“Pervs preying on the elderly or disabled could soon face harsh new penalties under a first-of-its-kind proposed law that would punish sicko peddlers of geriatric and handicapped porn the same as child pornographers. Fueled by a rise in sex abuse against the elderly and disabled and a string of cases involving photography and cyber postings, the proposed legislation would add seniors and the handicapped to kiddie porn laws. ‘Obviously with the technology evolving, the crimes committed using that technology have increased. That’s clearly the case,’ said Northwestern District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel, who covers parts of western Massachusetts and helped craft the proposal. ‘All we’re trying to do with these two pieces of legislation is to protect our two most vulnerable populations.’ Emil DeRiggi, spokesman for the state Disabled Persons Protection Commission, said the agency has ‘certainly seen an increase’ in sex abuse cases involving pornography.” — Boston Herald (US)

(Thanks to Furpo for the link.)

The Boston Herald lists a number of cases that are causing lawmakers to consider legislation. These include “a twisted online posting offering sex with a ‘cognitively impaired’ virgin”, “a pair of caretakers who took their disabled boarder on a ’state-to-state party,’ taking sexual photos along the way,” and “a mentally retarded woman [who] had pornographic pictures taken of her and posted on the Internet by relatives.” These cases hardly dovetail into a single category of activity prohitibable by law. The first doesn’t involve pornography at all. The other two raise a lot of questions. Are laws prohibiting pornography necessary when there are already laws prohibiting assault? Are crimes against disabled people increasing in frequency or in visibility? There is a big difference. In other words, are these crimes really more common? Or are they simply more public? It used to be that, if you were joyriding with a disabled boarder and taking pornographic polaroids, you didn’t have internet groups to share them with.

After alarming everyone with its cases of the disabled and abused, the Boston Herald buries at the end of its story a quote by civil rights attorney Harvey Silvergate. He claims that this legislation is “blatant censorship,” “the latest in a long effort to broaden the definition of obscenity… We’ve already got (laws) against coercion. Why is that not adequate?” Those are excellent questions from a man whose forthcoming book, Three Felonies a Day, argues that “federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition [...] prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior.” To be sure, nobody is saying that abusing the disabled or elderly is innocuous. But do crimes that already qualify as abuse need to have additional obscenity charges tacked onto them just because they involve a camera?

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