Babbling

[Llama_Fly_Aardvark]

is it worse to die or to be molested?

[Glodson]

---

Llama_Fly_Aardvark wrote:
is it worse to die or to be molested?

---

I hope no one goes with molested. That is a horrible, and enraging, crime, but to stay that it would be better to die does a disservice to the victims, it compounds their psychological damage with the attitude that they faced something worse than death.

[Buddyroe274]

Are you suggesting the proper course of action would have been to rape the dude?

[katt_goddess]

---

Buddyroe274 wrote:

Are you suggesting the proper course of action would have been to rape the dude?

---

With a barrel cactus? Sideways?

Pineapples are so 10 years ago.

[scoobdog]

---

Buddyroe274 wrote:

Well if that's the case we can go ahead and file the murder of my child's molester as premeditated, and if that warrants that there is something wrong with me, then I guess I'll just have to own it.

---

What can you do?

This whole thing is interesting to me because, honestly, I feel a lot of rage these days.  It's one of those things where I start the whole introspective journey because of it.  This is definitely one of those instances where I can feel it build up inside and it's disconcerting to say the least.

[the_shotgun_rhetoric]

Completely justified, sounds like the bastard died too fast though. If I caught someone doing that to a family member his remains wouldn't even merit a closed casket.

[Llama_Fly_Aardvark]

merely commenting that some people here are ok with taking a life, as revenge for child molestation, and some people are in favor of doing even worse. just seems disproportionate is all.

[ShowUsYourTaint]

I don't think it's so much about revenge as it is a form of self help social control.  Well, self help involves what most people think of as "revenge", so you're right, I just think personal revenge has a larger purpose that a lot of people aren't really directly conscious of.  In this case it's because they think the justice system is not adequate in punishing molesters relative to the heinousness of the act committed here so basically it's okay to take the law into their own hands.  If you have no faith in the justice system to provide satisfaction for your families and your personal victimization or provide a punishment that will deter the behavior you find particularly objectionable, or to incapacitate the offender to prevent him from reoffending for long enough if he is likely to reoffend, killing the molester to "teach him a lesson" or incapacitate him for good is the proper response under this justification to achieve personal justice rather than popping him a couple times, getting the child to safety and calling the cops to handle it through the formalized justice system.

The problem with that is that justice has to be collectively agreed upon by a society or you have chaotic conflicts, because individuals can have very different conceptions of justice that sometimes contradict each other.   If people want harsher punishments for sex offenders (which they often do) it's within their power to change the official sanctions.  If most people think the death penalty is the proper punishment for sex crimes, so be it I guess.  I don't agree that it is the proper punishment personally, I think it's excessive, but at least that way you would have a rule of law and not acts that undermine the whole process.

What if this man hadn't walked in on the molestation during the act?  What if his daughter let on that it had happened a week later and he figured it out that way. What if the guy hunted down and killed the molester himself after that?  Would it still be okay?  As okay?  Are we just excusing him for being caught up in the passion of finding his daughter being horribly victimized by this man (if he did indeed intentionally go overboard in beating the molester)?  I'm not saying that passion isn't a factor to consider in determining justifiability, it is, I'm just saying where is the line for killing people who do things we don't like outside of the justice system?  Is it a fixed line?  Or can the line vary, with extension or retraction of acts deemed death-worthy according to changes in personal experiences with it or through misleading sensationalist reports about particularly egregious or bizarre crimes?  (Misleading in the sense that they promote the idea that the especially horrific crimes that are most marketable as stories are common when in fact those crimes are usually extremely rare)

[anDaibhalsHusair]

In such a case where an Individual has presented themselves as an extreme and willful danger to the prosperity of another that has no choice, or comprehension of the events nor its consequences...it isn't rage, anger, vengeful, or spiteful for me. I come to the decision to take their life very calmly, and rationally. Krackkitty mirrored my thoughts quite well, in that to allow them to live on where they are a future potential risk at infecting other children with a cancer on their soul, then it is a matter of simple survival. I don't take delight in the fantasy exercise, I see it as amputating a diseased limb.

[alucardsexyghost]

---

Llama_Fly_Aardvark wrote:
merely commenting that some people here are ok with taking a life, as revenge for child molestation, and some people are in favor of doing even worse. just seems disproportionate is all.

---

I don't see this case as revenge though. If he had found out about it later and premeditated to come after the guy and harm or kill him that would of been revenge and not justified. This is a more heat of a moment where defending his daughter during the act of molestation got out of hand.

Although I personally wouldn't be sad at the death of a child molester and wouldn't oppose the death penalty, I'd be fine with castration, either chemical or physical as punishment and yeah I think that should be a required punishment. Either that or life without parole on the first offense, there is just to much of a chance some other kid is going to get molested if the guy gets out. And since there is a good chance a child who is molested with carry problems with them for life I don't see a issue with the molester having to sit in jail for life, or losing the ability for sex for life seems like a fair trade off to me.

[Llama_Fly_Aardvark]

things that are equally effective at preventing a child molester from molesting more children:

-Death
-torture, then death
-Life in prison
-castration (maybe?)
-being 100% cured of pedophilia (impossible today)

my point is that if your goal is to prevent a person from being a threat, there are options that don't include killing somebody who never killed anyone else. if you really are thinking calmly about it, one objection might be that vigilante death is the quickest and surest way: all other methods allow for the possibility of escape from prison, or probation, or relapse. I could see the sense in that, in a clear-enough-cut case. But some people think he should be more than killed, that he should be gruesomly, violently, murdered, even though such a death would not un-molest anyone.

Or how about this; I, too, don't think the father acted out of revenge or out of murderous purposefulness. The story that he flew into a rage and didn't realize that he had killed him seems quite believable to me. None of us here, however, are out of our minds with rage. We are all sitting comfortably at home or at work, in front of our computers, reading about something that happened miles and miles away. The subject of the story himself, at least superficially, expresses remorse at having taken someone else's life. Yet some of us who's personal lives are not affected in any way by it, believe he deserves to die. What's our excuse?

[Krackitty]

A lot of people here are parents or are related to small children they care vey much for. They need only imagine themselves in the Father's shoes to feel that a child molester deserves an accidental beating to death.

[Buddyroe274]

Well just as none of us are acting out of rage at the moment, none of us a thing to feel remorseful about........I didn't kill a man, he did, but I can  see how my reaction would have been exactly the same, and if I thought I could be facing jail time, I'm sure I could eke out an illusion of remorse, though I just can't see it being sincere.

I stand by my assertions, I don't care which is "worse"........I care nothing for fairness at his point, the price is your life........Hell, I'm willing to take it here.......If the father had walked in while he was stabbing his daughter to death, and he had beat him to death, is that justified?........What if while he was stabbing her she didn't die because he beat the snot out of the dude who's intention was to murder her by any means necessary, is it then justified?

I just feel that objective thinking in a situation such as this is for holier than thou types who want to somehow blame the savior, and not the assailant.

[the_shotgun_rhetoric]

Goddamn man, you write books on here.

[ShowUsYourTaint]

And contrary to popular belief, most sex offenders never re-offend in any way.  That doesn't mean they're cured, but only between 12-24% of them reoffend in some way, and the vast majority of those re-offenses are not sexual in nature.  Actual, sexual reoffense rates are about 4-5% for treated sex offenders and 7% for untreated sex offenders.  I wonder if knowing that would change peoples opinions about the suitability of the death penalty as a blanket punishment for sex offense.  By contract, robbers and burglars have reoffense rates over 70%

There are some who are a lot more likely to re-offend than others and those are the dangerous ones who likely will be a danger to society their whole lives if free.  Those are the 2.5% of rapists who rape again in the above study.  But again, they are the exception, not the rule, as you can see by the low rate of reoffense.

[ShowUsYourTaint]

I know, but sometimes I'm using what I write here elsewhere so it's not a complete waste of time to write this much.  I just think it's kind of a fun experiment to share what I'm thinking about, it's good practice for teaching or maybe writing an actual book someday, and it helps me realize when I've made a mistake sometimes.  Which happens.  It's kind of amazing that people actually take the time to read it considering attention spans these days.  I totally get when people don't want to and why it can be a bit much to ask for people to read it all.

Mostly I just like to understand things on more than a basic level for my own sake, and this requires somewhat more extensive analysis.

[alucardsexyghost]

---

ShowUsYourTaint wrote:

And contrary to popular belief, most sex offenders never re-offend in any way.  That doesn't mean they're cured, but only between 12-24% of them reoffend in some way, and the vast majority of those re-offenses are not sexual in nature.  Actual, sexual reoffense rates are about 4-5% for treated sex offenders and 7% for untreated sex offenders.  I wonder if knowing that would change peoples opinions about the suitability of the death penalty as a blanket punishment for sex offense.  By contract, robbers and burglars have reoffense rates over 70%

There are some who are a lot more likely to re-offend than others and those are the dangerous ones who likely will be a danger to society their whole lives if free.  Those are the 2.5% of rapists who rape again in the above study.  But again, they are the exception, not the rule, as you can see by the extremely low rate of reoffense.

---

http://www.oneinfourusa.org/statistics.php

Of those rapes reported to the police (which is 1/3 or less to begin with), only 16% result in prison sentences. Therefore, approximately 5% of the time, a man who rapes ends up in prison, 95% of the time he does not. (4)

considering only 1/3 of all sex crimes are even reported I think there is a chance your studies numbers may be artificially low. Heck even your link says so.

About 12 to 24% of sex offenders will reoffend[16]. When sex offenders do commit another crime, it is more often not sexual or violent[17]. (The figures given may be low because sex offenses are often not reported.)

Another site discussing reoffending so as you can see it's hard if not impossible to say acuatly how often reoffending occurs because of the low report rate and the low conviction rate.

"The problem with using recidivism rates to determine the rate of reoffending is readily apparent when considering the following example. If 100% of released molesters reoffended, but the rate of reporting is only 12%, and the conviction rate is half of this, than the recidivism rate would be reported as only 6%!"

All I know is my father molested my sisters, was out of jail in 5 years, and just got life in jail about 5 or 6 years ago for molesting another girl, and who knows how many victims he had in the 20ish years in between. So I'd rather see life in prison or chemical castration of all child molesters just to be safe.

[Glodson]

Well, I know that right now, in my current state of mind, I would not kill another. Just don't have a reason to. And I do not condone the killing of others as punishment, for a few reasons.

I get the reaction in this thread though. Sometimes stories take us to dark places. We can imagine seeing the rape of the child and picture our reaction in the moment. We lack any sort of empathy for the rapist, as it is an act entirely alien to us. The celebration of that man's death is more reactive and less rational.

And I believe the reaction is over the top, but I completely understand it as it is hard to pull back from that rage.

[anDaibhalsHusair]

The excuse Is not all of us here are as removed as we'd like to be.

Saying they haven't killed anyone, only molested them, is semantical depending on perspective. A victim goes on to live, and sometimes become offenders themselves. The point is the damage continues to smoldering on beyond the first encounter.

[ShowUsYourTaint]

It could be somewhat artificially low for that reason, but I would not expect it to be significantly so.  It is true that rape et al is very underreported in the general population.  But to the contrary it is also true that convicted sex offenders typically face a much higher level of post-release monitoring and behavior restrictions than the general population does or people convicted of other types of offenses do, so they as a group will be (much) more likely to get caught if they do reoffend.  This makes it somewhat (not entirely) inappropriate to apply the general underreporting of rape to dismiss convicted sex offender recidivism rates like that.  That they do not get caught in significant numbers probably indicates that it is a crime not as prone to reoffense as many other types of crimes, possibly in large part due to the amount of social pressure applied.  Some of them do reoffend and it probably is somewhat more than 4-7% due to the underreporting you mentioned, but based on the fact this number is pretty consistently so low we can still say with decent certainty that reoffense rates are not nearly as common as a lot of people believe.  I wouldn't take those statistics as gospel or anything, but it's very unlikely they are way way off like your hypothetical would suggest.   I appreciate the point though, it is a factor to consider that rape is underreported, absolutely.

There are also some issues with victimization surveys.  In some ways we can't be sure those measures of unreported crime are completely accurate themselves.  Rape is also not the only crime that goes underreported, in effect the same principle would apply to other recidivism rates.  You're more likely to get caught for some crimes than for others, rape being probably the most underreported crime, but still you would expect all recidivism rates to be affected by some people committing the crime again without getting caught.  That actually means comparative analysis of the statistics is still somewhat valid, if they are all at least somewhat commonly affect by the same flaw in the analysis, they are still measuring what we want to measure from a comparative perspective.  We can control for the rate of underreporting of rape too if we have confidence in the victimization surveys enough to use those as a control variable.

The point is when you use anecdotal cases of reoffending sex offenders and apply that to the entire criminal population, you are very very likely not accounting for the reality of the situation.  There are some people who are going to reoffend and there are a lot of others who aren't.  There's no automatic rule that every sex offender is a serial rapist.  That's just not remotely true, but it is often accepted without a second thought that it is.

[alucardsexyghost]

I wasn't trying to use just my anecdotal case, which is why I posted other studies/sources. And I under stand the monitoring and behavior restrictions. I just think those numbers could in fact be very low for reasons discussed in one of my links. Because reoffense is only determined by people who are convicted again and how low reports of sexual assaults are that 6% could be 100% in reality, I don't think it is quite that high, I think they were just exaggerating as a example. But I think it's a bigger margin of error then you are thinking. I mean go ahead and read my link.

heres another one Again the explain the difficulty in finding real findings because of how underreported these crimes are, as well as the standards used for determining if it's a reoffense or not.

" Results of this five-year follow-up study found that same-sex child molesters had the highest rate of previous sex offenses (53 percent), as well as the highest reconviction rate for sex crimes (30 percent). In comparison, 43 percent of opposite-sex child molesters had prior sex offenses and a reconviction rate for sex crimes of 25 percent, and incest offenders had prior convictions at a rate of 11 percent and a reconviction rate of 6 percent"

43% and 53% is a hell of a lot higher then your numbers, and again these are still possibly low due to underreporting.

I'm sure I can find more sources that basically say the same thing, that getting a acute number of reoffenses is next to impossible and the number may be way higher then the studies show.

I'm not saying child molesters should die, I wouldn't care if they do. I do think that on the first offense they should face life in prison or chemical castration because I just think that the risk of repeat offences is way to high. I might have personal bias and be wrong, but just poking around on the internet it seems like quite a few experts agree.

[ShowUsYourTaint]

As it said in the article you linked, the study you just mentioned was only using sex offenders with mental disorders as their sample rather than a representative sample of the general population of sex offenders.  I'd imagine it's pretty difficult to actually formulate a truly representative sample of all sex offenders in a study like that in the firstplace, so that's something to note.  But anyways, as a group, yes, it's very likely the mentally ill sex offenders are much more likely to reoffend than others, for one because the mentally ill often have more impulse control problems than their peers by comparison and this would almost certainly affect how much they act on sexual impulses.  Point is though that study was not measuring the general recidivism rate for all sex offenders, just a specifc subset group of sex offenders who are particularly dangerous, so the 43% and 53% figures were not saying what you think they were saying, not even close.  When you only measure high risk individuals naturally the rates will be much higher.  That's pretty much in line with expectations, that some types are more likely to reoffend than others and need to be handled differently.  I completely agree with that, and the likelihood of reoffense should certainly be taken into account during sentencing and there are certain red flags to watch for.

You are right to be somewhat skeptical of these studies, there are always problems with social research like this that need to be taken into consideration, often due to representative sampling issues or spurious variables, but to throw them out entirely for the reasons listed in these articles is going overboard I think.  I don't think they are suggesting you should throw them out entirely either.  They are suggesting you can expect a relatively wide variance in the results and inconsistencies, which is true.  That doesn't mean these studies aren't at least hinting at the truth collectively.  As it said in your article, it's not unexpected that the especially serious crimes will have lower recidivism rates.  Because the criminal justice system pays way more attention to those offenses it deems particularly serious and devotes far more resources to prevent those crimes and keep offenders from reoffending.  If we didn't pay so much attention to sex offenders, there very likely would be higher rates of reoffense too.  It's not necessarily that they don't want to reoffend or they stopped being attracted to children or whoever they victimized, so much as there's a great amount of pressure on them to not do it again and many of them are capable of stopping themselves.

[lunarnoodle]

I'm in agreement with pretty much everybody else that if he is charged, he shouldn't serve time.

I wouldn't call it a justifiable homicide, though his child was in imminent danger, she was not being killed so technically, if he's charged it'd likely be voluntary manslaughter with provocation, and he won't serve time.

Completely understandable reaction. Hearing someone abused your child would already make a parent crazy. Seeing it happen, it's no wonder this guy snapped. 

I think it's commendable that he feels any remorse at all. Don't think I would.

[DoomsDayDevice]

I'd probably have smashed the guy's skull in if i saw him doing that to my daughter.

And I'm not saying it with pride, or to brag, or anything like that, it's just what I imagine I would do if anyone in my family was being harmed/in danger of being harmed. It's like, if someone broke into my house in the middle of the night, i'd shoot the man dead. You don't know if someone that breaks into your house has murder on their mind, but I certainly wouldn't want to wait and find out. A threat is detected, it needs to be dealt with in the most efficient way possible in order to maintain my family's safety.

[chelydra]

---

Llama_Fly_Aardvark wrote:
merely commenting that some people here are ok with taking a life, as revenge for child molestation, and some people are in favor of doing even worse. just seems disproportionate is all.

---

In the face of a child being subjected to such an act of unbridled evil, notions of cosmic justice that are reached after many days of gazing at one's own navel have no value.  In this type of incident, self-restraint in dealing with the perpetrator is a vice.