Becky

"The Intelligent Mom's Guide to Spanking" group was created by "Becky Chandler" who claims to be an "unabashed radical Pro-Spanking Mom."  Becky goes on to emphasize that this group is not a fetish site.

 That's an interesting claim.  One of the regular contributors was featured in an earlier blog post and another seems to show up a lot in spanking-related groups.  And Yolanda Varela, one of the members shown on the left, has a rather telling profile picture.

Let's check out this "Spanking Children" page that Becky promotes.  There seems to be a number of like-minded people.

Becky Chandler seems to be all over the net as "beckychr007."  Below is one of her Twitter status messages.

She also likes to frequent Yahoo and answer questions about parenting.  Below she talks about paddling adolescents.

Should we be surprised that she again mentions bare-butt spanking?  By this point, probably not.

Who "sexualized" the "traditional way parents disciplined?"  According to Becky, it must have been the anti-spanking activists.  Glad she cleared that up for us.

She links to the "teacherswhopaddle" blog, which some people believe to be a fetish site.

She claims that her 11-year-old daughter encouraged her to start a discussion on Yahoo about whether she should be paddled.

She seems to have done a lot of research into different kinds of spanking implements.

One of her contacts uses the screen name "spank men otk for bad behavior" and asks a question about consenting adults receiving "real discipline spankings."

Becky also has an interesting list on Amazon.  I'm sure that the "Spanking Tails" books were just there for scholarly purposes.

She's also got quite a collection on ImageShack.

It's difficult to imagine any high school student, let alone a cheerleader, wearing red polka-dotted underpants that said "USA" on the back.  Just sayin'.

Becky has claimed to be Catholic, and what could be more respectful than nunsploitation?  Let's see how many things we can find wrong with the image below.  First, the entire background is white.  You might find this in a studio but not in a school.  Second, the "nun" appears to be wearing pants under the "habit."  Third, there are no Catholic schools left in the US that practice corporal punishment.

Although Google shut down the "Just a Girl in short shorts" blog, we can retrieve parts of it through the Wayback Machine.  Hey Becky, want to tell us again how it's the anti-spankers who "sexualized" things?

Update: if you Google "Becky Chandler and spanking," there's apparently a well-circulated porn clip depicting a blond girl in short cutoffs being paddled.

By an amazing coincidence, the Becky Chandler we've seen repeatedly posting about spanking also seems to be fascinated by short cutoffs.  Below is the photo she's used repeatedly.  Coincidence or not?

At any rate, some other users on Yahoo also noticed Becky's pattern of behavior: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090228221837AAu8bBR

Reporting Defaults

Most of the Facebook users interested in child pornography take it somewhere else or use private groups.  However, one will occasionally post some horrendous stuff to an open wall where anyone can see it.  Recently, I came across this and reported it to Facebook.  Here's what the reporting interface looks like.    We select the "nudity or pornography" category.

Here's what's a little worrisome.  Bear in mind that we're trying to report child pornography.  So why is the default option set to just block the user and not report it to Facebook?

Sheva and Joe

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Sukk Midic

"Sukk Midic" isn't a subtle kind of guy.  He's had a number of accounts with screen names like "Nude Foru."  So perhaps it's unsurprising that he's also open about his interest in "little ones."  The screenshot has been redacted since a couple of the profile photos depicted parts of his body that we'd rather not see.

His friend "Milly Luvlittlewon" has similar interests.

"Ineed Hotvideo" hides his wall and profile information, but manages to communicate his interests with his screen name and the photo of a prepubescent girl in a bikini.  The screenshot below has been redacted to hide her face.

RIP Trolls for Fun and Profit

"R.I.P. trolls" on Facebook are the unusually mean-spirited people who get a kick out of posting upsetting comments and images on memorial pages.  They tend to get mass-reported and shut down pretty quickly, but usually reappear quickly with new accounts.  One of the worst, an Australian named Bradley Paul Hampson, was recently sentenced to jail time for posting sexually explicit photos and comments on Facebook pages memorializing dead children.  Below is an excerpt from the SMH story:

A man who vandalised Facebook tribute sites for two dead children has been jailed.

Self-confessed "troll" Bradley Paul Hampson, 29, of Tarragindi in Brisbane's south, posted pictures of penises and wrote offensive messages on the two sites in February last year.

On one Facebook tribute site for the 12-year-old boy, he wrote "woot I'm dead" across an image of the dead child.

He also morphed a photo of the boy's face inside a woodchipper and made it appear blood was coming from the machine.

On another, he wrote sexually explicit comments implying he was responsible for raping and killing the eight-year-old girl.

"My definition of pleasure ... listening to her ribs crack," he wrote. "I got mad ... so I murdered her."

 In the U.S., there are a group of real-life R.I.P. trolls known as the Westboro Baptist Church.  Instead of posting foul things on memorial pages, they show up at funerals and picket.  Judging by the results that come back when you search Facebook for "Westboro Baptist", they're also widely hated.  However, some people have suggested that Westboro Baptist Church may be a scam organization that provokes people and then uses lawsuits to generate revenue.  Since they call themselves a "church," they may also be able to avoid paying taxes.

Shane Ispedo

The user previously known as "Shane Ispedo" is currently facing over 50 charges related to possession, distribution, and production of child pornography.  Shane Dale Pattison is a 21-year-old former student from Marshall, Saskatchewan who sometimes used the name "Pokedod."  I believe that this is his DeviantArt site: http://pokedod.deviantart.com/ .  It's strikingly ordinary.

When I was in high school, many of us envisioned pedophiles as dirty old men.  A number of Catholic priests had been charged, including two who had been pastors in the local Catholic Church.  Years later, it's difficult to wrap my head around the idea of people younger than I am now being arrested for sex offenses.  "What made them that way?" I wonder sometimes.  A number of causes have been suggested, e.g., experiencing sexual abuse, exposure to pornography, genetics, and personal choice.  But nobody really knows.

Police in Australia Criticize Facebook

According to a TNW story at http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2011/03/24/australia-police-claims-facebook-hinders-child-abuse-probe/ , Australian police have expressed frustration at the mutual assistance treaty and Facebook's response.

Australian Federal Police’s high-tech collection and capability manager, Grant Edwards, expressed that the mutual legal assistance treaty with the US is outdated and not designed to allow for a rapid response to online crime. And that Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, hasn’t been helpful with the push.

A revised treaty, supported by the AFP, is necessary to speed up the actioning of the police’s right to obtain information about online crime using a warrant on Facebook, which is head-quartered in the United States. Currently, the AFP is still required to undergo a long, tedious legal process in order to use US law enforcement to force Facebook to respond.

The Australian government has made efforts to amend the assistance treaty in order to speed up the process of lawful data acquisitions. However, the changes would need to be ratified by the US to take effect. According to Edwards, Facebook hasn’t been as helpful as it could because the company is “brand-protecting.” Furthermore, he labeled the social networking site’s action to remove pedophile profiles that were needed as evidence by the AFP as "ignorance on Facebook’s behalf."

Facebook has an automated system to detect and disable problem accounts.  However, this system generally can't detect when a user should also be reported to law enforcement.  Once an account is shut down, Facebook will retain the information for up to 90 days, and then it's gone.  Automatically detecting child pornography is a hard problem.  The most promising approach has been comparing images to hashes of known child pornography files, but that only works if there's a match.

The situation may also be fraught in terms of politics and public relations.  The ground truth seems to be that there's a lot of child pornography floating around and nobody's really figured out a surefire way to detect it.  Even if it is detected and reported to law enforcement, some countries are more responsive than others.  But a social network can't go on record saying that child pornography is a hard and frustrating problem; it's more palatable to say that their sophisticated technology is keeping things under control.  As an obscure blogger, I can comment about seeing a lot of users from certain countries who seem to be interested in child pornography.  If a Facebook spokesman said that, people would probably accuse them of being bigots and they'd be forced to apologize.