You can argue that the cyberflashing law is a bit too broad and the punishment a bit too harsh. I might agree if we're talking about one adult sending sexy photos to another adult without asking first. In that case it might just be bad manners worthy of a slap on the wrist. But here's what this guy did, and in his case the punishment totally fits the crime:
> Hawkes borrowed his father’s phone, saying he needed to call the probation office, went in another room and sent photos by WhatsApp to a woman and by iMessage to a 15-year-old girl, who began crying.
Because the crime he committed and primarily was sentenced for was breaking his probation.
Presumably his probation terms included "don't commit crimes" so the cyberflasher law is only relevant as it was the crime he did to break his probation
Probation is a privilege that a prisoner needs to apply for. It could be argued that even though he was previously convicted perhaps he didn’t know the exact consequences and so leniency can be given. However, by violating probation, he has proven to be intentionally malicious and a danger to society even more so then before. I think a few extra years for that is definitely justified
People usually do felonies in an intentionally malicious way. The base punishment should already take care of that.
Think of it this way: If someone on probation intentionally shoplifts, and gets a full punishment for shoplifting, and their probation gets cancelled, how much extra punishment should they get on top of that? I'd say some, but not years. And I don't think the extra a punishment should be a multiplier, I think it should be largely independent of the specific crime. Different amounts for misdemeanor and felony, probably, but neither one should be huge.
In some cultures, recipients of such pictures would probably just laugh and be at most confused. In others, the population is conditioned to be offended to the point of making it highly illegal. It doesn't even sound like this case is about mutilated or otherwise abnormally disturbing imagery; merely normal human anatomy.
“Normal human anatomy” is what you say if someone’s swimsuit slips in the surf, not when a sex offender sends a child pictures with the intent of forcing them to think about him sexually.
The difference is intent: he knew it was unwelcome, and he didn’t care about that lack of consent. Now might be a really good time to think about why your first instinct is to defend the guy committing mid-level sexual assault rather than the child he targeted.
sends a child pictures with the intent of forcing them to think about him sexually
That's entirely the result of a cultural construct.
about why your first instinct is to defend the guy
Trying to turn this into an "us vs. them" situation? I was just pointing out the huge cultural differences that exist in the world beyond Western puritanism.
It’s not just “Western Puritanism” to recognize that a photo of genitalia usually has a sexual context – the point of cropping it so tightly is to focus on that aspect! – but it’s also distracting from the real reason this is a crime: a convicted sex offender did it, by his own admission, with intent to cause distress to an unwilling participant. No matter how body positive you are, lack of consent to be part of someone else’s sexual gratification matters a lot. Even if the images were totally non-sexual in purpose - say pathology case studies in a medical textbook – consent still matters and you don’t go shoving them in other people’s faces without asking first.
You’ve been conspicuously non-specific about the other cultures you’re claiming would be okay with this, perhaps you could give an example and explain why it’s better?
> So you think sending dick pics to a 15 year old is chill in other cultures?
Not what they said.
The suggestion was that they'd laugh, make a joke about stupid men, tell them to put their dick away.
The most probable response to a real life flasher in this part of the world would be a little finger wiggle and the expression "ahh, winyarn" with a lot of mocking laughter.
Needless to say, not very many actual flashers .. but you can see plenty of near and fully naked men (and women) briefly changing in and out of wetsuits down the car park at the beach. There's more on show at the various nudist beaches.
You keep your puritanism by all means, it's no skin off my western nose.
Her murderer, Wayne Couzens, had on multiple occasions “flashed” various women before kidnapping and murdering her. These prior offenses were reported to the police but the police failed to investigate them properly. If they would have they would have recognised the escalating trend in his behaviour and perhaps could have prevented her death.
While I’m not saying that every flasher will “graduate” to become a murderer, this is the context this crime is viewed today in the UK.
In some purely academic sense you are right. What displaying any body part means is culturaly coded. It could mean anything. But in the context of the relevant culture sending someone a dick-pick like this is clearly about power, and forcing one’s self on someone against their will.
In the context of a thread branch stemming from: "huge cultural differences that exist in the world" it's not clear how the evolution of a London flasher to murderer relates to sub tropical girls laughing off idiots that walk about with their dicks out.
Given specific cultural attitudes in the UK, in Saudi Arabia, in India, one could posit several different behaviours that might be expressed and evolve from fetish to committing murder.
The interesting question is how this occurs and what attitudes might prevent this.
Part of the problem with the cultural differences claim is that it’s only mentioned enough to function as an excuse. Even a single culture mentioned specifically would allow people to evaluate things like whether that culture has rules about unwanted attention, or whether it’s generally considered desirable. For example, the traditional Hawaiian culture certainly had a very different attitude about nudity but they also focused their sexuality on mutual pleasure, not to mention having an absolute monarchy with the death penalty for things like women eating pork - cross-cultural comparisons are always a mixed bag like that.
The essential part of this particular cultural differences claim is that several cultures aren't intrinsically offended by "dick pics" - this results in a different reaction to flashers and people sending dick pics, near zero reaction based purely on the genital nudity aspect, almost entirely on whether it's welcome or not.
The other cultural aspect that results is incident of bothers; the UK has a much higher incidence of dirty mac flashers than either Australia or Papua New Guinea.
> Even a single culture mentioned specifically
I've just mentioned two and I heavily hinted at one of these in prior comments in a manner that many would have easily read in.
Australia has a strong beach | rural culture; few that surf or work the land would be shocked by a penis, having seen dogs, horses, bulls, and humans (getting changed outdoors) since before they could walk - the very few people that might try flashing or masterbating in public get pretty rapidly told to jog on and bugger off without causing much in the way of distress or embarrassment to their intended "victims".
PNG, of course, still has cultural groups sporting the Koteka .. why on earth would they be sending pictures of a nude, bare, undecorated penis when it's been all about the penis bling for generations?
Can you provide specific examples of cultures where targeted dick pics are shrugged off and nobody cares? That’s distinct from general nudity because it’s sexually focused and targets someone who is not a willing participant.
For example, despite your comments about Australia having tolerance for beach conditions (which as a north Southern Californian I approve of), it’s not like “laugh it off” is the government’s official position:
I’m not sure PNG is a great example (https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/05/1117642) but a quick search confirms that their 2016 “cybercrime” law covers both harassment and child grooming so it again appears that people recognize the distinction between traditional culture and targeted harassment like the case in question.
Look at the law in Vermont. There's no law against nudity (there are local laws in some places, though!) but there is a law against undressing in public. Nudity legal, flashing is not. This guy was flashing. I think Vermont got it right. I believe your right to dress as you want exceeds my right to dictate how you dress. But that does *not* mean you get to involve me in your sex games.
I can't tell which direction you are going with on this because the honest answer is a lot, and all my friends too. I remember a girl friend of mine in high school (we were 15) showing me a video of a grown man jerking off and she said he was married but they'd been cheating together.
Online Safety Act that's being cited here is "any sexual image"... as usual with UK laws a "sexual image" is not defined in statute and is a matter of fact for a court to rule on whether or not any given image is "sexual"
The Malicious Communications Act covers sending anything else with the intent of causing "distress or anxiety".
As an aside, "intent" in UK law usually means "knows or should have known" ie you can't just say "I didn't mean to" if the average person would agree that such a communication would cause distress etc (again this is a matter for a court).
> Most statutes here in the US do, just for clarity.
Not a lawyer, so i can’t say if you are right or not but there is a very famous US Supreme Court ruling which basically said “I know it when I see it” about obscenity. That suggest to me that perhaps the definition is not as clear cut in all cases as one would imagine (or were not as clear cut back in 1964).
The phrase was used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio. In explaining why the material at issue in the case was not obscene under the Roth test, and therefore was protected speech that could not be censored, Stewart wrote:
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
>The Malicious Communications Act covers sending anything else with the intent of causing "distress or anxiety".
So sending a photo of a steak to a vegan would get you 5 years in prison? I'm glad I don't live in the UK and I'm glad they left the EU so their idiotic laws won't poison EU laws.
> sending a photo of a steak to a vegan would get you 5 years in prison?
Two issues. The question is what was your intent. Proving that it was sent with the intent of causing distress or anxiety is much harder in that case. For example I don’t know a single vegan who would react with distress or anxiety to the image of a steak. That is just nonsense. They would just say “yuck”.
But if from the circumstances it is clear that that is the intent, perhaps because the vegan in question repeatedly expresses distress and the accused in question still keeps sending them then why would we not punish that? As in do you want that kind of behaviour in your society?
That was issue one. Issue two is about the 5 years. You say that as if that is the standard length of punishment a first time vegan abuser should expect. In reality this person has previously been convicted of a sexual crime and then commited infractions against multiple people. Surely these factors played a role in the lenght of prison sentence he received?
Offending someone and intentionaly causing anxiety and distress is not the same thing. I don’t know why you are mixing the two together. I hope it is not because you are not arguing from good faith.
Telling a chess player that chess is a silly game with a hodge-podge of rules crudely kludged together can be described as offending. It is a bit crass but to each their own.
The kind of communication I want people to be arrested for is way beyond that level which I would describe as “offending”.
But assuming you are asking in good faith: Why do I want people arrested for intentionally sending distressing pictures? Same reason I want anyone arrested for punching someone in the face. Because I think that behaviour should not be tolerated in civilised society and I want it to happen less often.
Thank you for bothering to get into that with them so I didn't have to respond to that absurdity ... ironically I think they are just trying to be offended for the sake of it, I'm surprised they didn't have a pop at the UK knife laws whilst they were posting
Is showing pictures of civilian casualties who have died gruesome deaths (think: genocide), with intent to distress citizens into changing their political support, arrest worthy, or is it speech that should be protected?
> The change means that anyone who sends a photo or film of a person’s genitals, for the purpose of their own sexual gratification or to cause the victim humiliation, alarm or distress may face up to two years in prison.
Does this mean someone could, in theory, go to prison for linking meatspin? Only half joking, when read literally it certainly seems that's a possible interpretation.
If your intent was to cause distress, then probably. If you’re sending it to a pal that might be hard to prove but to a stranger would be easier to prove I imagine.
This guy is achieving internet fame for all the wrong reasons. What he did was pretty dumb and definitely over-the-line transgressive, but now he's gonna be a poster child for Perverts Anonymous.
Is it true what they say that there is no such thing as bad publicity? Maybe he can parlay this thing into some kind gig as influencer, or content creator, or something.
I think you’re seriously downplaying the seriousness of these acts and the kind of person who does something like this:
“Hawkes was already a registered sex offender after he was given a community order last year for exposure and sexual activity with a child under 16. That registration ran until November 2033.”
> Hawkes borrowed his father’s phone, saying he needed to call the probation office, went in another room and sent photos by WhatsApp to a woman and by iMessage to a 15-year-old girl, who began crying.