is the instant we decide it’s okay to do that to others, and that’s not a precedent I can get behind.

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