Similar reason why there's no death penalty. If you get the wrong person and you lock them up you can release them with compensation, it won't fix it but its better. You can't un-castrate someone the same way you can't revive them after an execution.

Courts convict innocent people all the time, hence no irreversible punishments.

Locking someone up is a one-way punishment, they will not get their years back. Branding someone as a child-molester, even if they are later vindicated, is permanent. We already have irreversible punishments.

Ok but after two strikes? If you have gotten into trouble twice, I don’t have much concern. Life is not fair sometimes. Happy to see if there are better ways to treat abusers that improve recidivism but I am not convinced prison time works. There is something deeply wrong with people who not only have the desires but are willing to act on them knowing it will hurt their victims.

The threat level doesn't make your proposal a necessity and I believe it is founded in the same irrational fears that this policy suggestion plays on.

I doubt that child pornography is even the true reason behind these laws. If anything, that problem is at its lowest now in the entire human history, at least in Europe. And the form of "violence" these laws are trying to limit have to do with bytes going over the Internet, not directly with children being kidnapped or sold into prostitution. I'm not saying that these laws couldn't be used as tools to go after actual human trafficking networks, but their scope and the damage they do is vastly disproportional to that objective.

More likely, the true goal is to introduce novel forms of policing, and widen them bit by bit until we do become true surveillance states, where every word any citizen ever said is stored in some government archive.

> Why not castrate the offender have two strikes or even one?

That's orthogonal to whether or not we should implement a means to catch those that transmit child pornography.

Is castration intended to "cure" the criminal or do you think it would act as a deterrent? Would you consider castration for any kind of rape?

It sounds as though the next obvious step would be to amputate the hand of the serial shoplifter, etc. I'm personally not in favor of giving the state that kind of irreversible authority over our body parts.

Because we don't live in the middle ages and have human right laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodily_integrity

Such a dismissing statement without any meat. Happy if other alternatives are explored but I have not heard of any that significantly improve the recidivism rate.

We explored the possibility for these kinds of punishments aplenty. It is fairly established that higher punishments don't necessarily reduce crime or recidivism.

Because the age of consent is 14 in Germany.

This is not true.

>The age of consent in Germany is 14

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_Europe#Germ...

I always find it funny when Americans find out that Europeans aren't prudes like them.

When discussing extreme punishments like this, you must consider false convictions. Only in a perfect justice system (which is not achievable) could we allow such punishments. FWIW, I also feel this way about the death penalty.

When proposing “permanent” punishments like this, always put yourself in the shoes of someone who is falsely convicted. And consider that false convictions can (and do) happen for a wide variety of reasons: racial bias, political bias, cover ups, government oppression, etc.

Right I get it and I too always put myself in those shoes. I think if you have been convicted twice that it’s likely to weed out most of those cases. Generally once you have been convicted once, you are already not allowed around children.

> Honest question, why do we (US, EU, wherever) not have more harsh punishment for child SA? Why not castrate the offender have two strikes or even one? I am sure there are other biological reasons for this to happen but I got the impression a lot of abusers were abused as children.

Because castrating people as punishment ‘because’ they were abused as children doesn’t feel right?

Of course, doing that as part of treatment could in extreme situations be justified, but luckily there’s ‘reversible castration’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_castration), and that (of course) is preferred as treatment, if such harsh measures are required.

Is chopping off shoplifter’s hands next? Good grief, let’s not do a new wrong thing to fix an old wrong thing. That biblical stuff needs to stay in the fairy tale book.