A certain something left the grid this week - Good or bad?

/me giggles. shame on you girl

I can admit that I never saw anything "going on." I did find their "interesting" skybox, though, back when the place still ran under in its first name. o.O

(Three visits total, one for each name the place went through), the latter two after the Sky News pieces on each)

/cue end of world.

Actually, I don't think of this as so much an issue of morals and ethics as I do an issue of liabilities. If SAP is in one organized area, even if it is best to keep it somewhere monitored, and LL has any inkling of it, then they are obligated to shut it down to avoid their own liability. It's illegal. Same thing with gambling. LL couldn't care less about gambling, but it definitely cares about the feds showing up at LL HQ and arresting people.

LL cannot reasonably be expected to monitor everything that goes on on the grid. So if SAP filters out and remains hidden from sight, then LL has significantly less liability. I suspect that is the primary reason this parcel was shut down.

My opinion? I wish it would go away altogether. I have kids, and I'm scared that feeding the fantasies of pedophiles in SL or anywhere else is more likely to cause them to act out those fantasies in RL. As a father, that scares the bejesus out of me.

I, for one, had a TP point directly on top of the schoolhouse. And, yeah, I don't think any activity really ever occurred there. It seemed to be more of a hub and hangout more than anything else. I honestly did make some good friends there for a while, but, they did eventually fade away. I was aware of some permabans. (>_<

The ones that really got to me were the ones trapped by their own behavior and activity. They seemed as if there was no escape for them to be able to enjoy everything else SL had to offer. The fear and paranoia that I got from them was painful to witness. (T_T)

Fear not! My Inspector Gadget ave will save the day.He will root them out and grass them up,mow them down.

I thought it had all gone from SL a while back. It's not something I have ever come across in SL.

I know a couple of people who are into SAP in RL and they are most emphatically NOT attracted to children. They are attracted by the idea of humiliating an adult by treating them like a child (or being similarly humiliated). Weird, but probably no weirder than any number of other fetishes I don't happen to share. If it's all consenting adults ... etc. etc.

However, as soon as things are taken into the virtual realm, be it SL, Yahoo, email or whatever, it becomes difficult to prove that everybody involved is over 18 and making an informed decision.

I think LL are right to have got rid of it for this reason. They are ultimately responsible for what is hosted on their servers and cannot afford to take a chance on this. The opensource grids will find themselves in exactly the same position - they have to be hosted somewhere and hosting services and ISP's generally have rules about what sort of content they will allow.

I also feel uncomfortable with the amount of fantasy that can be played out in SL. I don't even know whether SAP in SL is the same thing as it is in RL. In RL, that saggy 45-year-old bloke in a gymslip will only ever look like a saggy 45-year-old bloke in a gymslip, whereas in SL the transformation is complete, which could, I suppose, attract a much more dangerous type of deviant.

On the other hand, I think prohibition and censorship are Generally Bad Things and tend to drive dubious activities underground where they are difficult to regulate.

Then again, if it makes life easier for the majority of SL kids, I think it's a good thing.


Please put my tick in the "don't know" box.

I agree wholeheartedly, Imnot.

We all agree that child abuse is completely intolerable.

IMNSHO, role playing between adults is not child abuse. However, in the well-intended laws of certain countries (esp. Germany), even artificial portrayal such as animations of child abuse is illegal. Role-playing is not, but the fact that in SL this role playing involves animations of avatars that look like children makes it illegal, and LL has little choice but to comply. (Fortunately they don't bother to heed the laws of Iran, which makes almost everything LL does illegal, including having avatars at all, depicting faces, not to mention sexual issues. This is a marketing decision as well as legal: Germany is a very big customer base for SL. Iran is not.)

Many people feel very strongly that even depicting age play should be banned (as it is banned). It's understandable, because we have very strong instincts to protect our children. However, it's a fallacy based on an illusion -- these people are being fooled by their instincts, just as the baby who will not crawl out onto a solid glass surface, seeing the apparent drop below them.

There are those who argue that age play encourages real acts of child abuse. This is a valid subject for debate, though I suspect that the opposite is true. I haven't seen any rational, fact-based discussions of this point; it's a matter of opinion on which intelligent people can disagree.

But those who vehemently oppose any kind of age play on the grounds of "protecting our children" are simply having a knee-jerk reaction to their instincts, forcing their views on others, without a rational basis other than (possibly, but not demonstrably) the caveat mentioned above. It's simply that they find it disgusting so nobody should be able to do it. Of course, they would object if activities they enjoy that disgust others were banned for equally specious reasons.

The bottom line, though, is that age play is against the law of this land (SL). I think this causes more harm than good, but that's just my opionion.

Something vehement objectors should keep in mind is that for the most part, peoples' preferences are not a matter of choice. Their *actions* are. We can't blame someone for the *desire* to engage in child play, or to have sex with someone of the same sex, or to have sex outside of marriage, or to have chocolote ice cream rather than vanilla. Yet, when it comes to this subject, the rigid anti-ageplay crowd tends to vilify anyone who has these desires, regardless of the rectitude of their actions towards children. I challenge these people to have more consideration for the issues faced by others that are not a matter of choice.

BTW, I have no interest in age play. I am attracted to women, not girls or boys, or men or animals for that matter. This isn't about me or my desires. I'm simply lucky to have desires that are acceptable to society. Many people are not so lucky. I would rather see them enjoy their fantasies with a safe outlet than to be repressed.

That 'other camp' would have been the absolute last place that most of us would have ever even considered you being at.

I figgured, but I also wanted t'make it clear f'r folks who might otherwise be new 'round here.

Immy, I'm not sure we could say the SAP crowd has been "driven" to opensource sims by the efforts of folks in SL. It seems to me that if they're going there, it's because the unregulated-ness of opensource grids is just a more logical choice for accomadating their...tendencies. Now that such grids are practical and functional, we should probably have expected them to make the move, even if they weren't being constantly hounded.

As for what they'll do once they're there - well, yes, there's trouble down that road. But that's kinda arguing about the price of tea in China, isn't it?

i really wish i was an undercover cop with extreme powers!

I'm glad it's gone.

I'm no fan of censorship or forcing views about private morality on others either, let alone the sort of witch-hunting mentality we have sometimes seen here. But neither am I a fan of condoning a demonstrable evil in SL that is bad for SL and likely to lead to serious and possibly fatal legal and reputational problems for LL eventually, and to me that is the real issue here.

As for worrying about them setting up elsewhere and pulling in RL kids, how do you know they aren't doing that as well even now? In any case, that is a problem that is beyond our reach - "our" meaning both LL and us Residents. Because the basic problem is RL kids with the kind of unmonitored access to the Internet that would make it possible for them to be harmed in this way. The primary responsibility lies with their parents or caretakers to protect them from that. When they fail or neglect their duties, I think the best thing we can realistically do here for their kids is help keep SL a place where the kids are relatively safe from predators when they figure out how to create a NIOF account and wander around among us until they're detected and perma-banned - relatively, compared not to a day-care center in a church basement, but compared to the other places they can go to just as freely on the Web. There is far, far worse out there for those kids than SL, and personally, I feel much better knowing rational, constructive steps are being taken to help keep SL that way.

BTW, a lot of law-enforcement people are very much aware of this problem. A couple of the police departments around here have assigned officers to monitor chat rooms and other interactive sites, posing as vulnerable kids and looking for predators. Every so often, the local paper carries an account of a successful sting that catches one turning up at what he thinks is a place of assignation. One good thing you might do for those RL kids is help pressure your local or state law enforcement agencies to do the same.

you and me both (still reading, maybe further on I will be enlightened)

ok finished reading...

SAP ahh now I understand (sheesh I am dense sometimes)

I have no opinion on the matter, and have not encountered any such situations in SL

Good.

I'm clueless, too. I'm not entirely sure what age play is either. There are a few of us out here, ya know...

From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageplay

Ageplay is a form of regressive roleplay in which a physical adult takes on the role of a child. This may be purely regressive (in order to re-experience childhood in a non-sexual sense), or sexual (the roleplaying of a child/adult relationship in sex, which may be a sexual fetish and is often grouped within BDSM).

In Second Life, the term "ageplay" has been used almost exclusively with the latter category by the media and by Linden Lab themselves. Most child avatars who are not otherwise involved in such activities have taken to avoiding the term, or specifing "sexual ageplay" and "nonsexual ageplay."

Age Play is the role play practice of depicting yourself as a different age than you actually are. (^_^)

I personally prefer to refer to Sexual Age Play as "SAP" simply to save on typing. (=_=)y

If you read between the lines ..erm, words, it is easy to see the name of the place we're talking about.

They changed names some time ago.

Ah. I don't keep up with this stuff, so thanks.

Ahhh..sort of like when I found out that 7' Blond Hunky Avatar "Robert84" was really a 84 year old playing from a nursing home .... that made introducing him to the parents difficult......

I kinda had to.

Purely digital sexual ageplay isn't illegal in the U.S. (At least not yet; not until the Constitution is amended, or the Supreme Court stops protecting more politically unpoplar parts of the Constitution.)

The market works. An entity has the freedom to decide what kind of interaction it will allow on its site. Linden Lab made the decision about Second Life. If it leaves a need in the market unserved, then another entity will pop up to serve that market.

I know of no evidence, or even good theory, that purely digital sexual ageplay has any impact at all on real exploitation of minors.

However, the disappearance of an open and notorious place for purely digital sexual ageplay in Second Life can be a good thing in this sense: As long as such a place does operate openly and notoriously in Second Life, such a fact illustrates how woefully incompetent Linden Lab is at enforcing its own, highly valued policies.

Maybe the fact that such a place has disappeared (more than a year after Linden Lab came out with the policy banning it) is some sort of education that Linden Lab can actually administer Second Life competently. Maybe.

I disagree. I would agree if it was Linden Lab pushing them out, instead of them looking for the right door to open and taking it.

Well, to answer the OP's question, how do I feel, i have to ask another question:

Which would you rather have happen, Second Life be shut down by the Feds, or some small unregulated Grid? I know which I would want. And I think that makes how I feel clear.