Does Germany lack meaningful prevention measures?

CSA prevention
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My thoughts here are conjecture, however they may form a form of inquiry.

When I looked into Prevention Project Dunkelfeld’s program a month ago, even in 2015, they knew it wasn’t effective for non-contact offenses. There is a question now if it is effective at all, and this aligns wth the recent increase in sentencing. I don’t believe longer sentences are useful. They make it harder to integrate back into society, and they’re focusing too much on the consumers, rather than the producers of CP. Due to it’s culture of privacy, some of these producers / distributors are located in Germany.

The paper brought up that a number of individuals in the program are repeat contact molesters. Despite being convicted for these crimes, Germany has failed to remove their access to children, or / and to implement general child protection measures to prevent this from happening.

Germany views offenses as a “public health issue”, however this is a view which is very divorced from reality, and this only serves to diminish personal responsibility, which is the real factor.

Why is it Prevention Project Dunkelfeld fails to report / handle active contact offenses? If someone truly can’t “control themselves” and they’re remorseful, shouldn’t they welcome measures to stop them from continuing to commit crimes? This doesn’t have to be incarceration, but physically preventing them from carrying out their crimes.

We could give them a nanny to watch over them, instruct the child protective service to remove the child from their care, or only allow them access to children under a two person rule. Why are we relying on a therapy when we have better tools available?

A nanny may be expensive, but only a handful of Dunkelfeld clients are active contact offenders, the majority are there for CP. Why is Germany bending over backwards to avoid handling them meaningfully? We could even drop this once they’re no longer an active threat, so as to encourage individuals to use the prevention program, although some might find that objectionable.

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Yes. I heard from someone who had a CLSD when it was legal and who visited one of those therapies to share his experience. He mentioned how the doll really helped him. Afterwards, he was called into the office and told to leave and never return, because they only accept patients who are willing to completely control their attraction.

They say:

For many pedophiles, a pressure of suffering arises from the fact that the desired sexuality can not be lived out.

But support the ban of dolls. Genius.

There are people who suffer greatly from their inclination. With regard to concrete sexual behaviors, some of the affected persons succeed in leaving their sexual impulses on the fantasy level for life. (Which is being banned [dolls], so with fantasy they really only mean thoughts)

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The thing with Don’t offend is, they are much less uniform than it appears on the outside.

I think there are something like 15 institutions in that program all over Germany, each one having their own standards and beliefs. The experience you have will vary greatly depending on which therapist you end up with.

For instance, I have been at two different institutions with different therapist in different parts of Germany. At the first one it was strongly implied that drawn CP is problematic and that I should refrain from watching it, while the therapist at the second institution had no problems with it whatsoever.

Similarly, different employees of the project have publicly stated different and sometimes conflicting opinions on the matter of CLSD. Officially they are not taking a stance - i.e., they are not supporting the ban, but also not fighting against it, and will advise their clients to follow the law (which right now means, dispose of all dolls you may have).

BTW, we are currently running a little event in cooperation with Don’t offend on our website, where you can ask questions directly to people working at the project. For those who are interested, here is the link:

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Their name alone is stigmatizing. It’s hard to destigmatize someone when the program is called “Don’t become an offender”. It may sound right in the sense that it mainly targets people who struggle with it, but there could be more neutral terms to prevent people from thinking that everyone needs to attend this, or they’ll become an offender.

Also, it’s frustrating for the anime community to be thrown into the same basket as pedophiles. Going by the popularity of manga the numbers are not even remotely correlating.

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I doubt they are even going to answer any more questions. They only got three days left and haven’t even answered any new questions other than those from day one (where they convienetly skipped the loli one).

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They actually answered. I love their answer on the doll and fiction question.

Something like:

“You’re right that there is no proof of them being harmful. There needs to be randomized studies, but the ethics commission is unlikely to grant universities the possibility to perform such a study”

Innocent until proven guilty is non-existant. How can an ethics commission (also known as moral commission) deny studies that they deem “ew”. Freedom of Science btw. Granted in the constitution btw.

PS: police is allowed to produce realistic porn and feed the internet with it to catch criminals, but using those images for science? Nope

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I know, it’s how it went down with sex dolls to.

  • They outlawed it with zero evidence for their harmfulness
  • When questioned, the same argument was cited: studying it would be unethical. So they just criminalized it, which is somehow ethically okay?
    • … and Prostasia actually shows that it is very much possible to ethically research this topic, if the will is there…
  • Frustratingly, when we were exploring options to take legal actions against that ban, we were told that there is basically no chance of success unless we are able to prove that child sex dolls prevent CSA.

So the state can take away your freedom without any evidence, but when you want to take action against that you suddenly need all kinds of studies and proof. Which of course are now getting even harder to obtain, because it is illegal now to possess a doll :unamused:

I think they have a study design in their head where they give a bunch of pedophiles access to fictional CP and then see if they abuse more children than a control group. I can see that this would be morally questionable, but it is by far not the only way to study this topic. Even Don’t Offend could easily do it, all they need to do is ask people who come to them if they consume fictional CP (they already ask tons of things, so it would not be a big deal really). Then, once they have collected enough data, they could analyze whether people who have admitted to consuming fictional CP have also admitted more or less often to committing CSA. It would not be perfect and there are a lot of caveats with this approach, but a good start to gain some first insight.

Yeah, I love the doublethink involved in this as well.

  • Allowing police to use generated child porn in order to catch pedophiles? Sure, let’s do it, after all generated CP does not harm any real person!
  • Allowing pedophiles the use of generated CP for sexual release? Absolutely not, that’s harmful and dangerous!
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Guilty until proven innocent. I honestly can’t get my head around the ethics commission argument. Isn’t it just as much likely that banning everything could increase abuse? They pretty much initiated a study on the contrary side, so it makes no sense since both sides are not answered. You could say that their decision on neglecting research and banning potentially helpful material is putting kids at risk as well? Very contradicting. Especially when every other study in the realm of pornography showed either a decrease, or neutral effect.

It’s sad seeing the denial in all of this. Abuse cases will rise and that’s not hard to predict. They have been rising nonstop and all the gov. has ever done was prohibition on fiction, harder penalties etc. Is it that hard to look at other countries like Japan, or Finland? Italy?

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Human expirements where people are fed unknown chemical cocktails are ethically okay btw. You get lots of money for those studies as well. I wanted to try one, but changed my mind.

So in short:

“Swallowing chemical cocktails with unknown side-effects? Hell yeah! Wait it’s mostly poor and uneducated people who desperately need money? Who cares lmao”

“Giving someone a plastic doll? This is very dangerous and unethical”

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@Sirius

I wouldn’t give up on the complaint tho. I honestly believe that it should be tried regardless. There is no limit on how often you can file a complaint after all. It might even cause public interest, so that the media would report about it. Public discourse is always good. There are many serious journalists who would publish from a very neutral aspect and the already supporting scientists could speak in favor of studies, because currently there is no reason for them to do anything since nothing is going on in that regards.