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The Las Vegas Review-Journal is running an interesting editorial entitled Upholding our rights: Even sex offenders are entitled to protections of Constitution.  The editorial argues that despite being "an unsympathetic lot, ... if the government is allowed to trample and shred the constitutional rights of [sex offenders], how long before authorities decide to take away yours?"

Yesterday's episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show was "dedicated to a Senate bill targeting child predators."  During the show, which detailed the "extent and pervasiveness of child pornography trafficking in America," Ms. Winfrey asked viewers to contact their senators about U.S. Senate Bill 1738. Winfrey previously testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in support of a national database of convicted child abusers in the early 1990s.  The Chicago Sun-Times has more.

CrimProf Blog reports that the state of Utah reported-rape rate, which is already higher than the national average, "drastically underestimates the actual incidence of rape," according to a new report.  Nearly 13 percent of women surveyed said they had been "forcibly raped in their lifetimes," while an additional 16 percent were "sexually assaulted in other ways, such as child molestation, drug-facilitated rape and attempted rape."  The survey further indicates that less than 12 percent of those incidents were reported to police.  The Salt Lake Tribune has more.

U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson has issued a gag order in the criminal trial of U.S. District Judge Samuel Kent, who recently pled not guilty to charges that he fondled a former case manager. According to the article, Judge Vinson "found it necessary to gag the attorneys and courthouse personnel on his own, without a request from prosecutors or Kent, [in order] 'to preserve a fair trial by an impartial jury by shielding jurors and potential jurors from prejudicial statements.'"  Judge Kent is the first federal judge to be charged with federal sex crimes.

Comments

[Arika]

Re: the Oprah Bill: If law enforcement took their current "pretend to be a child for the purpose of a sting" budget allocation, and pooled resources to instead go after REAL children who are in danger, would we need an additional bill to provide more staff and money? I doubt it.

So the question is, if law enforcement agencies know there are REAL children currently being victimized, why have they spent their money and manpower to protect IMAGINARY children?

Where did Oprah's "over 300,000 criminals who were trafficking in movies and pictures of young children being raped and tortured" number come from? It's like Chris Hansen's 50,000 predators on-line at any given time number.

CHRIS HANSEN: It was attributed to, you know, law enforcement, as an estimate, and it was talked about as sort of an extrapolated number.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Chris Hansen is a reporter for the "Dateline" series, still ongoing.

CHRIS HANSEN: So when we went to interview Ken Lanning, who was the expert we talked to in our first piece, I said, “Look, this number keeps surfacing. Do you think that it's accurate, it's reliable?” And he essentially said to me, “I've heard it, but depending on how you define what is a predator, it could actually be a very low estimate.”

BROOKE GLADSTONE: He took that as confirmation, but maybe he shouldn't have.

KEN LANNING: I didn't know where it came from. I couldn't confirm it, but I couldn't refute it either, but I felt it was a fairly reasonable figure.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's Hansen's source, FBI veteran Ken Lanning.

KEN LANNING: I was somewhat curious about the fact [CHUCKLES] that it was 50,000. That number had popped in the past, because I had been an FBI agent for over 30 years. In the early 1980s, this was the number that was most often used to estimate how many children were kidnapped or abducted by strangers every year. But the research that was done in the early 1990s found that somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 to 300 children every year were abducted in this manner.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: It seems bad things don't come in threes – they come in fifty thousand.

KEN LANNING: The other one that I specifically [LAUGHS] remembered kind of came in the late '80s, where there were a lot of people who were talking about satanic cults that were supposedly running around the country engaging in human sacrifices. And when you'd try to say, well, how much of this is going on? - once again, [LAUGHS] the same number popped up – 50,000 a year.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Sacrificed?

KEN LANNING: Yes. That's what they were alleging. [LAUGHS] This one here was a little bit more obviously problematic to me, because we do have good data on homicide. And at that time, there was somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 23,000 murders every year, so this meant that the satanists all by themselves were killing twice as many [LAUGHING] people as all the other murderers combined.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So why is 50,000 such an unaccountably sticky figure?

KEN LANNING: Maybe the appeal of the number was that it wasn't a real small number – it wasn't like 100, 200 – and it wasn't a ridiculously large number, like 10 million. It was like a Goldilocks number - not too hot, not too cold.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Carl Bialik tracks down dubious numbers in his column for The Wall Street Journal. He followed up that 20-billion-dollar child porn industry figure I quoted earlier, and it led him straight into a blind alley. Now, 20 billion is what Lanning might call a ridiculously large number, and despite multiple media citations and a long string of attributions, in the end Bialik could find no research group or agency willing to claim ownership.

CARL BIALIK: An interesting phenomenon of these numbers is that they'll often be cited to an agency or some government body, and then a study will pick it up, and then the press will repeat it from that study. And then once it appears in the press, public officials will repeat it again, and now it's become an official number.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And it actually displays a touching faith in the numbers supplied by the media.

CARL BIALIK: It does. You know, often public officials will criticize the media, but when there's a number that squares with the stance they're going to take, then it's a great resource for them.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Especially when that stance is unassailable. For example -

http://www.onthemedia.org/yore/transcripts/transcripts_052606_primenumber.html

Is this fearing mongering but instead of terrorists we need a FISA bill for predators? What is going on? Granted, one child rape is one too many and filming it and distributing is all the more horrendous, but where did the 300,000 number come from? Do we really want laws founded on fiction?