Maybe my perception is off, but it seems like there's a huge push by the legislature and some people to do anything and everything to prevent CSAM, yet almost nothing seems to be done to prevent CSA.
For CSAM, there's all sorts of monitoring, scanning, identify capturing, etc. But it's all after abuse has taken place, and it seems that many of the people actually arrested are arrested for CSAM and not CSA. This has even extended to fictional CSAM such as AI generated stories and pictures. As an aside, if that gets extended to political speech or other non-CSAM materials that are determined to be undesirable, that's a big concern. I can imagine that a conservative state could pass a law banning all porn because they claim it could encourage illegal activities such as prostitution, rape, or CSA.
On the CSA side, you rarely hear about arrests (they happen but less than CSAM). There doesn't seem to be any real push for educating and protecting kids before it happens. Ironically, the groups doing the most to educate and implement protective strategies are the ones who have been involved in abuse scandals in the past (Churches, Scouts, etc). Even then, a lot of it is just getting clearances, which doesnt prevent people who where not caught or were first timers. Offenders get put on a list/map. This is sort of a half approach. If they are still a threat, they shouldn't be released. Yet if you comb the list and see some of the results, they don't all seem to fit with CSA. I personally know of 1 who took a leak across from a playground at 2am walking home from the bars and was put on the sex offender registry because it was within 500'.
It seems like these laws are more about peddling to the publicist and lawmakers fantasy of incrementally extreme punishment rather than taking a appropriate, data driven, and level-headed approach that actually protects kids. Otherwise they will just keep pushing ham-fisted low-hanging "fixes" like required scanning and IDs to access the internet.
Because it isn't about CSAM, IMO. You see this with plenty of social issues, notably firearms ownership. The claim is we will restrict/license/outlaw xyz for the kids, but really, a data-drive approach would have focused on different things entirely (eg additional behavioral health services for kids, suicide prevention etc)
The same technology/access used for CSAM identification can find copyrighted files, materials that don't support current government, etc. Full E2E encryption seriously raises the cost of mass surveillance, and why the US government fights it at every turn going back 30 years.
When did we aggressively legislate against, search for, monitor, investigate, and prosecute owning firearms?
I'm taking a guess at what the OP meant, but people focus on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. Supposedly most incidents and deaths are caused by handguns. They're more affordable, and easy to discretely keep on your person. A data-driven policy would focus on them first, but it's easier to rile up the public about AR-15s so we keep doing the less-effective thing.
Things that feel useful instead of are useful.
We're not allowed to use data or experts. They’re untrustworthy and out to trick us.
One might wonder about why ceramic plates are controlled in Connecticut or New York.
It looks like Connecticut first enacted body armor regulations in 1998, the year after the North Hollywood police shootout with a pair of heavily armed and armored men:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout#Weapo...
It's hard to find 1998 news articles about it now, but I would guess that the law was a reaction to this high profile crime.
The second militia act of 1792. Though that required you to have a gun. Which in some fashion required monitoring. In modern times many states require you to have a permit to own a firearm and states regularly prosecute people without a license. In Washington state they have laws about safe storage and the police can come into your house to inspect your storage solution without if someone calls them and says you aren’t storing it properly. There’s a constant stream of cases fighting these laws in court. In the 2025-2026 SCOTUS term there were 14 petitions for cert.
https://scotus2a.com/
> The claim is we will restrict/license/outlaw xyz for the kids, but really, a data-drive approach would have focused on different things entirely (eg additional behavioral health services for kids, suicide prevention etc)
Well, most of Europe simply has banned guns in the hands of civilians instead, so that's some data as well.
The only reason why the US is so extremely lax on firearms is because people keep blathering on about how guns are the last line of defense against a tyrannical government - and yet, what do the most rabid of these people do? Vote in and defend a literal tyrant.
>The only reason why the US is so extremely lax on firearms is because people keep blathering on about how guns are the last line of defense against a tyrannical government
No, it’s because the right to own firearms is very explicitly stated in our constitution and the constitution requires an extreme super majority to update. A 50%+1 majority is all that’s required to ban civilian ownership of guns in most parliamentary systems, not so in the US. The culture is downstream of the law.
> the right to own firearms is very explicitly stated in our constitution
The right to bear arms does not necessarily mean firearms. Arms doesn't necessarily even have to include firearms, and America is already pretty damn strict about certain armaments, such as sub-machine guns.
Americans are allowed to have certain firearms, sometimes, in some places. I'm not sure how one squares that with the blanket statement from the American constitution that Americans have the right to bear arms, unless it's simply an impossibly poorly-informed citizenry
Or just a reinterpretation of a single line of the constitution.
Oh, SCOTUS doesn't radically reinterpret the Constitution in that direction. Or, perhaps maybe it does, but nobody's bought Clarence the right RV yet.
> Vote in a literal tyrant.
Tyrant? You may disagree with him, but he got in through the system. Now if he doesn't get out that is another story.
Being a tyrant has little to do with term limits or office duration.
No part of Europe has “simply banned guns”. Some countries have stricter policies but it’s possibly to own a gun in every country. Some countries are famous for gun ownership, eg switzerland that expects men to keep their militarily issued gun in the home.
epsteins case tells you how much the US political class cares about SA and CSA happening in the US.
Yea, until at least one non-ringleader Epstein party participant goes to jail, I'm not going to believe the US actually gives a shit about protecting children.
There’s no concrete evidence that anyone besides Epstein (and by extension Maxwell, who assisted Epstein) actually abused children. Besides the testimony of Virginia Giuffre, nobody else has claimed they were sexually assaulted as minors (Sjoberg was groped by Prince Andrew at Epstein’s home when she was in her early 20s). And neither the FBI nor the Palm Beach PD found physical evidence of such or communications between Epstein or others indicating this was going on.
Why would you expect anyone else to go to jail under those circumstances? Proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt seems very unlikely
I'd at least expect there to be an investigation, based on the huge volume of information that already exists. Unless we believe that the files are just 3 million pages of casserole recipes and that the people who visited just went to play Settlers of Catan.
There is if someone would follow the money trail. Plenty of hard facts to reach a guilty outcome. And over half of the papers haven't been released. If someone motivated comes to power there is a good chance.
Every president since Clinton protected epstein too, it's not a partisan thing.
CSAM is the perfect trojan horse to undermine privacy everywhere. No politician and no company can oppose it on the grounds of protecting privacy before having the reputation ruined.
Meanwhile the real pedos are rich people vacationing in well known places.
> I personally know of 1 who took a leak across from a playground at 2am walking home from the bars and was put on the sex offender registry because it was within 500'.
You might want to look up if that's actually true. It might be. It might also be a lie to hide the real reason why they are registered.
on the flip side, imagine if it's true and everyone immediately suspects that you're a pedophile trying to appear innocent.
Talk about tainted for life.
What’s up with the cop that cited them for that?
in my limited experience with the law, they tend to really go for you if you aren't the kind of person who enjoys breaking the law.
It's almost like they can spot an easy target.
Deal drugs and conduct yourself violently in society, sit with a gang and destroy property... Police seem to have a hard time with you.
Push someone over who is threatening to knock your teeth out when you're walking with your wife and kids... that's an assault charge, because naively you explained what happened to the police, and they're going to make sure you see the inside of a court room for it.
Don't talk to the police!
Quotas?
Dunno, probably just easier to “catch” people who think that they are good people, they think the police is on their side.
To play devil's advocate: child abuse is usually a crime without direct evidence. CSAM is child abuse but the perpetrator films their crime as evidence. Everyone else who obtains and keeps this material also holds evidence against themselves as the possession of it is the crime.
Now for real: People often do not care a lot about child abuse. It does not affect them as it happens in private where they do not see it. CSAM however does affect them as it makes the abuse visible and shows something deemed reprehensible. In a lot of ways people see themselves being witness (even indirect by purely hearing about it) to CSAM as the victim rather than the children who are harmed in the making and by redistribution.
My cynical opinion is that it is a lot more about social norms and feelings arising from the violation of these norms rather than the harm done through the violation of children.
> CSAM is child abuse but the perpetrator films their crime as evidence
This isn't entirely true. In much of the Western world – outside the US – CSAM (or equivalent legal terms such as "child pornography", "child abuse material", "child exploitation material", etc) can include text, drawings, AI-generated imagery, etc, which no child was abused to create, indeed the child depicted in it may be entirely fictional. Canadian law goes so far as to treat material which "advocates or counsels" the commission of CSA as CSAM - which the Supreme Court of Canada insisted (in the 2001 case of R v Sharpe) doesn't include mere political advocacy for its legalisation (as in e.g. the NAMBLA Bulletin), although some will question whether that insistence actually cashes out in practice.
Now, as a father of school-aged children, I find the whole idea of groups like NAMBLA rather abhorrent – but, I'm hesitant about the government making it illegal for people to express abhorrent ideas, because there are likely ideas which you or I hold which somebody out there considers abhorrent.
Fictional erotica portraying fictional children is not CSAM. There is no child abuse taking place as there is no child in the first place.
Conflating the two is 1. wrong as a matter of fact and ethics and 2. a great injustice to the victims of child abuse.
This is exactly what I wrote about in the second part of my comment. People see themselves as the victim of CSAM or proclaimed CSAM through being witness to it. In fictional works there is no child who could be the victim showing very clearly what these people are really about. They are not primarily concerned about children being exploited but they do not like the existence of such material as them deem it offensive to themselves.
CSAM is a very real crime; including cases where real children are not physically harmed but get sexualized through the composition of the material. It is a crime because it violates children, not because it is offensive to societal norms.
> Fictional erotica portraying fictional children is not CSAM. There is no child abuse taking place as there is no child in the first place.
That’s your definition, but it isn’t the definition many authorities/activists/etc use.
And I’m not defending their definition, merely pointing out it is a real live definition in active use
To clarify, I am aware you are objectively describing the legal situation. I am not making a legal, but an ethical argument. We seem to be agreeing.
There is even a Wikipedia article about the legality. It's quite complicated in a lot of places because people really like to ban it but it very much is free speech or protected artistic expression in countries that have these concepts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_porn...
To be clear fictional pornography about real children has to be distinguished from fictional characters. Even when the depiction is purely fictional. Sexualizing real children is unacceptable.
Not every problem can be fixed by making it illegal.
The CSAM issue is both very real and abused by politicians. When I did some work with a police agency, it was explained to me that there’s a pattern of escalation with people and they tend to accumulate collections and many escalate to actual behavior.
The detectives assigned to this work tend to not last long, and the horrific nature of the crime affects them.
Like all rape, it’s a combo of control and dopamine. The church and Boy Scout leaders leveraged their societial influence and power to compel compliance and even loyalty from their victims. Boy Scouts as an organization inserted itself into existing power structures like church, police and other institutions. It’s difficult for a 11 year old victim to make an accusation about a beloved community figure. They also tend to find ways to make their victims feel complicit. Even if people come forward, they are hard cases to try and exposes young victims to public shame. Many of these people plea to lesser crimes to protect the victim.
I wasn’t a victim thank god, but a Boy Scout leader at my parish was a serial molester who abused dozens or hundreds of children. I learned about it years later and realized that some of my friends were almost certainly victims — in his case everyone in authority just blew it off
> When I did some work with a police agency, it was explained to me that there’s a pattern of escalation with people
You have been mildly brainwashed.
It would be best if that episode lead you to study a bit of psychology but instead you chose to believe.
Like any belief it's a combo of control and dopamine. The feeling of belonging to a group and being righteous within that group hits so hard that it takes hard explicit effort to screen your perception of its effects.
You are a victim because you failed to accept reality.
In Sweden we're going to literally have Minority Report style pre-crime registries for potential child molesters. We already have one for potential domestic abusers. Fuck this country. I need to get out of here before it gets worse.
Say what now? What criteria do they use to scan the populace and create a pre-crime registry of any kind?
What? Since when? What are you talking about?
> On the CSA side, you rarely hear about arrests (they happen but less than CSAM).
Because it is nearly always someone we know. Someone who we just cannot imagine would ever do such a thing, even when the evidence is glaringly obvious. And I suspect that the fraction of the population diddling kids in real life is breathtaking, and nobody really wants to face that head on. Too uncomfortable.
I could just be overly cynical today. But given my own experiences and other people I've known throughout my life, I really believe it is very common.
I think it's similar with other liability issues, e.g., when a company happens to "lose" customer data through a breach. They will be on the hook for not having certain audits and certifications at regular intervals. Practically never will anyone be feeling any pain due to absolute disregard for basic common sense precautions to prevent issues in the first place. So usually, the pattern is that issues that can be outsourced to insurance will be handled by compliance departments - which don't care about the actual problems, just that the fallout from them is "managed" accordingly.
That's actually a little funny. I work in compliance and we regularly work with the teams to improve processes that enhance security. I will say though, that the outsourced work that we send to consultants has the same sort of result you describe.
> There doesn't seem to be any real push for educating and protecting kids before it happens.
Before abstinence and birth control, CSA prevention should be the primary goal of sex ed in schools, especially before high school. (Though on birth control [1] and probably STIs as well the US is not doing well.)
[1] https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/sex-education...
> This also included who is allowed to see you naked and/or touch your private parts. They also explained how to get help if someone what touching you inappropriately. That effort seems pretty active to me.
My school did not cover that (but at least my parents did).
CSAM laws in many jurisdictions include computer generated or hand crafted media that do not pre-require CSA at all. The idea is that deviance leads to CSA, and by cracking down on CSAM, we are preventing CSA.
The US constitution should require proof of harm to a living thing as a prerequisite for criminal charges.
>if that gets extended to
If you provide the government a platform to do So, they'll do Y if you wait long enough
One is far easier to prove. If the government could continuously monitor our actions "Is this CSA?" they might very well be pushing for that, too.
if you wear red glasses...
These laws are a pretext to remove anonymity on the internet and insert backdoors into everything.
It's not about children. It was never about children. How many politicians have gotten caught in Epstein's island by now?
It's all about surveilling the masses and keeping them under control. Children are merely one of the political weapons they use to make the masses accept any proposed solution, no matter how Orwellian. You're not against protecting children from drug trafficking, money laundering, child molesting terrorists, are you?
The problem is, the things that would actually prevent CSA require things like "giving children rights", "widely mandating effective age-appropriate sex education even for young children", and "admitting that it's mostly not scary strangers doing it."
These are utterly anathema to huge chunks of society, especially American society. It's more and more clear, from the scope of the Epstein Files, just how much of American society and government has been influenced specifically to enable easy access to children by rich white men. Even beyond that, the entire right wing would instantly catch fire if we actually required effective sex education. Especially age-appropriate sex education going right down to kindergarten (yes, kindergarten: the better children that age understand what's normal and safe, the better they can communicate when someone is doing things to them that are not that...and I only stop at kindergarten because AFAIK that's the earliest mandated schooling still). Similarly, the right wing desperately wants to have absolute control over their children—treat them as property—so giving children rights that even parents have to respect will get them to oppose absolutely everything.
Plus, as other sibling comments have already noted, the real desire here is for ubiquitous surveillance. CSAM is just the excuse they use.
Somehow, even something as simple as "age-appropriate sex education going right down to kindergarten" would tend to end up "special interests education from vocal minority groups."
To be clear, I recognize that there is zero chance of genuine effective age-appropriate sex education being mandated in the foreseeable future in the US, nor has there been any such chance at any time in the past. I'm merely noting some of the things that would actually be helpful measures in combating CSA if it were possible to implement them.
You're absolutely right that, even if such a mandate had already existed, it would've been erased or co-opted by right-wing groups by now.
Yep, will end up right-wing groups, or same-sex groups.
> ones who have been involved in abuse scandals in the past (Churches, Scouts, etc)
And those groups still have lower rates of abuse than Schools which do a lot less training and enforcement of youth protection policies.
Children are still safer in Scouts and churches than in schools.
Just about every kid goes to school though, so people just prefer to sweep that under the rug and focus on targeting organizations they are not a part of or disagree with because they're easier to demonize and make fun of.
I work with kids, and I've had to take the Scouts and Catholic Church's youth protection training. They are both free to take online if anyone wants to check it out.
>And those groups still have lower rates of abuse than Schools
Is that in absolute terms, or per child who frequents the establishment?
> rates
So something like 1 per 100,000; which of course is still 1 too many.
(The other comments in other branches seem to prove my point. I am not defending any institution by the way. No one should be covering up crimes and/or allowing criminals to victimize people further.)
"Rate" is an ambiguous word. Molested children per year is a rate just as molested children per total children is.
>something like 1 per 100,000
What is this? What number are you citing, and where are you getting it from?
I've never heard anyone say that a rate is ambiguous.
It seems like you're trying to be disingenuous, first with "rate", now with my clearly-arbitrary example of rate.
> something like
A rate is just a ratio between two quantities. You've never heard speed defined as the rate of movement?
I might have interpreted your example as such if not for the "one too many" comment. It's strange to throw out a completely fictitious figure and then lament it as if it's real.
No, it seems more like you are being disingenuous. All you have to do is drop a link to the rates you’re referring to. Instead you’re just arguing semantics. Where’s the receipts?
> something like
I thought adding "for example" at the end was just unnecessary redundancy, but I guess I was wrong.
I still don't understand why the other person is trying to cross-examine me on the definition of "rate" or whatever though. That is the person arguing semantics, not me... (Same with you, except you're going one step further and trying to gaslight me.)
I'm curious, do you have something against churches and/or Scouts?
And those groups still have lower rates of abuse than Schools
What evidence do you have of this? The only sources I can find that would even vaguely support your claim switch to talking about physical abuse in schools, or sexual assault committed by fellow students.
To be clear, we're discussing the sexual assault of children by adults here. We're not talking about physical abuse, nor are we talking about assault by fellow students.
Does the school work to cover it up to the same extent? Are people across the school in on it? Are the rates of abuse higher on a per capita basis?
Why are you making apologies for (Catholic) church sex abuse? Because you are a member and you took a training? Yikes.
Where did you see apologies?
I read it basically as “schools are even worse than churches and scouts yet are overlooked,” nothing apologizing for the churches.
"demonization" of the church?
Ironic phrasing, given the Catholic Church wants authority to decide what is demonic while acting like demons. Why is the comment so plainly aggrieved? Is the Catholic Church a victim here?
Even as your sanitized claim, where is the evidence?
It doesn't exist.
I'm not a Catholic (nor religious at all), and do question whether schools truly are worse than churches in terms of how children are treated.
But that's not the point. You made up a quote I didn't say ("demonization"), and accused the former poster of doing something they weren't: defending the church.
Saying that schools are worse yet ignored is not defending the church. It may also be incorrect, but that's a separate assertion.
That was in the comment that started this chain. Are you using an alt? I'm not sure why this is so hard for you to follow. If I were you I would take a breath and read the chain again.
Here I'll help you:
> Just about every kid goes to school though, so people just prefer to sweep that under the rug and focus on targeting organizations they are not a part of or disagree with because they're easier to demonize and make fun of.
In what world is that useful to your sanitized claim? Is it not an obviously underhanded apology for the conduct of the church? Is the aggrieved nature of this really lost on you?
Buddy, you are fighting windmills. You should go lie down.
HN is very anti-religion. It turns off their brain when they see it and leads to these kinds of responses.
Please tell me which part of your brain is engaged when you converse with your imaginary friend?
Is that really the best reply you could conjure? Maybe you can produce some evidence absolving the Catholic Church here? Or are you also an apologist for institutions that call themselves sacred engaging in systemic sex abuse?