“Adult game players have their minds destroyed, they lose their very humanity”. With these words, from the recent petition to ban eroge, and their other initiatives, the Democrats seem to have provoked a storm of protest.
A mountain of such responses as “So shouldn’t AV also be banned?”, “Is there any scientific basis for this?”, “I’m a married woman with children who plays these games” are evident; I’m sure you get the picture, many are very annoyed, and seem more vocal than those advocating the ban (who seem to be limited to DPJ party hacks, strangely enough).
It remains to be seen whether this will truly backfire for the Democrats, although that does seem increasingly possible (not that there was any real chance of success in the first place).
The article in question mentions that cases of child abuse are at 300 a year in Japan. Leaving aside valid questions of definition, reporting versus occurrence, relative numbers of children, etc, a brief look at the statistics is informative.
Assuming Japan’s child abuse refers only to sexual abuse, the incidence of sexual abuse (about 10% of the total in all these countries) is readily ascertainable; the US manages 50,000 in a climate of mass hysteria (this probably includes minors having sex with other minors and other dubious “abuse”, for example); adjusted for population that would be about 21,000 cases in Japan.
Taking a less extreme case, England, a similar calculation yields 7,500 cases for Japan, 25 times as many as Japan currently experiences. There seems little doubt Japanese children are amongst the safest in the world by any measure, irrespective of the relatively liberal sexual attitudes towards children in Japan.
An interesting fact about the representative proposing all these measures is that she goes by the rather ridiculous pseudonym of 円より子, Madoka Yoriko, which can also be read to mean “Children rather than money”; perhaps this gives a rather substantial insight into where her priorities lie? Her political interests seem almost solely concerned with women’s issues.
Via Sankei (and, of course, all the boards and blogs afire with indignation).
I think I hear the roar of a billion outraged people screaming for blood even now…
You are the Criminal!
Think about the economy >=O
Those numbers shouldn’t be trusted for issues like this, in the case of Japan it’s a lot more likely that for every child abuse case that goes through there’s 100 more kids that’re too scared shitless to report their parents. A quick google search can reveal that 300 a year is a bullshit number, I’d like to see what her sources were exactly. I wouldn’t believe only 300 kids get beat in an asian country with almost 4x the population of Canada per year. They just don’t do anything about it over there. I dunno if their child abuse reform’s actually done anything yet but it used to be that they needed their teachers and their parent’s go ahead before they could even get in the door to look at the kid.
Hey it’s Hisui!
“Adult game players have their minds destroyed, they lose their very humanity”
This belongs here: http://www.happehtheory.com/Masturbation/HappehTheoryAndMasturbationMainPage.htm