Innocent

I hardly want to get into all of this again with you, but I did notice last week that a transcription of apparently the entire broadcast Geraldo interview with Jesse Friedman was included as Exhibit 2 of a paper filed by Kathleen Rice's office, available here: http://bit.ly/1lTyQcf.

There were some girls in the classes, though apparently very few. That doesn't strike me as unusual -- in the 1970s and 1980s, computers were an overwhelmingly male interest.

English, please.

 The bad news is you have houseguests. There is no good news. 

Have you seen the series in question? I think you've misunderstood his angle on that project, and it's definitely worth watching.

You're right about the abuse though - it's human instinct to want to believe that something so awful didn't happen. It may sound ludicrous, but it's not. The OP said that innocent men being jailed is the scariest thing to him - being sexually abused, especially as a child, is far scarier.

People act as though child abuse is rare - it most definitely is not. According to the NSPCC, 1 in 20 children are sexually abused - that's three kids out of every two school classes. When you look at just girls, the stats are even higher. Other studies state that as many as 25% of children experience some form of sexual abuse. I guarantee that you know many, many people who were abused as children. It's not a rare crime carried out by an evil bogeyman - it's happening every day, to a large number of kids, usually by someone they know, often a family member.

I thought it was rare too, and I'm a victim - then others started to talk to me. Several others in my family were abused, by totally different people. Many of my friends. I know a guy where every girlfriend he's ever had has experienced sexual abuse - which isn't surprising given that 1 in 5 women are abused at some point in their life. Again, this is not rare.

It does seem that a significant amount was left out of the film, and I don't know why that is. All I'm saying is, don't let any interpretation of the situation be coloured by the idea that this rarely happens.

Furthermore, people have this idea that all abusers are extreme paedophiles, as in exclusively attracted to children, but in reality that's not the case. Most child abusers are in normal adult relationships and often show no other signs of being attracted to children. I'm pretty sure that the main factor in my abuse was alcohol - my abuser never showed signs of actually being attracted to children (yet of course a "normal" person would struggle to imagine being so drunk that they abused their own child). This isn't unusual either, I've spoken to many victims of similar situations. If that's the case, and men who aren't extremely attracted to children still abuse them, then I don't believe for a second that a man like Arnold Friedman hasn't abused kids. He can't even stand to watch a father bouncing his child on his knee because of the extremity of his feelings. A man like that cannot and would not resist actually having sexual contact with children, especially after it's normalised by such a large quantity of CP. There are very small groups of paedophiles who join support groups and promise not to act on their feelings or watch CP, but they are a tiny minority. If someone is attracted to children and they have a high sex drive, it's almost inevitable that they will abuse children. Regardless, those featured in CP are not actors - they are legitimate victims of extremely shocking abuse. Those who watch it are not only complicit in that abuse, but watching it makes it far more likely they will go on to abuse children. Add to this his access to children (his own and his students), and I would be utterly stunned if Friedman didn't abuse children throughout his life. Whether that's what the computer classes were about, I don't know.