John Grisham's "Just Looking" Child Porn Apology

[SO Reboot Partner]

John Grisham is a writer of legal-thriller fiction, an attorney that really doesn't want to practice - but pretend to practice law through fantasy fiction. Let's get that out of the way first. Mr. Grisham is a pretender that has decided to use his celebrity as a fiction writer and real life status as an attorney to comment on child porn sex offenders.

"We've got prisons now filled with guys my age, 60-year-old white men, in prison, who have never harmed anyone. Who would never touch a child, but they got online one night, started surfing around, probably had too much to drink whatever and pushed the wrong buttons, and went to far and went into child porn or whatever.
He added: "It happened to a lawyer friend of mine, a good buddy from law school. They haven't hurt anyone. They deserve some type of punishment, whatever, but ten years in prison?"

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-29639956
http://time.com/3511499/john-grisham-child-porn/
(notice BBC and TIME treat Grisham's comment as a tirade on US justice system while other online publications capture the cognitive dissonance/ stupid logic of the "just looking" argument with headlines like: "John Grisham: men who watch child porn are not all paedophiles" <= uh, wtf?)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11165656/John-Grisham-men-who-watch-child-porn-are-not-all-paedophiles.html

IT's JUST LOOKING! is the battle cry, once again. These poor hapless underage willy-wankers just pushed the wrong buttons and went to jail.

The "just looking" defense is such a slippery slope that children can be objectified and exploited because the market for such is "just looking".

INTENT IS NOT IMPACT

Looking has impact, regardless of intent. One may not intend to hurt, but looking does hurt because it creates a market, a demand, for exploitation and objectification of children and other human beings. One could argue the exploitation of children is okay because they have no rights to human dignity, but who would believe that but someone that lives in a fantasy world to begin with?

If anyone thinks that looking does not have an impact, then why does PIED exist? Looking does have an impact on the individual looking and is a debasement to both the observed and the observer.

I could rant for days on this, but I'll leave that to others to comment.

 

[Gracie]

Since I work in the field of sexual victimization for my day job, I will let you know that there are a lot of men "just looking".  The upside is most of them are prosecuted in Federal Court so there is no "good time".  When they are caught, the internet crimes division has been watching through their IP address they can see how long they were on the sites.  No one gets arrested for a "quick" look.  The ones that get arrested are there for a while or frequently or send images on.  And really being drunk makes it okay?  WTF?

Yes just looking at nude people of any age harms.  It harms the person in the picture, because their worth is their body.  It harms the person looking, because they want more and the disconnect from life.  It harms the people in the observer's life.  Because soon they choose porn as being most important. 

I am with you on this one SORP!

 

[Mbg]

I agree in regard to the harm this type of behavior causes.  However, the way in which our criminal justice system handles sex addiction, much like drug addiction, is typically lock em up and then boot em out.  I would say even drug addiction has made progress within the criminal justice system.  I certainly am not condoning any sort of sexual criminal act, but I feel as part of the revolving door system there needs to be more rehabilitative measures to help treat sex addicts.  The demonation of sex addicts is very strong throughout most of the developed world, and in one way rightly so.  But let's perhaps treat this type of behavior at the source.  It is a disease that most would never choose to have.  Sex addiction is real and it's not going away...

 

[SO Reboot Partner]

I agree in regard to the harm this type of behavior causes.  However, the way in which our criminal justice system handles sex addiction, much like drug addiction, is typically lock em up and then boot em out.  I would say even drug addiction has made progress within the criminal justice system.  I certainly am not condoning any sort of sexual criminal act, but I feel as part of the revolving door system there needs to be more rehabilitative measures to help treat sex addicts.  The demonation of sex addicts is very strong throughout most of the developed world, and in one way rightly so.  But let's perhaps treat this type of behavior at the source.  It is a disease that most would never choose to have.  Sex addiction is real and it's not going away...

Hang on there.

Sex addiction in and of itself is not criminal. Drug addiction in and of itself is not criminal, but the intoxication, procurement, distribution and possession of illicit drugs is a crime.  In the case of drug addiction, committing the crimes is a prerequisite to the addiction. The unlawful actions of procuring, possessing and ingesting drugs (all crimes) has to happen before addiction.

Sex addiction does not require breaking the law.

Sex offense is a crime; sex addiction is not. These are two different things. The criminal justice system is concerned with the sex offender, not the addict.

Not all sex offenders are addicts. Not all sex addicts break the law and become criminals. Yet due to the availability and perhaps escalating nourishment of an addiction, some sex addicts end up crossing the line, breaking the law and becoming sex offenders through their own criminal actions to serve the addiction. This is the point the justice system steps in, not before.

 

[Username]

I liked this commentary: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/16/john-grisham-child-abuse-images-sentencing-us
Grisham certainly did not do himself a favor in terms of publicity. But then again, every publicity is good publicity, right?

 

[SO Reboot Partner]

I liked this commentary: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/16/john-grisham-child-abuse-images-sentencing-us
Grisham certainly did not do himself a favour in terms of publicity. But then again, every publicity is good publicity, right?

Only if we truly are in the dawn of the Athropocene Epoch, hubris is probably our oxygen.

 

[Username]

Well spoken, although it is sad indeed.

 

[Mbg]

I agree in regard to the harm this type of behavior causes.  However, the way in which our criminal justice system handles sex addiction, much like drug addiction, is typically lock em up and then boot em out.  I would say even drug addiction has made progress within the criminal justice system.  I certainly am not condoning any sort of sexual criminal act, but I feel as part of the revolving door system there needs to be more rehabilitative measures to help treat sex addicts.  The demonation of sex addicts is very strong throughout most of the developed world, and in one way rightly so.  But let's perhaps treat this type of behavior at the source.  It is a disease that most would never choose to have.  Sex addiction is real and it's not going away...

Hang on there.

Sex addiction in and of itself is not criminal. Drug addiction in and of itself is not criminal, but the intoxication, procurement, distribution and possession of illicit drugs is a crime.  In the case of drug addiction, committing the crimes is a prerequisite to the addiction. The unlawful actions of procuring, possessing and ingesting drugs (all crimes) has to happen before addiction.

Sex addiction does not require breaking the law.

Sex offense is a crime; sex addiction is not. These are two different things. The criminal justice system is concerned with the sex offender, not the addict.

Not all sex offenders are addicts. Not all sex addicts break the law and become criminals. Yet due to the availability and perhaps escalating nourishment of an addiction, some sex addicts end up crossing the line, breaking the law and becoming sex offenders through their own criminal actions to serve the addiction. This is the point the justice system steps in, not before.

Well it certainly shows the efficacy of our criminal justice system.  My point is not that you have to be a sex addict to be a sex offender.  However, I'm sure many are whether they know it or not.  The point is that if we are locking people up for sexual of fences we should be looking to rehabilitate that person, not let them simply become part of the revolving door.  Certainly sex offenders have some sort of psychological problems.  It's unreasonable to assume that these offenders don't know the risks they are taking.  They probably know.  I'm not arguing that all sex offenders are sex addicts, but certainly addressing the problem of sex addiction within the system could be nothing but beneficial. 

 

[Mbg]

Sexual offense is in many times related to sex addiction.  I personally know recovering sex addicts who had committed some type of sexual offense.  Sex addiction is a disease that leads people to do dark and unspeakable things.