SL5B - No Kid Avatars, please!

well i dont think anyone is asking you to understand or have it be believable to you. its is for the people doing it and that should be good enough. i dont know why people eat eachother. i dont know why people suck eachothers blood. i dont know why people spew their loads on plushies and fantasize about doing animals. i dont know why christians attend church. but if a child abuse survivor says yes its very helpful to them to deal emotionally with trust issues to regress or be small you should just respect that and leave them alone.

to be honest, everyone who comes into sl has different life experiences and different baggage. some people are pretty privileged and can afford to sit on their asses in front of their monitors eating donuts trying to dictate the sexual lives of grown adults. i think thats pretty damn shitty behavior myself.

Save it. All right. If someone wants to say its therapeutic then they should provide published documentation from accredited professionals that it is such.

That way other professionals can review their research and determine if it has any merit.

It is not enough to say that the victims of child sexual abuse say it makes them feel better when it has been determined that childhood abuse (sexual and violent) is a perpetual cycle.

if someone wants to show that its not therapeutic then they should provide published documentation from accredited professionals to prove it. it works both ways and its not the accused party's responsibility to show guilt or innocence. its innocence until proven guilt. so you can save it Colette because altho i nearly always agree with your posts, i dont think im doing any harm to offer a different perspective.

The thing is, it''s considerably harder to prove something to NOT be something, than it is to prove it is something.

i can promise right now if you can show me where ageplay promotes rl pedophilia or is not in any way therapeutic for the participants, you would never ever hear another contradictory word out of me. and i know how much you guys would love for me to shut up.

I suspect that role-playing sexual molestation of children in private under the supervision of mental health professional would be considered malpractice. I know that doing it where any one else might witness it is unacceptable in current western society.

It will probably all end up a moot point. Maybe, the event will end up being griefed by the giant flying penises. LL will need to get out their giant floating penis missles and it will be war. Then the media will end up blaming 'Radical Child Avatar terrorists"

and yet sexual ageplay of all types is completely legal in the US.

I can't show you this, and neither can anyone else. Because there may be some outlier, some person that does get therapeutic value for it, and then that would mean bam it's proven the other way and then you can use that as your basis.

Proving something as untrue is.. essentially impossible. To prove something true, you need only one concrete example or piece of proof. To prove something untrue, you need every single piece of evidence and example ever to say that it's untrue. And even then it's not for certain untrue, because maybe you didn't account for one little thing.

ETA:: My last post on this topic. I find I can only g so far with actual thinking on these forums. Just a personal opinion, but yah.

Have fun.

But people aren't proposing the argument

"Its not therapeutic so Sexual Ageplay should not be allowed"

Instead people are proposing the argument ---

"It is therapeutic so Sexual Ageplay should be allowed"

Many times in past, as you have basically done here.



Just like those who say Sexual Ageplay leads to RL pedophilia - They have no evidence of this.

Neither do those who claim its therapeutic have any evidence of their claim.

If someone is going to make a claim of this sort then it is up to them to provide some sort of conclusive or at least reasonable research backing said claim up.


It is the claim I take exception to, because its undocumented and flies in the face of logic. There is also the obvious problem of determining if its actual therapy and not just part of the perpetuation process.


Now other arguments such as first amendment protections, and right to privacy are different.

But any argument that is basically claiming something has Psychological effects should be required to bear scrutiny.

i cant really disagree with that. and i would point out that one psychological effect being
suggested is that it promotes sudden adult onslaught of pedophilia. lol so then youd have to throw the arguments out on both sides and what are you left with? a group of people being demonized because some people think they are icky.

Some people seem to have no interest in the actual topic but are instead interested in causing forum drama and distracting people from the topic at hand.

Please don't fall for it.

i think the topics are related and i know you are talking about me

I'm going to gently disagree with this one, Qie.

Like it or not, our service provider is everyone's de-facto partner. Until grid do us part. Unless you are truly on the way out of here, the way forward begins with honest conversation and engagement.

Besides, there will always be some good reason to boycott or protest or whatnot. Easily a dozen reasons a year. Drama, unlike hurricanes, knows no season.

Should Caledon's participation thus become a pawn in a permanent, long-running political game for whatever cause du jour?

That reminds me of groups going to corporations and saying: "Visibly support our cause, or we'll drum up a boycott against you as an opposer." This really happens, by the way.

Anyone pushing an agenda in that manner would find their IM's and emails sent straight on to sluniverse, Prokofy, the Herald and Virtually Blind for their reader's delight. Caledon has solid financial reserves as well, which I would not hesitate to use in defence of our resident-citizen businesses, plus we have something like 100 blogs of our own out there.

We may not be all of the same opinion, but it would be a darn foolish thing to target our merchants, I assure anyone.

* * * * *

What we shall do, when participating as Caledon, anywhere:

- stick to avatar rights as laid out in our covenant, declared Feb 2007
- be participatory, present, be counted for ourselves and who we are
- not deny anyone rights they would have on our home isle
- say what we think if asked, when appropriate, as individuals.


What we shall not do when participating as Caledon:

- self-censor ourselves to the point of hypocrisy
- use our participation to inject a thinly veiled protest
- try to coerce others or 'evangelise' any viewpoints we hold

I don't see any dust-up whatsoever in Caledon's SL5B participation. Nor should there be.

We are doing pretty well with RFL also at the moment (currently in the #2 position as of this writing, under the remarkable captaincy of Erasmus Margulis: http://www.rflofsl.org/).

Just imagine if we had boycotted RFL last year due to the inclusion of purported 'griefer groups' - or if we had boycotted further region purchases over grid performance.

No, the plan is to be constructive, present, positive, transparent, and open.

We are going to be the change we wish to see, and if that doesn't work, we'll keep trying. Nondestructively.

I apologize for my part in this. But I just can't accept the idea that acting out the victimization of children is ok.

I'm a non-professional who has been a treatment team member for victims of sexual abuse.
I was a classroom assistant at a day treatment center for teenage mental health patients for about ten years. Many of my students had been sexually molested.
None of the psychiatrists, social workers counselors, or special ed teachers I worked closely with ever suggested that role playing the abuse would be therapeutic to the victims.
I have just been using Google to try to find evidence that this has ever been found to be beneficial and I haven't been able to find any reference to it.
I doubt that sex abuse victims who think that role playing child molestation in SL life is good for them are using good judgement.

Few would disagree with you Kaimi.

I think the subject here concerns people using kid avatars, but that otherwise don't do anything disgusting with them.

But, see, that's exactly what the child avatars have been doing, and now it's come to this.

When, in '09, the builds "respectfully declined" from participating are the ever-controversial Steampunk, carrying as they do the taint of repressed Victorian sexuality... then it would be just okay that everyone carries on as usual?

As partners with LL "until grid do us part," we have some responsibility for keeping that partner from going off the deep end. They need to hear from us when they've made a serious error, not because we can make or break them, but because we are the voices they can trust.

And here we are, more than a year from SL6B. I'm pretty confident that Caledon's creative forces could plan a party that would make the Linden's little candles-and-cupcakes affair pale in comparison. If given the challenge.

Well exactly

Lets see...

SL is 18+, we all agreed to this when we started an account.

Also Sexual Age-Play is banned - Thats been made clear on the Blog.

Therefore any Child Avatars obviously are both over 18 in real life and not participants in Sexual Ageplay.

Thus their participation should not be hampered in any way.

Innocent until proven guilty.

Well, at this stage, and given that LL might actually yet reverse their decision, I would not blame anyone for not withdrawing from participation in SL5B from Caledon.

But this is a significant point, though: say that SL6B is run on a similar basis and a significant number of Caledonians objected to this. Would it then be legitimate to have a Caledon presence there that claimed to represent the micronation?

But but...


Thank Goodness for you Colette. Can we all go back to our lives now?

FWIW, for those collecting blog entries...

http://mmccann.livejournal.com/17919.html

Mari

I don't believe anybody _really_ thinks it's ok but some people, because they like creating drama, will say it anyway, just because they know it'll provoke a reaction.

And I fell for it. Again.

I think there are people who do say such things to rationalize their own activities, however.

or the activities of their friends in Second Life.

I do not think its always just about provoking a negative reaction.

After all there definitely have been participants in Sexual Ageplay who have posted on threads about it.

Qie, you know as well as I do that Victorian Steampunk isn't going to be declined for what it is. But say it was, I'd carry on.

I don't 'win all my battles' by a longshot - I've already been 'respectfully declined' so to speak in many ways. There are a number of things that never really worked out for me, but I tend to not set myself up for public failure or drama.

I've long been the underdog. I banned sexual ageplay, gambling and scam-banking back in the day when the grid was fueled by that kind of stuff. People thought I was a nutter because of it.

But that didn't mean I went protesting, boycotting, punishing or correcting anyone. Rather, it meant I set an example by living up to my own principles. That's what got me where I am.

* * * * *

There's a key assumption I'd challenge: "We" aren't 'the voices they can trust.'

In fact, if 'the voices' were listened to en masse, the US FBI, the Department of Justice and all manner of vice squads would have had cause to shut the grid down by this point.

Sexual ageplayers and their supporters weren't looking out for the health of the grid. The gamblers weren't either. The scam-bankers moved on to more fringe territory for the most part, too. But wow, did they debate and cry out and demand and feel entitled. I don't feel it is the case this time, but I certainly can't always agree with the angry mob. Down that path lies disaster.

Dig up the old debates on this forum. The evidence is all there; I was in a lot of those discussions myself.

* * * * *

Caledon's political capital isn't yours to spend, nor is it mine. I would not dare presume to speak for all the resident citizens; their opinions are diverse. We are, I think, a worthy group to participate; our citizens can and will if they so choose, and we shall simply be representing ourselves as always we have been.

And any individual or group whatsoever pressuring us will certainly not garner our overall goodwill or cooperation. Regardless of our agreement or disagreement with their cause.