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LadyEllen -> RE: Goverment bans "violent porn" (9/4/2006 6:32:18 AM)
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isnt it funny how whenever there is some dreadful crime that shows clearly how ineffective government policy is, we have to have some knee jerk reaction regulation that will conveniently put the blame somewhere else?
Dunblane - it wasnt that the guy was obviously and medically known to be psychotic and should never have had a gun in the first place, it was that people who want guns are clearly all crazy - so ban guns. Meanwhile I note violent crime rising.....
School plays - it isnt that some paedo who should have been locked up long ago without parole might get hold of the video of your child, its that anyone who videos their child is obviously a paedo - so ban videos in school. Meanwhile I note child abuse has not been eradicated.....
And now "violent" porn, because it isnt that the odd mentally ill person might get tipped over the edge, but that anyone who looks at the stuff is a damaged individual who is a menace to society - so ban violent porn. I expect however no reduction in rape and sexual assaults........
This problem in the UK today is yet another result of the mismanagement of Mrs Thatcher (who some say was our first female PM, but I assume they are using a silent fe). She closed down the psychiatric hospitals in favour of "care in the community" - a policy which to this date means that all kinds of dangerously ill people are walking our streets unsupervised, receiving minimal medical and psychiatric/psychological treatment if they get any at all. Thus we get every year a string of terrible attacks and murders and nowhere but the prisons to send the perpetrators.
The people who do these types of crimes are not morally evil as might be a normal healthy person who chooses to do wrong - these are psychologically ill people. There is no point in sending them to prison to punish them, as they do not see how they have done wrong - what they do is for them normal and harmless. We send them to prison because that is the only place we have to send them, and then they are released when their sentences are up, to do the same "normal, harmless" behaviours again.
Until we admit as a society that public protection begins with institutional care for these dangerously ill people, before they commit some dreadful act rather than afterwards, we will have to have laws to forbid almost anything and everything on a just in case basis. Neither is this a human rights issue - if I were the new Typhoid Mary, I could expect that my human rights would have to come second to those of everyone else. In just the same way, paedophiles, serial rapists and that ilk have to suffer a diminuition of their human rights in order to protect those of everyone else.
But then we come up against another problem. Even if we reopened the hospitals and could find staff to manage them, they would effectively be what they were before - non criminal prisons, simply because there is no cure for these dangerously ill people for most of whom their behaviour seems hard wired and not subject to adaptation and thence cure. And how do we judge who belongs in such a prison and who does not, when no crime has been committed? One of the reasons for closing the hospitals in the first place was that many people had been in them for decades and yet did not and never did belong in the first place.
We would have to have a law, which said one would be committed to such a hospital should one show signs of being dangerously mentally ill. For instance, wanting to own a gun, wanting to video a school play, wanting to look at bdsm images.....
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