The age of consent is the age at which a person is considered to be legally competent to consent to sexual acts. Consequently, an adult who engages in sexual activity with a person younger than the age of consent is unable to legally claim that the sexual activity was consensual, and such sexual activity may be considered child sexual abuse or statutory rape. The person below the minimum age is considered the victim, and their sex partner the offender, although some jurisdictions provide exceptions through "Romeo and Juliet laws" if one or both participants are underage, and are close in age.
There have been many cases of sexual abuse of children by priests, nuns, and other members of religious life in the Catholic Church. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the cases have involved many allegations, investigations, trials, convictions, acknowledgement and apologies by Church authorities, and revelations about decades of instances of abuse and attempts by Church officials to cover them up. The abused include mostly boys but also girls, some as young as three years old, with the majority between the ages of 11 and 14. Criminal cases for the most part do not cover sexual harassment of adults. The accusations of abuse and cover-ups began to receive public attention during the late 1980s. Many of these cases allege decades of abuse, frequently made by adults or older youths years after the abuse occurred. Cases have also been brought against members of the Catholic hierarchy who covered up sex abuse allegations and moved abusive priests to other parishes, where abuse continued.
"Twinkie defense" is a derisive label for an improbable legal defense. It is not a recognized legal defense in jurisprudence, but a catch-all term coined by reporters during their coverage of the trial of defendant Dan White for the murders of San Francisco city Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. White's defense was that he suffered diminished capacity as a result of his depression, a symptom of which was a change in diet from healthy food to Twinkies and other sugary foods. Contrary to common belief, White's attorneys did not argue that the Twinkies were the cause of White's actions, but that their consumption was symptomatic of his underlying depression. The product itself was only mentioned in passing during the trial. White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter rather than first-degree murder, and served five years in prison.
Child sex tourism (CST) is tourism for the purpose of engaging in the prostitution of children, which is commercially facilitated child sexual abuse. The definition of child in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is "every human being below the age of 18 years". Child sex tourism results in both mental and physical consequences for the exploited children, which may include sexually transmitted infections, "drug addiction, pregnancy, malnutrition, social ostracism, and death", according to the State Department of the United States. Child sex tourism, part of the multibillion-dollar global sex tourism industry, is a form of child prostitution within the wider issue of commercial sexual exploitation of children. Child sex tourism victimizes approximately 2 million children around the world. The children who perform as prostitutes in the child sex tourism trade often have been lured or abducted into sexual slavery.
Cybercrime is a crime involving a computer or computer network. The computer may have been used in committing the crime, or it may be the target. Cybercrime may harm someone's security or finances.
Perverted Justice Foundation, Inc., more commonly known as Perverted-Justice, is an American organization based in California and Oregon which has investigated, identified, and publicized the conduct of adults who have used chat rooms and other social media in order to solicit online sexual conversations and in-person meetings with minors. Their website serves as an archive of collected data on these investigations, which they make available in order to assist law enforcement and the public in understanding the behavior and child grooming techniques of online hebephiles.
Child grooming is befriending and establishing an emotional connection with a child under the age of consent, and sometimes the child's family, to lower the child's inhibitions with the objective of sexual abuse. Child grooming is also used to lure minor children into various illicit businesses such as child trafficking, child prostitution, cybersex trafficking, or the production of child pornography.
Pedophilia is a psychiatric disorder in which an adult or older adolescent experiences a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children. Although girls typically begin the process of puberty at age 10 or 11, and boys at age 11 or 12, criteria for pedophilia extend the cut-off point for prepubescence to age 13.
Anti-pedophile activism encompasses opposition to pedophiles, pedophile advocacy groups, child pornography, and child sexual abuse. Much of the direct action classified as "anti-pedophile" involves demonstrations against sex offenders, against groups advocating age of consent reform, legalization of sexual activity between adults and children, and against Internet users who solicit sex from underage children and teenagers.
The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) is a pedophilia and pederasty advocacy organization in the United States. It works to abolish age-of-consent laws criminalizing adult sexual involvement with minors and campaigns for the release of men who have been jailed for sexual contacts with minors that did not involve what it considers coercion.
In the United States, each state and territory sets the age of consent either by statute or the common law applies, and there are several federal statutes related to protecting minors from sexual predators. Depending on the jurisdiction, the legal age of consent is between 16 and 18. In some places, civil and criminal laws within the same state conflict with each other.
To Catch a Predator is an American reality television series in the television news magazine program Dateline NBC featuring confrontations with host Chris Hansen, partly filmed with a hidden camera, of adult men arriving at a sting house to have sex with a minor and typically being arrested as a result. The minors are adults impersonating underage persons in online chats.
Omegle is a free online chat website that allows users to socialize with others without the need to register. The service randomly pairs users in one-on-one chat sessions where they chat anonymously using the names "You" and "Stranger." The site was created by 18-year-old Leif K-Brooks of Brattleboro, Vermont, and was launched on March 25, 2009. Less than a month after launch, Omegle garnered around 150,000 page views a day, and in March 2010 the site introduced a video conferencing feature.
Patrick Naughton is an American software developer and convicted sex offender. He is one of the creators of the Java programming language.
Child pornography is pornography that unlawfully exploits children for sexual stimulation. It may be produced with the direct involvement or sexual assault of a child or it may be simulated child pornography. Abuse of the child occurs during the sexual acts or lascivious exhibitions of genitals or pubic areas which are recorded in the production of child pornography. Child pornography may use a variety of mediums, including writings, magazines, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, video, and video games. Child pornography may be created for profit or other reasons.
James M. Cantor is an American-Canadian clinical psychologist and sexologist specializing in hypersexuality and paraphilias.
The Trojan horse defense is a technologically based take on the classic SODDI defense, believed to have surfaced in the UK in 2003. The defense typically involves defendant denial of responsibility for (i) the presence of cyber contraband on the defendant's computer system; or (ii) commission of a cybercrime via the defendant's computer, on the basis that a malware or on some other perpetrator using such malware, was responsible for the commission of the offence in question.
Online predators are individuals who commit child sexual abuse that begins or takes place on the Internet.
People v. Turner, formally The People of the State of California v. Brock Allen Turner (2015), is a high-profile criminal case in which Brock Allen Turner was convicted by jury trial of three counts of felony sexual assault.
Michael Aaron Persky is an American attorney and former judge of the Santa Clara County Superior Court from 2003 to 2018. He gained attention after his ruling in the case People v. Turner, in which he in June 2016 sentenced Stanford University student Brock Turner to 6 months in prison for the sexual assault and attempted rape of an unconscious 22-year-old woman, Chanel Miller, which was a sentence recommended by the Santa Clara County Probation Department. Despite allegations that race, gender, and class bias influenced his lenient sentencing of Turner, the California Commission on Judicial Performance found no wrongdoing in their investigation of the case. Nonetheless, Persky was recalled by voters on June 5, 2018, during the 2018 California primary elections.
