The Lord of the Flies - Child AVs and the Nursery Syndrome

My Wang is bigger than yours... *giggles*

/me curls up in her rocking chair and starts singing, "Reeeeach out, reach out and touch someone! Reeeach out, reach out and just say 'Hi!'"

LOL! Thanks for sharing.

(And yes, it WAS with a bit of trepidation that I tried that link. Mum said never accept candy from strangers, or YouTube links from guys named "Smith" . . .)

But do you got big balls?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iB34tVsbBw

Your Mum's maxim leaves a lot of holes to exploit there, Scylla

Yeah, well . . . Mum was always a little naive . . .

First, there is no qualitative similarity between eating a candy bar (or any other activity that carries no significant moral baggage) and activities that do carry such baggage. Many people have very bad interpersonal experiences with other people. They retain intense feelings about those experiences for a long time. They fantasize killing those other people. They don't kill them. Most people, contemplating any number of situations, draw the line at doing real harm to others. The notion that the only thing that separates Dr. Jekyll from Mr. Hyde is the possibility of getting caught is not credible. The analogy is false.

Second, the "no brainer" argument (often stated as the "common sense" argument) cannot be proven. The fact that a person has a fantasy about doing something does not predispose the person to doing that thing. This has long been accepted in the practice of psychology and psychiatry, especially in the realm of sexual fantasy. It just doesn't work that way. You can assert the opposite as much as you like; it won't make it true. It's a "no-brainer" that I can never grow to an infinite size, too--until I reach the speed of light. The human brain is imperfect; after millions of years of evolution it is still too strongly influenced by atavistic emotions. We have to work hard to keep our brains from playing tricks on us.

In order to do something, you first have to think about doing it. So somebody who IS predisposed to commit a crime first thinks about committing the crime, plans the crime, then does the crime. This could be called a form of "fantasy", I suppose. In reality it is a completely different process, entirely unrelated to the fantasies that normal adults have about things that they enjoy thinking about, or role-playing, but would never do in earnest.

Third, the adults who engage in these fantasies--and BDSM fantasies as well--report thoughts and feelings about them that have nothing to do with coercion and violence. The context is completely different, the resulting emotions are completely different, and the experience is completely different, from what occurs during the commission of a crime. They start from a different place, and end up in a different place. Again, a starfish is not a star, it's not even a fish. The fact that things appear similar on the surface does not prove that they are in any way similar beneath the surface.



Probably you should have spent more than ten seconds. First, the data there is 15 years old; since then rates for all types of violent crime have dropped considerably. At the time the data was collected, the internet was not in common use by children. However, if we read far enough down, we find this particular item:

"'96% of female rape victims in 1991, younger than 12 years old, knew their attackers. 20% were victimized by their fathers or step-fathers.' (US Department of Justice)"

That would mean that only 4% of those girls were attacked by strangers. It is, in fact, a myth that beaches, parks, and the internet are crawling with pedophiles just waiting for a chance to grab some kid they don't know.

Most children who are molested are molested by members of their own families, or people who have frequent contact with their families. If you want to protect your children, you should be looking at your spouse, your brothers and sisters, your parents, and your cousins first, and then at your friends, and then at your priests, ministers and teachers. Uncomfortable as that is to acknowledge, that's the way it is.

In my opinion, people's unwillingness to face up to this reality, and the guilt that engenders, is part of the reason why they get so rabid about "exposing" alleged "rampant" pedophiles in the general population.



None of which violates anybody's civil or human rights. Telling consenting adults what fantasies they can act out in private does violate their rights.

Again, public policy has to be based on fact and reason, not on fear, no matter how much we love those on whose behalf we fear.

Damn. Someone's trying to get this thread back on the rails again . . .

This!! A thousand times THIS!!!

You win!!!!

It's better this way.

you x 10 and that times eleventytwo

The analogy is certainly simplistic. It is not necessarily "false." I don't think that Des intended to suggest that EVERYONE placed in this kind of situation would necessarily eventually be driven to act out their fantasy. Yes, most people DO draw the line. But an awful lot don't. (I do agree, however, that fear of getting caught is not the reason why most don't.)


Well, actually, there is a lot of conflicting evidence on this, isn't there? The "practice of psychology and psychiatry" have hardly closed the books on this debate, or we still wouldn't have debates about the impact of violent video games. And there HAS been a great deal of worthwhile research done on the issue of how porn can increase the susceptibility of those already so inclined to act out violent or paedophilic fantasies.

That doesn't, of course, mean that this is true of everyone who engages in this kind of fantasy. But, again, the issue remains a tendentious one: the disciplines of which you speak (to which you should probably add sociology) have NOT declared a definitive victory in this one.


Again, what you say applies to the majority of people. But not to all. Convicted sex offenders DO frequently report that they used pornography frequently or compulsively, and that it sometimes fed their urge to commit RL crimes. That is NOT to imply a simple cause-effect relationship between porn and sexual crimes, but there is some kind of linkage there, clearly.


I think that this is probably, to some degree, true. But it is reductive in the extreme to suggest that there is therefore NO mental link between the fantasy and the reality. If there were not, why choose THESE kinds of fantasies at all?


This is a rather key point, isn't it? Is it only sexual abuse if it moves from an online molestation to an RL one?


Undeniably this is true. However, given the sheer numbers of children who have been molested, that 4% is still pretty significant. Do we sort of shrug our shoulders, and agree that "only" 4% is an "acceptable" casualty rate among our young?


I tend to agree with you, actually. But that doesn't mean we should just ignore the whole issue, and accept that the potential for damage is just part of the cost of freedom. There are other ways to approach this than through bans and legislation, most notably, education.

One final point. As of 2008, MySpace alone had 29,000 registered sex offenders. The number would certainly be significantly smaller for SL, but we don't, of course, have a comparable statistical breakdown. The odds, however, of RL sex offenders using SL to act out their own interactive paedophilic fantasies is probably not insignificant. That lovely family man who is "consensually" RP a child molestation may not be so "lovely" after all.

My first reaction to this was that you can't be serious about your reaction. They didn't do anything that says they expected you to change your behavior. They may have enjoyed having someone play along - but that's a far cry from insisting upon it. There's a difference between "you said a bad word" and "(I'm a child av; please don't use vulgar language in my presence.))".

But after reading some of the other posts, I realized that the remark about roleplayers in general was closer to the mark, but it's still one-sided. Half the problem is that people just don't know how to handle roleplayers in situations away from the roleplay sims.

You have your own set of choices. You can ignore them, which may be the right thing for most of you having this problem. It's not possible to participate in all the conversations that are going anyway, so quit feeling like you have to respond to everything they say. No one is forcing you to acknowledge their presence.

You can ignore the kid aspect, and say things like "Welcome to the sim, feel free to investigate all features of our environs." No one is forcing you to talk to them as if they're kids. If they don't like it, see the previous choice.

You can play along - that's fine if you want to, but it's a choice, not a requirement.

If their gestures, comments, etc. become too overwhelming, you can treat them as anyone else creating gesture spam. There's no difference between someone filling the chat window with "you said a naughty word" and someone filling it with "woot" or wolf howls or whatever.

There is nothing in the rules that says you're not allowed to use foul language in front of a child av on a Mature sim. You can't say "want to come back to my place and engage in sexual intercourse", whether you use clinical or vulgar words - but you shouldn't be saying that in open chat anywhere, unless it's the sort of place that would ban child avs to begin with. (On the other hand, that doesn't mean that it's polite to use vulgar language anywhere on a Mature sim.)

The same applies to any roleplay. No one is forcing you to participate. You don't have to treat the Gorean slave visiting your store as a slave, you don't have to pet a dog avatar, you don't have to use archaic language if someone is dressed like King Arthur. It makes a whole lot less sense to say that roleplayers are forcing their roleplay on you than it does to say that people are forced to submit to rape or slavery in SL.

Did I answer this already? I do NOT want child avatars to be given up - I simply asked a question about them.
Listen, I am reading this thread and it's as if we are REALLY talking about eliminating real children from SL and I'm beng made out to be some Cruella De Ville who wants to skin some 101 Dalmations.
The children are NOT REAL folks!!!! They're adults! All I set out to do was create a meaningful dialogue that established some sense of what it means to be a kid here and why it was being done.
Please play with your avatar - I really don't mind. I am just saying ....arrghh! Never mind!

Better? Hmmm. At any rate, it's probably safer . . .

I'm gonna take on slave auctions - at least we'll all agree on that, right?

And is yiffing anything to do with humping dogs? If it is, it's a very silly name that makes me think of Daffy Duck.

(I'm really busy in real, so I am off!)

Off the rails is usually better than driving the train into a grease fire.

I saw a lot of statistics on that page, many of which were poorly worded or not meaningful out of context. It's late, my eyes started glazing over, so I didn't read the whole page carefully. But from what I did read, I didn't see anything that could be described as an indication of how widespread it is.

Quick example: The first line says that 67% of all victims of sexual assault reported to law enforcement agencies were juveniles. Without knowing the total number, it's like saying that 99% of lightning strike victims died, therefore death from lightning is a widespread problem. And that's ignoring the impact of parents, statutory rape laws, and mandatory reporting laws on those statistics.

The statistics on that page were pulled together to incite, not to analyze. It's the sort of page that justifies jokes about lying with statistics.

You'll have to give me plenty of advance warning. I'll have to launder my flameproof clothing first.


"Yiffing" is what "furverts" do, silly!!

Today it's the Children's Crusade. Tomorrow, I'm gonna "do a Wilberforce" and take on the slave markets. Call for back up, Scylla. It's you and me, kid. There's gonna be Big Trouble in Little China!

God help us all . . .

I think we were doing reasonably well staying in that direction until someone dropped in advocating the total ban of child avatars in SL. That is what set this thread off its rails.

Ultimately, I think it all comes down to tolerance and respect on both sides of the table. Representing oneself as a child in-world is a perfectly legitimate form of roleplay and is allowed in accordance with the community standards. Everyone needs to accept that fact and respect their right to be present anywhere they are not specifically banned. There is no reason why one cannot roleplay in "public" (that is, outside a specific roleplay region). However, that respect *must* go both ways. Child avatars must respect the fact that there are people on the grid who are not comfortable around child avatars, and respect their right to be on the same grid as them. This means toning down the roleplay outside of designated areas. Launching spitwads at passersby is not an appropriate level of roleplay in public areas, for example. It also means not imposing oneself on someone who has indicated he or she is not interested in "playing along".

Honestly, this does not apply just to child avatars. This applies to Gorean, to vampires, to nekos, to furries, to Elizabethan people, and every other aspect of roleplay in existence. One of the consequences of mixing a population of roleplayers and non-players together on the same grid is that each has to learn to tolerate and work with or around the other. This includes the idea that if one TPs into a setting that makes him or her uncomfortable, it is THAT person's responsibility to leave quietly, without passing judgment or stirring drama.