(no subject)
Feb. 27th, 2007 02:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alitalf
I spotted this while mousing around following links from another LJ user. The story as stated is appalling, and all too believable. Unwanted popups can land you in gaol (you need to scroll down to read the story).
It is difficult to be quite sure about the accuracy of stories on the net, but it seems to me to make sense.
It is difficult to be quite sure about the accuracy of stories on the net, but it seems to me to make sense.
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no subject
Date: 2007-02-27 11:36 am (UTC)However, in much more general terms, I'm becoming increasingly glad that I did not manage to make it into the teaching profession, because every which way you turn, there are a myriad of things that can go wrong for the individual teacher, to a ridiculous extent and support (in every sense of the word) from SMTs can be woefully inadequate.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-27 01:05 pm (UTC)Two examples:
Years back there was a long case of suspected child sex abuse somewhere way up north. The allegations were sufficiently serious that to ignore them would have been negligent. However, after a relatively short time the one piece of medical information on which the prosecutions were based was shown to be quite irrelevant to the actions being alleged. In other words there was no evidence at all for the accusations. The authorities fought a rearguard action for years to prevent children from returning to their parents after it was shown that the whole case was spurious from the start.
A couple of years ago, a computer magazine had an article on technical aspects of some child pornography prosecutions. As reported, some people accused paid for expert testimony showing that the couple of dodgy thumbnails found in deleted file space arrived as unwanted attachments in spam. Others didn't think they could afford the experts and later discovered how serious a mistake it can be to accept a caution just because you don't think you can afford to fight the case.
In another incident, a conviction was later quashed because the main evidence on which he (probably "he" anyway) was convicted was provably fake. The accused had used a credit card on a legal porn site, and had been convicted when the prosecution showed the court what purported to be the home page of the site, showing only an advert and link to kiddie porn. Later it was shown that the "home page" was in fact a rotating advert that showed intermittently for one day at the bottom of a long page, and not on the day that the credit card had been used on the site.
The wider problem appears to me to be that there are instances when the authorities suspect someone of an illegal act, often for initially good reason, and decide to try to get a conviction anyway once it becomes clear that the initial suspicion is not based on any real evidence.
But, yes, there have also been reports of teachers whose lives have been wrecked by false accusations. Where accusations are provably false, I would like to see adequate compensation (for example, lost salary for as long as it takes to get broadly equivalent employment, all legal costs, plus damages) being awarded to the victims and paid eventually by the accuser, somewhat like a student loan, but with no way to evade it by declaring bankruptcy.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-27 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-27 08:38 pm (UTC)