Providing this kind of context makes a lot of difference, so thank you for that.
Whatever you do (or don’t do), and whatever his response is, I suspect relations will be very ugly and that you will lose contact with him, or at least any semblance of a good relationship. (Edit: and, this may spread over to other relationships. If he had no knowledge of any child porn being in the stack - like with the aforementioned “poisoning” of the binaries groups - then he’s going to assume he’s innocent and you’re out of line. If he knew something icky was in there but didn’t see it in the light you do/didn’t pay much attention to it because of the sheer volume of porn he looked through, he might tell others his own version of the story assuming you’re going to rat him out. And that’s just a few of the possibilities.) I’m sorry you’re having to deal with this.
Right. “Pretend you didn’t see it” is NOT the answer for everybody, and neither is setting it up as an aggressive conflict to bring anyone down. The relationship already HAS BEEN DISTURBED – the other party would notice if **Aqua **and her boyfriend started acting strange around him for no apparent reason.
Listen: You don’t want honest advice, then don’t post an OP that ends with: “So what do we do now?”
No one’s painting you as the bad guy here, so don’t get all defensive when the advice you get differs from the shit you want to hear. I stand by the advice I gave.
What if he doesn’t remember? I myself have seen a lot of porn in the last ten years. If some cousin’s girlfriend tried to corner me about finding printouts of kiddie porn among my possessions, I would deny it on the basis that I couldn’t possibly remember. Have I downloaded child porn? Again, not to my knowlege.
Would it give you any more closure to hear such an ambiguous answer from him? Now that you burned the pictures, you have no way of proving what you saw. All things considered, I think the most likely answer he’d give if you asked him about this is “I don’t remember”.
Oh, please. There aren’t enough :rolleyes: in the world. This thread has been very supportive and sympathetic of your situation. What most of us are trying to do is put this in perspective for you, since you seem to have lost some.
No. Because you found one sheet of thumbnails that can be easily explained by a hundred scenarios presented in this thread other than “he’s a creepy pedophile.” You clearly have a lot of reason to otherwise trust this man (and his family), and while I’d be squicked out, too, this is one sheet of thumbnails from 10 years ago while he was a kid.
No, I don’t. I tend not to judge people too harshly on one thing they did or had when they were 14 years old.
You’re going to be doing that regardless, the way it sounds. Again, what answer do you want? Even if he dismisses it, you don’t seem to be the type to forget about it. Nothing good is going to come out of confronting him, because I can see your next dilemma: “He denied it; do we trust him, or what?”
Right, because…
You’ve already tried him in your mind, whether you believe it or not. Somehow, any answer you get is going to smell like a lie.
It doesn’t. But hey, you did ask for opinions on what to do next. You just don’t like the rational answers you’ve been given.
I don’t see how this is obvious, unless you’ve omitted some information. From your OP, you found a single sheet of paper with the images in question, in a huge collection of old papers in this guy’s room, apparently dating to when he was 14. As others have pointed out, there are any number of ways that piece of paper could have wound up where you found it. Under the circumstances as you have described them, it doesn’t seem to me that you have much evidence of anything.
How does this resolve the issue? If he was really a pedophile, that’s exactly what you’d expect him to say. If you had worries before, you should, logically, have the same worries after he says that. As I said in my earlier post, I just don’t see how confronting him is going to have any positive result.
Child pornography is an extremely heinous crime. For that reason, however, I think you should be careful about making the accusation. The mere accusation can seriously damage someone’s life, even if nothing is ever proven.
Obviously, you’ve got to make the final decision, and you know the circumstances better than any of the other posters. All I’m saying is, think realistically about the consequences, both positive and negative, before proceeding.
It wouldn’t normally, but you are being a mega-massive drama queen about something that has a 99% chance of being no big deal. I’m not going to go into ALL the crap that I have had to remove from the computers of 12-17 year old boys over the years because their parents asked me (as a somewhat PC savvy friend) to fix the PC that the kids had locked up with spy-ware using sharing sites. There was pornography and grotesqueness the likes I’ve never even heard of… kiddie porn, bestiality, poo-play, pee-play, torture porn, anime tentacle porn, vaginal and anal fisting etc. etc. Now should I assume all these kids were massive deviants, or this was more likely to be a the usual “Dude…check out this shit!” oneupsmanship that’s part of the teen genetic code. Should I have called the police in each of those instances?
Beyond this you are referencing one page of thumbnails which is what would probably be printed if he was checking out the weirdness of somebody’s collection vs wallowing in it. If he was really into kiddy porn the chances are infinitesimal that all you would have found in his mountain of collected mess is one page of thumbnails.
And now 10 years later you are prepared to confront and humiliate him over a random single page of* thumbnails *(not even pages) he printed out when he was 14. You are being a borderline hysterical ass who has wound herself into a righteous fervor assuming his possible incipient deviance over the slimmest evidence imaginable that he is kiddie porn aficionado.
You need to step back and realize just how nuts and over the top your elaborate plans are to grill him on this topic 10 years after a 14 year old printed off a single page of porn thumbnails.
I agree with the mountain out of a molehill sentiment. 14 year olds do a lot of stupid things. Really stupid things. The moral implications of that sort of disgusting material probably never even registered in his mind, merely the shock value. He showed poor judgment 10 years ago, and it shouldn’t be used against him at this late stage.
However, I think you should confront him, or rather let your boyfriend do it. It seems to me like the damage to the relationship will be greater if you let the uncertainty fester. Don’t go into it thinking “whatever he says he’s just covering up his guilt,” though. That’s just unfair to him. What you should absolutely not do is to tell anyone else about this unless further corroborating evidence comes to light. Seriously, the amount of damage a rumour like that can do to a person’s life is massive and it sounds like he does not deserve that at all.
Think of it this way: what if you had found a notebook page with some swastikas drawn on it? Would you immediately jump to the conclusion that 10 years later he’s a closeted white supremacist? I would think not. More likely you would conclude he had some stupid ideas as a kid and grew out of them.
And the point others have made, and that I agree with, is that the OP will probably NOT be able to do this, no matter how much she thinks she can, and that there’s a great chance they’ll come out of it thinking, “he’s lying,” with more than lingering doubts, no matter what they think they’ll do if they get a denial.
That’s why I think it’s significant that the OP hasn’t yet answered the question, asked multiple times, on what sort of result will satisfy her. I don’t think she’s really thought about it, and I don’t think there IS one. I get the sense that she and her BF will NOT (fully) believe a denial. Right now, they’re in shock, confused, and probably in denial about what their reactions will be. The OP’s follow up post confirms this in my mind. This is completely natural, of course, but I think they’re reacting more to the horrifying images burned in their brain than the entire situation at the moment.
Frankly, I’m not sure they’re in an emotional position to really think about this and do what they truly think is best (or would if they weren’t seeing some of the most sickening things known to man every time they closed their eyes). This might demand some kind of “cooling off” period.
No one’s denying that you were shocked and horrified by these illegal images which you discovered in your cousin’s teenage pr0n collection. But now, it’s beginning to sound like your only current motivation is to punish and humiliate someone, anyone, as revenge for causing you to feel shocked and horrified.
Grow up, woman. Bad things happen in this world, including children getting raped. You can’t prevent these children from getting raped, it happened years ago and your cousin had NOTHING to do with it. If you can’t handle what you saw, maybe it’s time you examine the unresolved issues which are making you react in this selfish, hysterical manner.
Wanted to chime in with a couple of thoughts here…
Another vote for not confronting him, there are only bad outcomes in store here - falling anywhere between him getting offended that you would even think it is possible, through to you getting the (wrong) vibe that he is lying.
He was 14, who, as a teenager has never done stuff just because you can. There could be any number of (logical to a 14 year old) reasons to download / find such material, ranging from “I wanted to see if I could find it” to “my friend passed it to me” to “I didn’t even know it was there”
One page of thumbnails IS NOT jerkoff material, nor is it something that actually got any pleasure / had any interest in the subject matter would actually bother with - I do surf for porn every now and again and thumbnails are only a preview - they provide no enjoyement by themselves (they are too small)
Given that you had permission to look - the cousin obviously believed there was zero chance of you finding anything wrong, that means (to me) that he has quite genuinely forgotten about the porn at all, let alone the kiddie porn
You are right to be squicked, but just put it down to a random pop-up. I would give the chances of this guy as being a pedophile at about the same as your boyfriend being interested in buying a russian bride jsut because he got Russian bride spam.
If you really really want to do something, perhaps a more devious solution may be in order? Assuming you have the tech savvy and the balls to carry it off and you WON’T be caught…
Is there anyway that you can borrow his computer, make a ghost of his C drive and then really examine it with a fine tooth comb? If he really is as disorganised as you say, and he is a pedo, I would place pretty good money that you will find something incriminating. Note: I don’t think this is justified given everything else that you have said, but if you really really need to convince yourself, this may do it.
OK - sorry for the DP 9and the typos in my prev post), I wanted this is a separate post.
As a related issue, is there too much hysteria in law enforcement regarding kiddie porn?
If the cousin IS NOT a pedo, and this was really one isolated incident from 10 years ago:
a) What would happen to him if it was proven to be him and taken to court?
b) How could an investigation be structured such that **Aqua ** really could go to the police with her concerns, and have them investigated without negative repercussions for the cousin (assuming he is innocent of this particular deviancy)? It seems that the mere fact that an investigation is conducted at all is a MAJOR negative outcome, even if it finds nothing at all - this is not the way that it is supposed to work in America.
Now your gonna have all these sick images floating around in your brain for the rest of your life. You’ve destroyed the picture, so calling law enforcement isn’t going to solve anything unless the cousin has the same desktop ten years later, which I doubt. Without the pictures, there is no way the police will even be able to identify those commiting the crimes. Its a dead end, unless you want to punish your boyfriend’s cousin in which case it will probably become a his word against yours scenario. Its fairly obvious that the pictures were more of a result of teenage curiousity and not something more sinister. If you pursue this further nobody is gonna win. Cousin will have reputation of pedophile lite and you’ll look like a self-righteous(and foolish) crusader. In the future, don’t look through other people’s porn.
I think this is slightly off-topic, but do consider the feelings of the cousin there. From the OP, I am not sure if permission has been granted to go through his stuff. If not, then it’s a double-take for the cousin - “You went through my stuff without telling me!” and “You’re evaluating me just on one piece of paper”. Especially when the stuff is labeled “top secret” (I know, labeling something as top secret basically begs people to look through it…)
I also think that the OP is just confused and shocked, and act without thinking stuff through (like the burning of the evidence), so I don’t think it’s fair to judge what she’s really up to.
1: Assuming he was masturbating to thumbnails (which no one does)
2: Determined he needs to be forcefully confronted over these 10 year old thumbnails and interrogated about his child porn proclivities at age 14
3: Mind boggling stupidity and hubris of both the OP and her boyfriend for not even trying to put this into a rational, common-sensical context, but leaping to the most absurd and extreme assumptions possible
As another poster wisely pointed out teenagers often “do things” just to do things out of curiosity, boredom or even a desire to shock or one up their peers. None of this seems to be registering with the OP. The only relevant thing is that she saw decade old KIDDIE PORN thumbnails and someone is going to pay!
Another one in the “he was 14 and from the rest of the info it sounds like he isn’t any kind of pedophile” camp.
Puts me in mind of my cousin who used to pull down people’s bathsuit bottoms at the public pool. If someone with 2 digits in his age and not diagnosed with retardation had done that, he would have been considered a sex offender. But, being 3 at the time, my cousin was merely labeled a pest.
How do we know this isn’t something he accidentally left from his bigger stash which is located somewhere else? As far as I can tell it is just people saying “he doesn’t sound/seem like a paedophile”, which is just the classic response that people use when they find out someone they know is a paedophile.