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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Prominent perverts

Thanks to the Internet, we're not seeing perverts just from the dregs of society but from all walks of life:

The growing availability of the Internet helps explains the child pornography arrests of a police officer, a community leader and a high school teacher in the Muncie area this year, an expert said.

The increasing prominence and growing number of those arrested for child porn is directly related to an explosion of Internet availability, said Michelle Collins of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

"The Internet did not create this problem," Collins told The Star Press for a story Sunday. "But it's allowed all these people to connect and share materials."

If there is a link between a desire to consume child pornography and a predilection to molest children (I haven't seen any research, but it's probably safer to assume there is one), are we worse off today? Is the technology that makes it easier to create the stuff and distribute it with some anonymity creating a more dangerous world for our children? Or are we better off in the long run because we're now discovering this tendency in people who might have been able to conceal it in an earlier time?

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