AL - Sheriff Sam Cochran spreading lies and fear, as usual!

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As usual, an ignorant sheriff who probably sees everyone as a criminal spews the usual lie that most sex offenders re-offend, which doesn't jive with the MANY studies out there which say recidivism is LOW and totally contrary to what this country hick says.

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Not Every Schoolboy’s Fantasy

Gabriela Compton

Original Article

05/16/2012

By Emily Bazelon

Arizona teacher Gabriela Compton sexually abused two teenage boys. Why did she get off with a slap on the wrist?

When male teachers sext or have sex with their students, nobody laughs. When female teachers do this, the titters don’t stop. Fictional examples: Skins, Big Love, and many more. Real-life example: this wink-wink blog post about Gabriela Compton, a 21-year-old (former) middle-school teacher’s aide in Phoenix, Ariz. Compton sent a 14-year-old boy at her school a picture of herself topless. He sexted back a photo of a penis he’d found on the Internet. A few sexts later, Compton found herself accused of having sex with the boy in the back of her van. A 13-year-old went to the police and said he’d sexted with Compton, too, and she reportedly admitted to that and the sex, too. She was charged with three counts of sexual abuse, three counts of sexual abuse with a minor, and one other related count. Altogether the charges carried a maximum sentence of 39 years in prison. In March, she pled guilty to the sexual abuse counts—and got a sentence of lifetime probation. She’ll have to register as a sex offender, but she won’t go to prison.

As law professor and sentencing guru Doug Berman points out, it is not really possible to imagine a male teacher getting off so lightly for having sex with a 14-year-old girl. Is Compton’s light sentence typical? Can it be justified?

The answer to the first question is mostly no: Compton’s wrist slap is in important ways an outlier. My colleague Will Saletan has been here before me. A teacher named Beth Geisel pled guilty to molesting a student in 2006, prompting CNN’s Nancy Grace to ask: “Why is it, when a man rapes a little girl, he goes to jail, which I’m all for, by the way, but when a woman rapes a boy, she had a breakdown?” Saletan pointed out a 1991 study that found little difference in the likelihood that male and female sex offenders would go to prison. And he updated the numbers with his own informal survey of 37 inmates who’d recently been sentenced. What was different was how long they would remain incarcerated: Will found that the men were in prison for an average of 11 years, while the women were there for less than two. But the women were also far less likely to have molested multiple children or to have molested kids under the age of 16. That is where Compton is in unusual and unfortunate territory. Since she was accused of having sex with a 14-year-old and sexting him and a 13-year-old, she’s not a Notes on a Scandal gal having sex with an older teen. She was doing something ickier.

Is her sentence of probation nonetheless justified because women molesting boys is just different than men molesting girls? There are salient differences between men and women when it comes to sex offenses. For starters, men are far more likely to commit sexual assault than women are, accounting for 96 percent of the total (PDF). They are also rearrested much more frequently.

The women who perpetrate this misconduct not surprisingly have serious problems. Like the men, they have poor coping skills and trouble showing empathy. This report (PDF) by the Center for Sex Offender Management breaks female sex offenders into three types, based on clinical observations. The first group were coerced by men into abusing children, even their own. The second were themselves victims of incest or other sexual abuse—this kind of history is far more likely for women sex offenders than for men, and the women in this category also tend to victimize young children in their own families. The third type, labeled “teacher/lover,” sounds more like Gabriela Compton. They were “often struggling with peer relationships, seemed to regress and perceive themselves as having romantic or sexually mentoring ‘relationships’ with under-aged adolescent victims of their sexual preference, and, therefore, did not consider their acts to be criminal in nature.”

All the joking assumes that 13- and 14-year-old boys just want to have sex, but the law provides that it is in fact criminal behavior for an adult, male or female. Saletan has written about how the age of consent varies by time and place. The research on the cognitive ability and psychosocial maturity of teenagers shows (not surprisingly) that both tend to rise as they get older. Did the student who sent Compton Internet photos of a penis understand what he was getting into? What about the 13-year-old who went to the cops—does that suggest that something was off here, and that it makes sense to view the pairing of a young teenager and an adult as a crime, no matter who is which gender?

I’d rather the law err on the side of caution and uniformity here. And I can’t really get my mind around probation for a woman who was facing nearly four decades in prison, even if it is probation for life that includes sex-offender registration. Thirteen-year-old boys should be shielded from predatory adults the same way girls are. If they don’t think they want the shield, well, maybe they don’t know what’s good for them.

Sexual Futurist - Romeo & Juliet Laws

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12-year-old dies giving birth in Yemen

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Terry Brown Interview with FOX

You will notice in the video they show "40% of offenders re-offend," which is a lie and doesn't jive with true statistics, which puts the recidivism rate around 3.5% to 5.3%, and you can find many more studies at the bottom of this post.

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Facebook mom trolled so badly she sues to stop the madness

Original Article

05/14/2012

By Suzanne Choney

A mom who dared to share words of encouragement on Facebook to an unpopular reality-show contestant found herself as the target of a hate campaign that's raged for six months. After trolls allegedly set up a fake Facebook page in her name and used it to solicit girls as young as 9, Nicola Brookes decided to sue Facebook to find the names of the unseen people who persist in harassing her.
- How familiar this sounds.  Many people we've came in contact with over the years, have done this same thing to others, and they continue to this day posting lies about people, just because they speak out and do not agree with their warped reality.

Brookes, who lives in Brighton, England, has been the target of troll hatred on Facebook since last fall, when Frankie Cocozza, an "X-Factor" contestant, was thrown off the British equivalent of "American Idol" for boasting about drug use. Brookes, whose daughter is a fan of the show, was looking at a Facebook page about Cocozza and saw all the snarky remarks posted to him.

"Keep your chin up, Frankie," she said in her Facebook post. "They'll move onto someone else soon." Move on they did, to Brookes herself.

On the fake Facebook page they created in Brookes' name, the trolls apparently solicited young girls for drugs and for sex, then posted comments on the same page calling Brookes a pedophile. The trolls also later posted Brookes’ Brighton home address and a photo of her daughter, says Brookes.
- Hopefully they were or will be arrested and thrown in prison?

Facebook removed the fake page, but Brookes wants the social network to turn over the Internet addresses of the perpetrators, hiding behind various identities. She maintains that she did nothing more to inflame their bile than share her "keep your chin up" remark.

"As soon as she posted that comment about the singer, people started hurling awful, nasty comments toward her," attorney Rupinder Bains told msnbc.com in a phone interview. Her London-based firm, Bains Cohen, took the case on a pro bono basis. Brookes, in her 40s, has Crohn's disease and has not been able to work for a while. The Facebook fiasco has made her scared to leave her home, with threats continuing, Bains said.

When the law firm asked Facebook to remove the fake page last fall, it did so quickly — "they were great," said Bains.

"But the trolling hasn't stopped," she said. "The trolls will constantly be on there, making comments about Nicola ... and then they say things on other blogs elsewhere and on their own Facebook pages. We have to take steps to get the identity of these trolls."

Facebook, contacted for comment by msnbc.com, shared this statement:

Nothing is more important to us than the safety of the people that use our service. Unlike other websites and forums Facebook has a real-name culture, which provides greater accountability and a safer and more trusted environment. We are clear that there is no place for bullying or harassment on Facebook and we respond aggressively to reports of potential abuse.

The site gives users "the tools to report abuse on every page and the option to block people from having any further contact with them. Reports involving harassment are prioritized, reviewed by a trained team of reviewers and removed if they violate our terms."

In a story in the Telegraph, a Facebook spokesman said much of the same, adding that the site responds "aggressively to reports of potential abuse," but declining to comment on the legal action.

Bains believes there may be four or five people behind the harassment/bullying effort on Facebook, but she doesn't know for sure. The law firm plans to request an injunction from the court in Britain to compel Facebook to turn over the computer addresses of those involved in the cruel campaign.

What happens if such an order is granted and the law firms gets ahold of the names? "We would see criminal prosecution once we've identified the trolls," Bains said. Charges could include violations of harassment and communications laws in Britain.

The case, she said, "just goes to show how the veil of anonymity gives an individual so much strength and power," including the power to wound.
- And it's these same idiots who are going to ruin it for everyone else.

Meanwhile, Brookes has been "through times of depression because of this," but she remains on Facebook, Bains said: "She refuses to be beaten by them."

The Kidnapping Hysteria

Original Article

05/09/2012

By John Stossel

If you have kids, you are probably worried about them being kidnapped. Your kids are probably worried about it, too. How could they not be after seeing all the publicity about abducted children?

In television public-service announcements the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children warns, "Every day 2,000 children are reported missing." Center president Ernie Allen told me, "Our goal is to reach into every home and to generate that key lead that leads to the recovery of a child. We need to send a message to the American public that this is serious."

That's a noble goal, but there is a downside. Kids tell me that all the talk on television about kidnapping worries them. Dozens of 7-to-12-year-olds I interviewed for "20/20" said abduction was their biggest fear. One little boy said he worries every night "because I'm asleep and I don't know what's gonna happen."

Scaring kids might be justified if abductions were common. But the media make the problem look far bigger than it is. The stereotypical kidnapping, where a child is abducted by a stranger and murdered, ransomed, or kept for a significant period of time, rarely happens. In fact, there are only 100 or so such cases every year.

Those abductions are tragic, but kids are more likely to be caught up in a tornado. Maybe we should have warnings about that, with lots of pictures to put everyone on edge.

The Center for Missing Children is a piece of the Fear Industrial Complex. It raises money by scaring us.

Businesses also profit from our fear. Brinks Security pushes apprehension about child abduction in commercials for home security systems. One terrifying ad is reminiscent of classic horror movies.

And we in the media profit from fear.

"For the media, child kidnapping is a gold mine," says David Glassner, author of the Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things. "It can go on for weeks. It's not a one-shot thing. The child is still gone, you can keep following it. Is there a new lead? Then finally, if they're discovered, that's the grand finale."

Nancy Grace has become a CNN superstar by featuring grisly crimes including child kidnappings, complete with an upbeat soundtrack. And NBC's "To Catch a Predator" has become a call to arms for parents by making it seem as if nearly everyone online is out to sexually solicit your kids.

The media have parents scared stiff, says Dan McGinn, who runs focus groups. Some parents won't let their kids out of their sight.

"When they talk about their kids and the risk of kidnapping, the numbers become irrelevant. It doesn't matter if it's 100 kids in the United States or 10,000. They really believe 'it's my child and I could minimize that risk,'" McGinn told us.

During a focus group McGinn assembled for "20/20," parents said things like, "I won't let [my son] go to the restroom by himself" and "I do not let [my kids] go out by themselves in the yard, not even the front yard."

All this worry can't be good for our kids. One child told me, "Anyone could just grab me at any time. A lot more kids are getting kidnapped."

But more kids are not getting kidnapped.

Ernie Allen concedes the point. "The numbers of non-family abductions have been remarkably constant over the years."

But if that's true, isn't his organization needlessly scaring parents and children to death?

"We're trying very hard not to scare people."

But a child is much more likely to be hurt running into the street than kidnapped by a stranger.

"We don't want you to feel like you have to lock your child into a room and never let them out of your sight, " Allen says.

But his message certainly encourages people to do that.

That's a shame. Kids would benefit from being allowed to play in the yard or walk to school by themselves. They should be more vigilant about reckless drivers than potential kidnappers. They would learn to worry about the real risks.

Next week: what we should and shouldn't worry about.

John Stossel is co-anchor of ABC News' "20/20" and the author of "Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel — Why Everything You Know is Wrong." To find out more about John Stossel and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.