Parents Lose Children over Family Photos

[Glocksman]

There were grounds for an investigation. The pictures were reported as possible kiddie porn to the police. The cops have an obligation to investigate.

The investigation should have consisted of a look at the pictures.
Once the cops saw the pics, they should have realized that they were dealing with a clerk with an overactive imagination and that no further actions were warranted.

Contrast this case to the one in Ohio where repeated charges of abuse were brushed off.

Texas's officials took actions in a harmless case that the Ohio officials failed to do in an extreme case of abuse.

[Tosho]

I'm so ashamed of being a Texen at the moment.

[Captain Cyran]

are you fucking kidding me? she lost custody of her children be cause of a photo of her breastfeeding her kid? thats what breasts are for! oh for fucks sake that pisses me off.

Next thing you know, women will be picked up in their own homes for breast feeding their babies. I fucking hate these people who see the tiniest thing and take it far out of purportions.

[Captain Cyran]

I'm so ashamed of being a Texen at the moment.

Hell, I'm from New York. I'm ashamed to call myself an American after events like this....

[XPViking]

The investigation should have consisted of a look at the pictures.
Once the cops saw the pics, they should have realized that they were dealing with a clerk with an overactive imagination and that no further actions were warranted.

To Richardson police, who arrived at the store that afternoon and apparently made up their minds from the content of the pictures alone, this was nothing short of a felony case of child pornography. "We thought they contained sexuality," says Sergeant Danny Martin, a Richardson police spokesman, explaining why two Richardson police detectives began pursuing a criminal case. "If you saw the photos, you'd know what I mean."

But the police did look at the photos and decided to pursue a criminal case based on a single photo. Yeah, the police should've (shouda, coulda, woulda) dropped it but...

With nothing else to support their contention that the photos were related to sex or sexual gratification, the police and the Dallas County District Attorney's Office presented the photos to a grand jury in January and came away with indictments against Mercado and Fernandez for "sexual performance of a child," a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. The charges centered on a single photo, the breast-feeding shot. Fernandez and Mercado say they took it--although the child had ceased breast-feeding--to memorialize that stage of their baby's development.

Now can everyone see why it such a ludricrious situation? It's not just an overreactive clerk, but the police and DA office too.

I'll admit it right now. I've taken pictures of my son (who is now 2 1/2) taking a bath. Go ahead and arrest me you frigging prudes.

XPViking

[Solauren]

Geez, this is an interesting topic.

I can see why the clerk would have reacted in that way. I really can. I mean, after all, what was to stop the family from using several cameras and spreading a shoot across several rolls of film and getting them developed over time to avoid serious suspicion.

Calling the police in his case was warranted. I have heard of laws that say if you don't report stuff like that, you can be held accountable, so hey, better safe then sorry.

However, the cops should have looked at the pictures, thought for 10 minutes, and realized, odds are, nothing is wrong.

To be on the safe side, they should have gone to the home, explained to the parents what the situation was, and asked to look over the house for evidence to clear them or convict them.

The parents, having nothing to hide in this case, probably would have said "sure", the cops spend some time going through stuff, looking at some family photo's, thanked them for there time and apologized for the inconvenience, then left.
I am assuming the parents would say sure with nothing to hide. Had the cops found something else in the house, like actual child porn, drugs, etc, this story would not have made the papers.

However, it appears the family was a victim of the justified-if-overly-paranoid hysteria over child porn in prevalent in North American society.

(Justified: Look at all the kid porn arrests and convictions now)
(Overly-Paranoid: Jumping to arrest mode over pictures of a mother breas-feeding)

Now, Stormbringer brought up a point about photo’s like this being in the collections of some convinced sex offenders. Good point.

However, there is a huge difference between family bathing photo’s, close-family friend bathing photo’s, and photo’s of kids you don’t know bathing.

For example, I think there are like dozens of pictures of me of various ages bathing in my family’s collective photo albums. Some of me bathing with either of my parents, or occasionally another relative when I was younger, and one of a family friend having a bath with me.

Now, with my parents, that’s standard. You don’t drop a kid under the age of 6 into a bathtub and walk away. Hell, just sitting on a chair or the toilet beside them is pointless, as you have to actually wash the kid. I know of no babies or young children able to use a bar of soap with any skill, besides trying to eat it.

My relatives, again, nothing wrong with that. My parents where obviously in the room, or at least someone else was. None of my relatives have any sex offenses against them, just speeding tickets, so why would my parents even think that it could be a problem.

Family friend, that’s a little gray. Depends on if my parents were aware of the bath and in the area.

I do know however, it’s fairly common. I was at a friend house a few months back, and she was beyond tired, but her kid needed a bath since he had just finished his first time eating spaghetti. She asked me to bath help bath him, so I did. She now has a picture of me in shorts in the bathtub with her kid splashing me and laughing. The only reason I didn’t take up her invite to remove my shorts is because this friend and I are not romantically involved, so she doesn’t need to see me taking a bath. That and my girlfriend would kill me for letting another girl see me nude.

Family and close friend bathing pictures hardly can be classified as child porn.

Mind you, if they found these parents had pictures of kids bathing they obviously didn’t know or couldn’t prove they know, I’d be raising an eyebrows.

However, if you don’t know the kids, and are not a child photographer that likes to collect or display his work, there is a problem. Actually, even the child photographer displaying his work is creepy if it’s largely kids in bathtubs and stuff like that. Dividing them up into categories, like kids bathing, guys in front of motorcycles, ‘bedroom’ shots of hot girls, etc, is one thing, but all kid shots on the wall, is kinda creepy.

Stormbringer also pointed out about parents using their kids for trading material for “soft-core” child porn. True enough. However, no evidence of that was found in this case. The initial stages of a proper, impartial investigation would have shown that with a quick search of the house and a looking over of the photo’s.

Now, Darth Wong pointed out a few rebuttals to Stormbringers arguments, and I’d like to point something out to Darth Wong.

It would appear the police were trying to investigate all the possible explanations, but they and Child Services/Welfare jumped the gun. That happens in Ontario all the time. Hell that happens everywhere all the time.

For example, I have a female friend with a kid, that while crossing the street with the baby in her arms, that was clipped by a car while she was crossing the street at the cross-walk with the cross-walk light. She went back into the daycare center she was just in and told them what had happened so they could call an Ambulance so she and the baby could get checked out (neither was hurt beyond a bruise in the shoulder where the car’s door-mounted mirror had struck the mother).

When she got home, a Children’s Aid Society worker was there waiting, and told her they could have the kid in a foster home in 4 hours if the mother wanted. Why? Because they thought the mother had purposely stepped into traffic because of a badly related incident report from the daycare center it happened in front of. Coupled with the fact she was a single mother, they assumed she was suicidal.

I’d call that jumping the gun to no end, when they could have just talked to the daycare center personnel and single parent support groups she is in to find out if she could be considered nutty or not.

When I heard that they’d offered to take the kid, I laughed my ass off and offered to pay for a lawyer so she could sue the daycare center and CAS.

Anyway…

Like everyone said, this is clearly a case of over-reacting cops and child care workers.

Unless the photo’s showed the parents getting off in the pictures (i.e. parents playing with themselves), the kids being made to get off (kids playing with themselves with parental help) or something like that, then they are basically arresting people for bathing there kids and feeding them.

The only possible explanations I can think of for them over-reacting to pictures of this nature are
1- They have a quota to meet. That might be the case for the Child Care workers. I have heard of cases like that.
2- The cops assigned to check it out either have not worked on an actual child porn case, or have been working at them for too long and need to be reassigned
3- No one involved on the “law” side of it has ever had children.
4- They have been told to come down heavy, hard and publicly on all cases like this to make the public feel good and to scare child-pornographers, pedophiles and the like

Well, that’s enough of me rambling.

Anyway, the parents should get their kids back immediately, as well a nice big fat legal settlement from the cops and child welfare. And the official involved should be given a quick review. For all we know, they were just following procedure, or they could have jumped the gun. If they were following procedure, calm procedure down a bit. If they jumped the gun, vacations or reassignments might be in order

[Xisiqomelir]

Oh no, pornography