Pupusas restaurant near me
Fast food news, reviews, and discussion
2008.06.15 19:41 Fast food news, reviews, and discussion
The /FastFood subreddit is for news, reviews, and discussions of fast food (aka quick-service), fast casual, and casual restaurants -- covering everything fast food from multinational chains, regional and local chains, independent and chain cafeterias and all-you-can-eat restaurants, independent and chain diners, independent hole-in-the-wall restaurants, convenience store and gas station prepared food, food trucks and food carts, the neighborhood taqueria, street vendors, etc.
2023.03.26 21:34 saranrapper Home base in WA state close to airport / hiking?
My wife and I travel most of the year and are looking to set up a home base in WA to take advantage of the lack of income tax and enjoy the PNW when we are state side (generally in the summer).
We're looking for a place that is:
We haven't spent much time in WA but lived in PDX for a year in the NW district near Forest Park and enjoyed it. Based on what I know, we're thinking:
submitted by saranrapper to SameGrassButGreener [link] [comments]
We're looking for a place that is:
- Close enough to a major airport (SEA or PDX)
- Walkable neighborhood, would be great to be able to get around and visit some restaurants / bars without a car.
- Access to nature nearby. I love trail running and hiking.
We haven't spent much time in WA but lived in PDX for a year in the NW district near Forest Park and enjoyed it. Based on what I know, we're thinking:
- Vancouver, WA
- Issaquah, WA
- Bellingham, WA
- Seattle, WA (not sure about specific neighborhoods or if it makes sense $ wise and being gone most of the year).
- Move back to Portland and just accept the income tax.
2023.03.26 21:32 Boristheblaze I've lost count
I stopped smoking in mid February, I don't recall which day exactly because they all just blend together now.... after nearly 11 years of smoking daily use to get over my ptsd and from a tragic loss of my bestfriend from a drunk off duty border patrol agent.(BP crashed into us at 65 while we were at a dead stop) I decided to quit in order to get a better career only to findout a majority of tech sector Jobs are being laid off... so now I'm attempting to get in shape physically and mentally in order to go career in the Navy. (Joined USMC at 18) It's a sacrifice I'm willing to make to have a better life not only for myself but for my significant other as well. Joined this community not too long ago (lurker) and some of the posts give me the courage to continue on this journey I've set forth.
Just wanted to give my thanks to y'all. And best of lucky to any and all who start that journey of quiting as well.
submitted by Boristheblaze to leaves [link] [comments]
Just wanted to give my thanks to y'all. And best of lucky to any and all who start that journey of quiting as well.
2023.03.26 21:32 FriendlyStranger566 I’m pretty sure i’m the problem.
Why cant i function like other people do. Why can’t go to a restaurant with my family without ending up ruining it for everyone and end up being the odd one out. Why can’t I control my emotions. Why can’t I just act like a normal person. Just mind my own damm business but everything I do is just wrong. It isn’t just like this with my family. I just feel like I do everything wrong. With my friends, relationships, school. I bother everyone around me cause I’m just not an alright person. I wish I could commit suicide or just stop existing. I wish I could leave my family and my home town. I wish I could disappear out of everyone’s life and start over.
submitted by FriendlyStranger566 to offmychest [link] [comments]
2023.03.26 21:30 oenje Mental health around upcoming top surgery - debating postponing
TW for mental health, dissociation, mention of maladaptive fantasies around top dysphoria. Also, I wasn't sure which flair to use, sorry!
I just booked my top surgery a week ago. It has taken forever to deal with insurance, only to find out I’m going to be paying out of pocket. I was expecting a minimum of 4-6 months before I could get in, because that’s what I heard everywhere online, but I’m booked for May 1. I could have gotten in even sooner, but I needed a bit of time.
And this is such a big and exciting thing, but I’m not dealing well with it. I am so stressed, but I’m also pretty dissociated from it. It really doesn’t feel like it’s happening. I really need to do what I need to do to prepare for it, but I’m having trouble focusing. I need to figure out what I need to buy and buy it. I need to figure out who’s going to take me, and the interpersonal part of that feels like a good way to edge onto a panic attack.
I need to get off of some over the counter sleep aids, which I’m really scared of going poorly. I have so much trouble sleeping, and with this added anxiety I’ve been feeling sick from lack of sleep this last week with the sleep aids.
And I’m worried about my mental health around this. I don’t doubt this is the right path overall. I wear a bra 24/7 due to physical discomfort. I’m sure there are bad health effects down the road from warping my posture this badly. While I’m feeling much more comfortable with my body now that I’m on T, that doesn’t erase the meaning behind my teenaged daydreams around self-mutilation and damn near hoping for breast cancer. But I know that even if everything else goes smoothly, surgery can cause a bit of shock/depression/mourning.
And since I booked the appointment the dissociation and doubt has been getting worse. I’ve even had moments of doubting myself about being on T. But I think that is coming from the same place that is making me want to withdraw even more from life, to go back to when I was a teenager and had the time and attention span to read for 8-10 hours a day. The place in me that doesn’t feel human and doesn’t want to be because it all feels too hard.
I am very seriously considering calling to see if I can reschedule the surgery for this fall, maybe September. I’m wondering if I’m putting it off for the wrong reasons, if I’m just stalling, if this will make it worse because I’ll have even more time to be stressed about it. But it would give me a better time frame to get off of my sleep aid. I could find another therapist who specializes in dissociation, which I’ve been meaning to do anyway, but this would give me time for it to help with this issue.
I’d really appreciate any advice or support. I feel like I come here a lot looking for help, but everyone here is really so kind and supportive. So, really, thanks so much :)
submitted by oenje to ftm [link] [comments]
I just booked my top surgery a week ago. It has taken forever to deal with insurance, only to find out I’m going to be paying out of pocket. I was expecting a minimum of 4-6 months before I could get in, because that’s what I heard everywhere online, but I’m booked for May 1. I could have gotten in even sooner, but I needed a bit of time.
And this is such a big and exciting thing, but I’m not dealing well with it. I am so stressed, but I’m also pretty dissociated from it. It really doesn’t feel like it’s happening. I really need to do what I need to do to prepare for it, but I’m having trouble focusing. I need to figure out what I need to buy and buy it. I need to figure out who’s going to take me, and the interpersonal part of that feels like a good way to edge onto a panic attack.
I need to get off of some over the counter sleep aids, which I’m really scared of going poorly. I have so much trouble sleeping, and with this added anxiety I’ve been feeling sick from lack of sleep this last week with the sleep aids.
And I’m worried about my mental health around this. I don’t doubt this is the right path overall. I wear a bra 24/7 due to physical discomfort. I’m sure there are bad health effects down the road from warping my posture this badly. While I’m feeling much more comfortable with my body now that I’m on T, that doesn’t erase the meaning behind my teenaged daydreams around self-mutilation and damn near hoping for breast cancer. But I know that even if everything else goes smoothly, surgery can cause a bit of shock/depression/mourning.
And since I booked the appointment the dissociation and doubt has been getting worse. I’ve even had moments of doubting myself about being on T. But I think that is coming from the same place that is making me want to withdraw even more from life, to go back to when I was a teenager and had the time and attention span to read for 8-10 hours a day. The place in me that doesn’t feel human and doesn’t want to be because it all feels too hard.
I am very seriously considering calling to see if I can reschedule the surgery for this fall, maybe September. I’m wondering if I’m putting it off for the wrong reasons, if I’m just stalling, if this will make it worse because I’ll have even more time to be stressed about it. But it would give me a better time frame to get off of my sleep aid. I could find another therapist who specializes in dissociation, which I’ve been meaning to do anyway, but this would give me time for it to help with this issue.
I’d really appreciate any advice or support. I feel like I come here a lot looking for help, but everyone here is really so kind and supportive. So, really, thanks so much :)
2023.03.26 21:30 ItsSnoky 25 [M4F] UK/Europe - Looking for the one to get to know and muh more.
IntroductionWell hello there! (General Kenobi!). I'm Snoky also known as you'll find out when we get to know eachother
I’m a 25 year old English/Norwegian guy from the U of K! I currently work in the IT Sector within the Local Government and my god I forgot how hectic the public sector was after i left it roughly 4 years ago. I did indeed have quite a shock coming back 😅
ApperanceI'm on the bigger side but am looking to get that changed with some help due to i'm not very happy with the way thing's are currently. Minus that I'm 6'1/6'2, depends on which doctor you ask! I have short-ish hair dark blonde hair? I think? I'm not very good with colors so you'll have to tell me whenever we decide to exchange pictures.
Which i will be more than happy to exchange later on once we get to know eachother!
Main Intrests/HobbiesMy main interests are either playing games with some friends on the PC, studying for future certifications and mainly what I do after work just kicking back and watching whatever random things I can find on YouTube (I aren’t a big TV person). I used to watch a lot of anime but I tend to drop out of it for a year and then I get back in to it then I lose interest again heh, it’s just a thing that I’ve been doing for years on end.
I am somewhat in to movies but I haven’t really properly watched any within the last year or so but if I was to give a rough genre, I’d say dark-ish movies with a grabbing story i.e. DC films and a here and there Marvel film (IW ftw!) I much more prefer it when the bad guy gets the upper hand and basically wins as close to that of Thanos basically.
My main music choices? Everywhere and everything. If my ears like it, then chances are I’ll most likely like it. I’d write down all the artists I follow right now but trust me it’d take too long to go over so it’d probs better to just share my Spotify playlist lmao. But to give a quick sum up I’d say its more around mixed genre, alt-rock basically.
I do also write my own stuff as well, but again like anime I do it for like 6 months then stop, then start a year later so eh it’s a pretty hit and miss hobby for me 😅
Future Prospects?As mentioned in my apperance section i'm in the process of trying to get fit with weight loss as I’m not very happy with how I am at the moment especially when it comes to health after a incident a few years ago but that’s neither here nor the future as I’m looking to change it with the help of the NHS and people around me. I'd be more than happy to join forces together with someone who's trying to do the same thing!
I currently own my own company which is currently under going some development but hasn't actually started as of yet (still looking in that area) but it will get there at somepoint!
Alongside my own company I’m also undergoing a project with a close friend of mine that we’re trying to pursue which is actually happening alongside the org itself so it's all looping togetherslowly but surely.
What am i looking for?I'm looking for someone who's intrested in getting to know eachother, someone who's got my back and i've got theres, someone i can well essentially "grow" with and get to know, someone who's willing to put the effort in to get to know me and vice versa.I'd like said person to be able to hold a convoersation with me as i've been in too many instances where it's all been one sided convos with me basically putting in more effort than the other person but alas that's neither here nor there and hopfully I'll maybe find the person who would share that equal effort with me. And trust me I've been ghosted loads of times to the point it's like "bruh, just why?" but anyway!
I'm open to long distant's so long as there's a goal to meet eachother in the somewhat near future!
No older than 27 please!
The End?If you've made it this far after this somewhat long post then i must congradulate you!
I now have a small question for you to send me the answer too when you message me.
On what date and or month was a i born? I was born on the month of a certain red birthstone on a international memorial day
p.s, if you don't get it it doesn't matter it's worth a try regardless
Small partial note; If your going to time waste and just ghost me please don't bother messaging me as i'm only intrested in getting to know actual serious people...and please be able to hold a convosation with me and vice versa!
2023.03.26 21:30 ItsSnoky 25 [M4F] UK/Europe - Looking for the one to get to know and muh more.
IntroductionWell hello there! (General Kenobi!). I'm Snoky also known as you'll find out when we get to know eachother
I’m a 25 year old English/Norwegian guy from the U of K! I currently work in the IT Sector within the Local Government and my god I forgot how hectic the public sector was after i left it roughly 4 years ago. I did indeed have quite a shock coming back 😅
ApperanceI'm on the bigger side but am looking to get that changed with some help due to i'm not very happy with the way thing's are currently. Minus that I'm 6'1/6'2, depends on which doctor you ask! I have short-ish hair dark blonde hair? I think? I'm not very good with colors so you'll have to tell me whenever we decide to exchange pictures.
Which i will be more than happy to exchange later on once we get to know eachother!
Main Intrests/HobbiesMy main interests are either playing games with some friends on the PC, studying for future certifications and mainly what I do after work just kicking back and watching whatever random things I can find on YouTube (I aren’t a big TV person). I used to watch a lot of anime but I tend to drop out of it for a year and then I get back in to it then I lose interest again heh, it’s just a thing that I’ve been doing for years on end.
I am somewhat in to movies but I haven’t really properly watched any within the last year or so but if I was to give a rough genre, I’d say dark-ish movies with a grabbing story i.e. DC films and a here and there Marvel film (IW ftw!) I much more prefer it when the bad guy gets the upper hand and basically wins as close to that of Thanos basically.
My main music choices? Everywhere and everything. If my ears like it, then chances are I’ll most likely like it. I’d write down all the artists I follow right now but trust me it’d take too long to go over so it’d probs better to just share my Spotify playlist lmao. But to give a quick sum up I’d say its more around mixed genre, alt-rock basically.
I do also write my own stuff as well, but again like anime I do it for like 6 months then stop, then start a year later so eh it’s a pretty hit and miss hobby for me 😅
Future Prospects?As mentioned in my apperance section i'm in the process of trying to get fit with weight loss as I’m not very happy with how I am at the moment especially when it comes to health after a incident a few years ago but that’s neither here nor the future as I’m looking to change it with the help of the NHS and people around me. I'd be more than happy to join forces together with someone who's trying to do the same thing!
I currently own my own company which is currently under going some development but hasn't actually started as of yet (still looking in that area) but it will get there at somepoint!
Alongside my own company I’m also undergoing a project with a close friend of mine that we’re trying to pursue which is actually happening alongside the org itself so it's all looping togetherslowly but surely.
What am i looking for?I'm looking for someone who's intrested in getting to know eachother, someone who's got my back and i've got theres, someone i can well essentially "grow" with and get to know, someone who's willing to put the effort in to get to know me and vice versa.I'd like said person to be able to hold a convoersation with me as i've been in too many instances where it's all been one sided convos with me basically putting in more effort than the other person but alas that's neither here nor there and hopfully I'll maybe find the person who would share that equal effort with me. And trust me I've been ghosted loads of times to the point it's like "bruh, just why?" but anyway!
I'm open to long distant's so long as there's a goal to meet eachother in the somewhat near future!
No older than 27 please!
The End?If you've made it this far after this somewhat long post then i must congradulate you!
I now have a small question for you to send me the answer too when you message me.
On what date and or month was a i born? I was born on the month of a certain red birthstone on a international memorial day
p.s, if you don't get it it doesn't matter it's worth a try regardless
Small partial note; If your going to time waste and just ghost me please don't bother messaging me as i'm only intrested in getting to know actual serious people...and please be able to hold a convosation with me and vice versa!
2023.03.26 21:30 SaviorOfRats Advice for moving into a dorm?
I'm moving into my colleges dorm tomorrow, and I'm super nervous. My parent is helping me move and all, and it's gonna be way easier to attend college because before I was bussing nearly 2 and a half hours every day to go to and from school, but I want to be a good roommate and not have issues like I did at my last institution. I was dealing with a roommate who didn't respect my boundaries and was kind of ableist to me (I was using a wheelchair at the time), any advice for avoiding things like this when I have a roommate?
submitted by SaviorOfRats to college [link] [comments]
2023.03.26 21:29 zucchini51 25M looking for roommate(s). 9/1 lease or later than that is fine
Hi everyone,
I am a 25M relocating to Boston. I will start my new job at MGH at the end of this year, so I am planning to move to Boston sometime between 9/1 to 12/1.
I have done some research and I think I would prefer Fenway, South Boston, North End, and some other neighborhoods that I can easily access the red line or the green D/E line. I am not very familiar with Boston so if you prefer any other areas I am open to talk about it. I do have a SUV that I plan to keep.
I will be working three 12 hour shifts a week and some night shifts here and there so I will either be gone all day or be home for some time as well. I have had roommates throughout school and I did not have issues with any of them. I would say I am clean and I love to cook and try new restaurants.
My budget is <$2000. I will not start my job until the end of the year, so I am okay with starting a 9/1 lease even though I probably won't be there for a month or two.
I have lived with guys and girls in the past, so I am open to anyone. I do not have any kids or pets. I do not mind if you have pets though. Just looking for someone around my age who is clean and respectful. I know it's only March so we have some time but feel free to message me and we can chat about it more!
submitted by zucchini51 to bostonhousing [link] [comments]
I am a 25M relocating to Boston. I will start my new job at MGH at the end of this year, so I am planning to move to Boston sometime between 9/1 to 12/1.
I have done some research and I think I would prefer Fenway, South Boston, North End, and some other neighborhoods that I can easily access the red line or the green D/E line. I am not very familiar with Boston so if you prefer any other areas I am open to talk about it. I do have a SUV that I plan to keep.
I will be working three 12 hour shifts a week and some night shifts here and there so I will either be gone all day or be home for some time as well. I have had roommates throughout school and I did not have issues with any of them. I would say I am clean and I love to cook and try new restaurants.
My budget is <$2000. I will not start my job until the end of the year, so I am okay with starting a 9/1 lease even though I probably won't be there for a month or two.
I have lived with guys and girls in the past, so I am open to anyone. I do not have any kids or pets. I do not mind if you have pets though. Just looking for someone around my age who is clean and respectful. I know it's only March so we have some time but feel free to message me and we can chat about it more!
2023.03.26 21:29 Junior-Hornet-5037 Bumps and itching
I've been on t for almost 4 months now. About 2 months in my injection sights began to swell and become itchy. My skin has been drying and turning darker in those spots, a long with developing large hard bumps near where I inject. It got so bad that I went to the Dr. He said it seemed like a textbook skin infection but was baffled that it didn't hurt, just itched. I got antibiotics but they didn't help, so I contacted my Dr who prescribed me testosterone. They said that I was probably allergic to the cotton seed oil and prescribed me the version with sesame seed oil and all seemed well. Yesterday I took my second dose of it and today I have a new itchy hard bump. Just wondering if anyone else has experienced this. It also stings everytime I take my shots and I'm not sure if that's normal.
submitted by Junior-Hornet-5037 to ftm [link] [comments]
2023.03.26 21:28 chronic-venting The Price of a Stolen Childhood
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/magazine/how-much-can-restitution-help-victims-of-child-pornography.html
When Nicole was a child, her father took pornographic pictures of her that still circulate on the internet.
Victims of child pornography can now collect damages directly from those convicted of possessing their images. But how much can restitution help them repair their lives?
By Emily Bazelon Jan. 24, 2013
The detective spread out the photographs on the kitchen table, in front of Nicole, on a December morning in 2006. She was 17, but in the pictures, she saw the face of her 10-year-old self, a half-grown girl wearing make-up. The bodies in the images were broken up by pixelation, but Nicole could see the outline of her father, forcing himself on her. Her mother, sitting next to her, burst into sobs.
The detective spoke gently, but he had brutal news: the pictures had been downloaded onto thousands of computers via file-sharing services around the world. They were among the most widely circulated child pornography on the Internet. Also online were video clips, similarly notorious, in which Nicole spoke words her father had scripted for her, sometimes at the behest of other men. For years, investigators in the United States, Canada and Europe had been trying to identify the girl in the images.
Nicole's parents split up when she was a toddler, and she grew up living with her mother and stepfather and visiting her father, a former policeman, every other weekend at his apartment in a suburban town in the Pacific Northwest. He started showing her child pornography when she was about 9, telling her that it was normal for fathers and daughters to "play games" like in the pictures. Soon after, he started forcing her to perform oral sex and raping her, dressing her in tight clothes and sometimes binding her with ropes. When she turned 12, she told him to stop, but he used threats and intimidation to continue the abuse for about a year. He said that if she told anyone what he'd done, everyone would hate her for letting him. He said that her mother would no longer love her.
Nicole (who asked me to use her middle name to protect her privacy) knew her father had a tripod set up in his bedroom. She asked if he'd ever shown the pictures to anyone. He said no, and she believed him. "It was all so hidden," she told me. "And he knew how to lie. He taught me to do it. He said: 'You look them straight in the eye. You make your shoulders square. You breathe normally.'"
When she was 16, Nicole told her mother, in a burst of tears, what had been going on at her father's house. Her father was arrested for child rape. The police asked Nicole whether he took pictures. She said yes, but that she didn't think he showed them to anyone. A few months later, while her father was out on bail, Nicole was using a computer he gave her to work on a presentation for Spanish class when she came across a file with a vulgar name that she couldn't open. She showed it to her mother and stepfather, and they brought the computer to the police.
A search detected five deleted video files of child pornography, two of them showing Nicole and her father. In the spring of 2006, he was charged with a new crime—producing the videos—and he fled the country. At this point, the police didn't realize that Nicole's father had also distributed the images.
Months later, the police said they had no leads on her father, so Nicole went on television to ask the public for any tips that might help them find him. A police officer in Toronto involved in tracking child pornography around the world saw the broadcast and recognized Nicole as an older version of the girl in the notorious videos. The Toronto officer set off an alert that reached the police in Nicole's hometown, informing them that she was the victim in a major pornography-distribution case.
The alert brought the local detective to Nicole's house on that December day, to confirm that she was in fact the girl in the pictures that circulated around the globe. "It was the worst moment of my life," Nicole said of seeing the pictures of herself. "In a way, I didn't remember it being that bad with my father—and then I saw that it was. Knowing that other people, all over, had seen me like that, I just froze. I could hear my mother crying, but I couldn't cry."
Nicole's appearance on TV produced a tip that eventually led the police to arrest her father in Hong Kong. But by going public, she had inadvertently exposed her identity to thousands of men who for years had collected her images. On one Web site with an American flag design, on a thread that continued for four years, commenters described in detail the acts of rape and bondage Nicole had experienced. One called the videos "legendary." Another called her "an eager participant" because her father instructed her to smile and talk in the videos. "The fact remains that she is the most searched for, sought after and downloaded ever," a third commenter wrote. "There are hours of video out there. It's just too bad there are not more willing like her."
For Nicole, knowing that so many men have witnessed and taken pleasure from her abuse has been excruciating. "You have an image of yourself as a person, but here is this other image," she told me. "You know it's not true, but all those other people will believe that it's you—that this is who you really are."
Until the 1970s, magazines with titles like Lolita were rife with sexual images of minors and routinely sold alongside adult pornography at red-light bookstores. In 1978, Congress made child pornography illegal, and four years later, the Supreme Court upheld a state law banning its sale. The court's decision changed the market along with the law. "The commercial distributors started to go out of business," said Kenneth Lanning, a retired F.B.I. agent who consulted on child pornography cases for decades. For a time, distribution and production plummeted. But then came the Internet. By the mid- to late 1990s, Lanning said, "there was a way for people seeking it to find each other and send images."
A decade later, the Justice Department interviewed veteran experts like Lanning for a 2010 report, and concluded that "the market—in terms of numbers of offenders, images and victims"—was growing to a degree described as "overwhelming" and "exponential." In the early-Web year of 1994, only 61 defendants were sentenced in federal court for child-pornography offenses; in 2011, 1,880 were, a 30-fold increase. The federal definition of child pornography extends to young people up to age 18, but the 2010 report noted that it had become more common for images to involve young children, as well as violence and sadism.
Precise numbers of child-pornography viewers are hard to come by. Unicef estimates that there are at least hundreds of thousands of Web sites with child pornography worldwide. Child-pornography consumers are even more likely to swap with one another via hidden networks. Using a tool developed at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 2009, police have logged close to 22 million public I.P. addresses offering child-pornography pictures or videos via peer-to-peer file sharing, which allows users to download content from one computer to another; almost 10 million of the I.P. addresses were located in the United States. Many of the users shared only a single illegal image, perhaps downloaded inadvertently, but others offered collections of hundreds or thousands of pictures.
To gain access to a group of downloaders, a recent arrival may have to prove himself by delivering new material. Often this involves digitally altering an existing image, but in some cases, it can also mean seducing children to create new pictures to trade. The most desired series zoom around the Internet. "A lot of these guys have a collector's mentality," Lanning said. The pictures Nicole's father took became must-haves and went viral.
For Nicole, knowing that her photos were circulating was an unrelenting burden. It was hard to concentrate at school and hard to forge new friendships. She stayed close to just a few friends from her church. Her family is deeply Christian—"I've found comfort in my faith," she says—and she was home-schooled for a few years as a younger child. Her friends from church were the only ones she told about her father. "Everyone else I held at arm's length," she told me when we met this summer at her lawyer's office. Nicole speaks deliberately and carefully, and on that day she was wearing an outfit that matched her coral nail polish and perfectly applied makeup. "But other kids found out after my father was charged. I remember walking down the hallways and thinking I could hear people saying, 'There's the girl who was raped by her dad.'"
In her junior year, Nicole transferred to a community college with a program for students who wanted to earn an associate's degree while finishing high school. "At the time I'd have said I went for academic reasons, but looking back, it was also to isolate myself," she said.
Late that spring, Nicole got a series of messages on Myspace from a man who said he had been looking for her for five years. He asked, "Want me to come visit u?" When Nicole blocked him, he wrote to one of her friends on Myspace, telling her that Nicole was a "porn star"—and sending two images. "That's when I fully realized what it meant for these pictures to be out there," Nicole said. "I couldn't get away from it, not really. I started getting paranoid and having nightmares."
The man was arrested and went to prison, but Nicole couldn't avoid the knowledge that other men were still looking at the sexual photos of her young self. Later that year, she got a letter from the Victim Notification System at the Justice Department. Congress had passed a law in 2004 mandating that crime victims receive notice every time a suspect is arrested or has a court appearance. The letter was addressed to Nicole's mother and stepfather because she hadn't yet turned 18; it informed them that a man in California had been arrested for possessing a pornographic photo of her. "It just sat there on the counter for days," Nicole remembered. "We didn't really know where to put it." More arrests followed and more letters—piles of them. "We stacked them in a laundry basket in a walk-in closet so I wouldn't have to see them," Nicole said. "Then there were more baskets, and we had to move them to the garage. It was really hard for me. I was still scared of my father, but I knew him. These other people, they were strangers, and there were so many of them."
The piles of letters would eventually connect Nicole with another young woman who had also been abused and then lead them both to court. Back in April 1998, in one of the first investigations into Internet trafficking of child pornography, the F.B.I. started tracking an AOL user, with the handle HAZMAT029, who was posting on an AOL bulletin board service. HAZMAT029 sent 80 illegal pictures to another user, BMR169, along with e-mails that included the message: "do me a favor. get a peice [sic] of paper and wright HI HAZ on it and take a pic of her in nothing but stockings pulled down below her [genitals]." BMR169 e-mailed back pictures of a young girl, her shorts and underwear pulled to the side, sitting on a gray carpet in front of a wooden dresser. Next to her, a note read, "HI HAZ."
The F.B.I. traced BMR's AOL account to a suburban house in a small town, and in October of that year, a team of agents arrived with a search warrant. In a basement bedroom, they found the gray carpet and the dresser. They also seized a computer full of illegal images, including pictures that showed the same girl being forced to give oral sex and being raped. The man the F.B.I. suspected was BMR wasn't home, so the agents showed the face of the child in the photos to his wife and his adult son. Did they recognize the girl?
They did. As they spoke, one of the agents looked out the window of the house and saw the girl playing in the yard across the street. "It's something I'll never forget," he told me.
Amy, as she's called in the court documents, was BMR's 9-year-old niece. Shown sanitized versions of the pictures, Amy denied that her uncle had abused her. She said he told her she was special and took her to buy treats like beef jerky, and she didn't want anything bad to happen to him. "How is he?" she asked her parents in the weeks after his arrest. "Is he going to be mad at me?"
Over months of therapy, Amy began to talk about the abuse. "My mind has everything in it," she told her therapist, according to court records I read with her permission. She remembered her uncle trying to have sex with her—it hurt, and she pulled away. And she remembered, at his direction, chatting with men over the Internet about the photos he sent them.
Amy's uncle pleaded guilty to one count of rape and two counts of child sexual abuse in state court and was sentenced to the minimum for each one, adding up to 12½ years in prison. In federal court, he pleaded guilty to one count of production of child pornography and received a 12-year sentence. Amy's current lawyer, James Marsh, says her parents were told the state and federal penalties would run consecutively, but instead, her uncle was allowed to serve the two at the same time.
Amy was given a diagnosis of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder the year her uncle was sentenced, but she also asked to stop going to therapy—she told her parents that she didn't want to talk about the abuse anymore. Her mother, who worked in health care, and her father, a tradesman, blamed themselves for trusting Amy's uncle with her. For years Amy's mother barely spoke to Amy's aunt, who remained married to her husband, even though the sisters continued to live across the street from each other.
As Amy grew up, she tried to push aside what had happened to her. Every few months, in middle school and high school, her parents would ask if she wanted to talk about it, and each time she would say no. "I was always thinking about it, but I wasn't ready to deal with how I felt," she says now. Amy threw herself into her social life, going out and drinking in the hills behind her house. Even to the friends who knew, it almost seemed as if the abuse hadn't happened.
When she was 17, Amy received her first crime-victim notice from the Justice Department. "My mom said it was a mistake, because I was still a minor—the letter should have been addressed to her and my dad," she said. "But it had my name on it, and I never got mail, so I wanted to open it. My parents took me into their room and said we needed to have a talk." Amy's parents had never told her that her uncle had distributed images of her to other men. "It had been so long by then, eight years," she said. "They didn't know how to tell me."
Amy's parents took her to see Marsh, who had started the public-interest Children's Law Center in Washington. At their first meeting, he explained to Amy that the letters meant her pictures had been traded countless times online. "I just felt so full of shame," Amy said. "I started wondering, Has he looked at them? He said he hadn't, and that made me feel better. But then I thought, Who has?"
Marsh researched legal remedies for Amy. Combing through his casebooks, he found a provision in the Violence Against Women Act that he had never heard of before: it gave the victims of sex crimes, including child pornography, the right to restitution or compensation for the "full amount" of their losses. Enumerating what those losses could be, Congress listed psychiatric care, lost income and legal costs and concluded, "The issuance of a restitution order under this section is mandatory."
The provision for restitution, enacted in 1994, had yet to be invoked in a case of child-pornography possession. The basis for such a claim wasn't necessarily self-evident: how could Amy prove that her ongoing trauma was the fault of any one man who looked at her pictures, instead of her uncle, who abused her and made the pornography?
Marsh suggested that Amy see a forensic psychologist, Joyanna Silberg, who evaluated Amy and said she would need therapy throughout her life and could expect to work sporadically because of the likelihood of periodic setbacks. Silberg attributed these costs—Amy's damages—to her awareness of the ongoing downloading and viewing. "Usually, we try to help survivors of child sexual abuse make a very strong distinction between the past and the present," Silberg, who has given testimony on Amy's behalf for restitution hearings, told me. "The idea is to contain the harm: it happened then, and it's not happening anymore. But how do you do that when these images are still out there? The past is still the present, which turns the hallmarks of treatment on their head."
Marsh put together a lifetime claim for Amy totaling almost $3.4 million. With the crime notices arriving in the mail, Marsh started tracking men charged with possession of her pictures. He looked, in particular, for wealthy defendants. He planned to use the concept of joint and several liability to argue that each defendant should be on the hook for the full amount of his client's damages—that is, for millions of dollars. Joint and several liability is often used in pollution cases: when several companies dump toxic waste in a lake over time, a plaintiff can go after the company with the deepest pockets, and a judge can hold that single company responsible for the entire cost of the cleanup—with the understanding that it's up to that polluter to sue the others to pay their share.
In July 2008, Marsh learned about the arrest of Alan Hesketh, a former vice-president of Pfizer, who was charged with trading nearly 2,000 child-pornography photos online—among them four pictures of Amy. Marsh filed one of his first requests for restitution with the prosecution. Hesketh pleaded guilty, and his sentencing was scheduled for later that year.
At the time of the Hesketh case, Amy was struggling. She was 19 and living with her boyfriend. She had enrolled at a local community college, but she drank too much to concentrate on studying. The crime-victim notices had stirred up the past for her, and she wasn't in regular therapy. "The last class I went to, there was this PowerPoint slide, something about child sexual abuse, and I thought, I can't do this," she told me as she sat in her kitchen smoking a cigarette. "It just brought everything back." Amy dropped out after that, without telling her parents. "I told myself I would just take a year off," she continued. "But you know, statisticwise, once you leave school, the chances you'll finish go down about 80 percent."
Amy has a quick intelligence—she's a college dropout who can rattle off her own odds of going back—and asks lots of questions. She has focused her curiosity on the legal strategy that Marsh has pursued for her. When Hesketh was sentenced, Amy decided she would be there. "I kind of wanted to face my fear," she told me. She also wanted to prove a point: Hesketh was arguing, through his lawyer, that he had committed a victimless crime—a common defense in cases of child-pornography possession. "I thought, I want him to look at me and know that I'm not a picture; I'm a person," she said.
In a federal courthouse in Bridgeport, Conn., in October 2008, Amy sat on the opposite side of the courtroom from Hesketh's family. The judge opened the proceedings by acknowledging that there was a victim in the courtroom. Amy listened as Hesketh's grown children asked the judge for mercy for their father. "His kids kept saying he was the best grandfather ever," she said. "And I was like: 'But you know. You know what he did.'"
Then Hesketh took the stand. As Amy remembers it, he said, "I'm so sorry." Earlier, he said that "he hadn't hurt anyone," Amy told me. "Now he totally flipped around. I felt like I'd made an impact. It was like, 'He knows now.'"
Hesketh was sentenced to 6½ years. Four months later, in an unprecedented move, the judge advised Hesketh to settle the restitution claim and he agreed to pay $130,000.
Not long after, Amy found out she was pregnant. She wasn't sorry—at the time she had faith in her boyfriend, whom she had told about the abuse and the photos. But he was a heroin user and dealer, and he went to jail two months after their son was born. Amy started seeing another man who she says had a jealous streak and broke her nose, twice. He also broke her infant son's leg, she told me. She took the blame when he threatened her, and she had to give up custody to her mother for six months.
As she recalled this time in her life, she took out her phone and scrolled through her photos until she found a close-up of her beaten face: lip split, one eye half-closed, nose swollen and cheek yellow with bruises. The young woman next to me had clear skin and bright eyes, and I had just watched her charm a police officer into calling us a cab. The girl in the photo was expressionless.
Amy stared at the picture on her phone. "That was my normal," she said.
Six months after Hesketh's sentencing, Marsh went after another child-pornography defendant, Arthur Staples, a 65-year-old sheriff's deputy in Virginia, who had chatted online with an undercover detective and expressed an interest in young children. Staples sent one image of a young girl (not Amy), and he was caught with more than 600 pictures on his computer, including hers. Staples agreed not to appeal any sentence or restitution judgment. The judge sentenced him to 17½ years, and made the unusual move of ordering him to pay all of Amy's claim. To Marsh's surprise, Staples turned out to have $2 million in assets. He has since paid $1.2 million to Amy. (Marsh says the government let Staples's wife keep part of the estate.) While Amy has been turned down for restitution by some courts, which have stated that there was not enough proof that any one man who viewed her pictures was responsible for the harm she has suffered, she has won more than 150 cases, totaling $1.6 million. Most of the amounts aren't large: $1,000 or even $100, paid out in checks as small as $7.33.
Nicole has also been pursuing restitution. Her lawyer, Carol Hepburn, did her own research and got in touch with Marsh when she learned about the claims he was bringing for Amy. The two lawyers now collaborate on ideas and strategy, though they represent their clients separately. Since receiving her first check for $10,000, Nicole has collected more than $550,000, mostly in small amounts from 204 different men. So far only a few other child-pornography victims have gone to court for restitution. Many may not know there is a legal remedy; others don't know their images have circulated.
The restitution checks gave Nicole a lift when they started to trickle in, but, like Amy, she had trouble with the transition into adulthood. In the fall of 2008, Nicole was attending a one-year bible college and working at an ice-cream shop. At work she felt increasingly self-conscious around male customers. Had they seen her pictures? Were they like the man who stalked her on Myspace—were any of them coming to the store because they knew? That spring, Nicole testified at her father's sentencing. She asked the judge to give him a long punishment, and her father was sent to prison for 50 years. Her roommates, one of whom was a friend from her childhood church, supported her. "But I didn't have a counselor there, and that was tough," she said. "I called my parents and said: 'I have to quit my job, and I need to come home. I feel like I'm going crazy.'"
During her first few weeks at home, Nicole slept all day in her childhood bedroom and stayed up late watching sitcoms like Sabrina and The Nanny. Finally, she started counseling and was able to get a job doing administrative work at a nuclear-waste site. That June, she testified at the sentencing hearing of four child-pornography defendants caught with her images, hoping to gather strength from speaking out. Instead, the experience made her feel exposed.
More than a year later, in the fall of 2010, she left for a four-year college away from home. She was worried about being on her own, but she wanted to try. "I push myself," she told me. "I don't like to say something is too much for me." Like Amy, however, she took a psychology course, about child development, that brought up unbearable memories. During lectures, she began going blank. "All of a sudden class would be over, and I would be like, 'What happened?'" she said. She started skipping class for fear of continuing to disassociate.
Nicole, who wasn't in counseling at the time, failed all but two of her courses that spring. "I just totally broke down," she said. "I'd come home and sit in the same position and stare into space, and then I'd look at the clock, and it was six hours later." Nicole talked about this period of her life with Hepburn and me over dinner one night last summer. She showed us a tattoo on her right wrist: a heart sheltered by wings that she got after her father's sentencing. She also learned to make tattoos, and she took out her phone to show us a picture of the first one she created, an anchor with a rope curled around it. "My cousin is a tattoo artist, and he taught me," she said. "We grew up together, and he was a very easy person to hang out with during that bad time. I'd go over to his place, and he'd be drawing, and he said, 'You're into design, you could do this.' When I tried I felt this release of emotions. We started drawing for hours to music—Tom Petty, Cake, everything. You have to learn how to go smoothly and keep the same pressure on the line the whole time. I drew anchors over and over again on grapefruit. I'd been numb for months, and now I could feel again. I actually felt joy."
In the fall of 2011, Nicole transferred to a campus closer to her family. She made her way through her course work by avoiding subject matter that upset her and by allowing for her own limitations. "I had to accept that, because I have this extra stressor, I get overwhelmed by things that other people can do," she said.
Nicole decided to spare herself going to court, so she wasn't in El Paso, in September 2011, for the sentencing of Luis Enriquez-Alonso, a student at the University of Texas. He agreed to plead guilty after being caught with thousands of illegal videos and images, including Nicole's, on his computer. At the hearing, Enriquez-Alonso and his parents listened while the prosecutor read into the record a statement Nicole wrote about what it is like to know men are looking at her pictures: "After all these years and going to different counselors, I still haven't learned the trick to let my mind rest," Nicole wrote. "When I do sleep, my dreams are vivid and I remember them for weeks. A common theme is finding myself naked in front of a crowd of people or in an enclosed space and I can't escape or run away fast enough."
That day, without a court order, Enriquez-Alonso's family handed over a check for $150,000, along with an expression of remorse. "That really touched me," Nicole said, "that his family wanted to make sure that I was taken care of, that I could get all the counseling I need. Most of the time when I get restitution, there's no story behind it. I feel like they're forced to give the money. In this case, they wanted to do it, and there were words behind it, kind words." Enriquez-Alonso, who faced a maximum of 10 years in prison, is serving 5.
Study after study links child sexual abuse to psychological trauma, addiction and violent relationships in adulthood. There is almost no research, however, that deals with the specifics of Amy and Nicole's experiences: What additional harm comes from knowing that pictures of your childhood exploitation are circulating widely?
The Supreme Court actually addressed this question in its 1982 decision upholding child-pornography bans. "Pornography poses an even greater threat to the child victim than does sexual abuse or prostitution," Justice Byron White wrote, quoting from a book about abused children. "Because the child's actions are reduced to a recording, the pornography may haunt him in future years, long after the original misdeed took place."
David Finkelhor, a sociologist who directs the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, sees the moral weight of the Supreme Court's proclamation, but not the empirical proof. "The evidence doesn't yet tell us to what extent the experience of being a pornography victim aggravates the experience of the sexual abuse itself," he told me. "How do you separate it out?"
Courts have disagreed on this question. In at least a dozen cases, defendants have appealed restitution decisions and mostly won. In five of those cases, federal appeals courts have expressed skepticism that Amy and Nicole should receive more than nominal restitution. Two other appeals courts have allowed the young women to recover from individual defendants as members of the group of viewers but, so far, only for amounts of $10,000 or less. (Amy collected a far greater sum from Arthur Staples because he waived his right to appeal.)
Last spring, the legal battle was focused on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. One panel of three judges upheld full restitution to Amy of millions of dollars from a Texas man. Based on that decision, a second three-judge panel affirmed a separate $529,000 restitution order for Amy against a New Orleans defendant, but voiced its fundamental disagreement with the original ruling. To address the dispute, 15 Fifth Circuit judges gathered last May for a hearing in New Orleans. James Marsh and Carol Hepburn were there along with Amy; Nicole chose not to go. Amy knew this was the most significant hearing to date, and she wanted to show the judges that she was real, just as she had shown Alan Hesketh.
At the lectern to argue her side was Paul G. Cassell, a former federal judge who teaches law at the University of Utah. Cassell is a staunch conservative (he challenged the right to a Miranda warning before the Supreme Court), and Marsh and Hepburn, both Democrats, were surprised at first to be allied with him. But as a leading advocate for victims' rights, Cassell sees in Amy's claims a chance to lay the groundwork for broader change.
For 30 years, the victims'-rights movement has fought for a larger role for victims in criminal prosecutions. Victims have gained the right to make statements in court about the impact a crime has had on them, which judges can take into account in determining punishment. Restitution remains an ambitious next step. The standard context is crime involving financial loss—a bank robber ordered to return stolen money to the bank or an embezzler who must repay the employer he defrauded. Cassell sees Amy and Nicole's cases as a route to expand the idea. "I'd like to pursue the concept of total restitution for all victims, for whatever crimes and losses a defendant has caused," Cassell told me. "This is a good opportunity to show how it can work."
In the courtroom, Cassell linked the defendants to the network for child-pornography distribution. "What the defendants have done is collect images of an 8-year-old girl being bound, raped and sodomized," he said. "If you participate in a market, you become responsible for that market." The lawyer for the New Orleans defendant disagreed. She argued that there was no proof that her client, in particular, had harmed Amy—no way to show that his viewing of her images caused damage. She also called the restitution order for $529,000 "grossly disproportionate to his culpability relative to other people who have abused Amy."
Michael Rotker, the lawyer for the department, told the court that the problem with the restitution awards was that there was no statutory authority for joint and several liability—nothing in the law, as Congress wrote it, which allowed a victim to recover a large award from one defendant who could then seek to recoup those losses by suing other defendants. Instead, Rotker argued, each defendant could be held responsible only for a small and roughly equal fraction of the whole. He offered this hypothetical example: if 200 men were convicted of possessing Amy's images, and her claim for damages totaled $3 million, then a judge would have discretion to order a defendant to pay restitution of $15,000 to $30,000.
As the lawyers spoke, Amy's eyes filled with tears. "Some of it was hard to listen to," she told me later. "But my therapist said to think of it as a store, with different compartments you can take out and put back. She said, 'When you were a little girl, you had to compartmentalize to deal with everything you went through.' So I can still do that now, and sometimes it's good, I guess."
At one point in the proceedings, Judge Emilio Garza stopped Cassell, not to challenge him, but to pick up on his theme. "It seems to me that we're in this brave new world, where not only was there an actual rape, but I'm going to suggest to you there is a continuing digitized rape," the judge said. "Possession of the digitized recording of the rape contributes to the system, contributes to the economic benefit of those who produced this thing."
The judges would not announce their decision for several months, but at the end of the hearing, Amy focused on what Garza said that day. "To hear that from a judge—I couldn't believe it," she told me. "It was so relieving. It was like he really got it. He understood."
Just six weeks after Amy got home from New Orleans, her uncle was released from prison after completing his concurrent 12-year sentences. Amy says she was greatly relieved when her aunt told her that she wouldn't allow him in the house. Instead, he was paroled nearby. When Marsh texted to give her the address, Amy happened to be only a few blocks from it. "I almost dropped the phone," she said. "Oh, my God, it was just so weird. I thought, He's got binoculars, he's looking for me. I thought the worst." Marsh reminded her that if her uncle contacted her, he would go back to prison. And also that she was an adult now and safe from her uncle's [abusiveness toward children].
Last month, while standing in line at Wal-Mart with her brother and a friend, Amy saw a man who she thought was her uncle looking at her. "I wasn't positive because I haven't seen him for so long," she said. "But as soon as I made eye contact, I didn't breathe." Was she being paranoid? She couldn't tell. The man seemed to follow them out of the store. As they got into her car, the man stopped to light a cigarette, and she thought he was staring at them. "It was very, very scary," she said.
Today, a sentence like the one Amy's uncle received—with no additional prison time for a federal conviction for pornography production and distribution—is extremely rare. The penalties for distributing or receiving pornography have become harsher. Receiving one illegal photo carries a mandatory minimum penalty of five years. The number of images a defendant downloads increases the punishment, as does his use of a computer. Now that large volumes of data stream with a click, the average recommended prison term for possession has jumped to 10 years, even if a defendant has no criminal record and there is no evidence that he produced or distributed porn. Because some child sexual abuse cases still end in relatively low penalties in state court, there's a paradox: defendants who look at sexual pictures of children can spend more years in prison than people who abuse children but don't have pornography of them.
The United States Sentencing Commission held hearings last February to discuss whether the punishment for child-pornography offenders has become both disproportionate and unfair—with people who committed similar crimes receiving vastly different penalties, based on the subjective decisions of judges. Restitution was discussed even though the prevailing view is that technically it isn't considered part of punishment. Its purpose is to "make the victim whole," as the legal phrase goes. "Simply put, an innocent victim should not suffer financial losses from a crime—the defendant should make good on those losses," Cassell said.
But Douglas Berman, an Ohio State University law professor who writes a frequently cited blog about sentencing, argues that the commission could rethink the role of restitution. In some cases, restitution could be considered commensurate to prison time—and courts could recommend shorter sentences for child-pornography collectors who agree to compensate victims based on their ability to pay. Berman thinks the key to making this leap is adopting the point of view of the victim. "Victims are shrewder than most prosecutors about the diminishing returns of long incarceration," he said. "They want perpetrators to serve some time. They want these men's lives disrupted, and they want the deterrence that helps protect other people. But they're often wise enough to realize that there's not much gain in deterrence from a 5 or 10 year sentence to 15 years. If victims are saying that restitution is as, or more, important to them than five extra years, I very much think the sentencing commission and Congress should listen."
When I asked Amy about such a trade-off, she supported it. Nicole had mixed feelings: she liked the idea of greater incentives for restitution, but she wasn't sure about giving up longer punishments, given how easy it would be for someone to leave prison and go back to downloading child pornography. Cassell says that using restitution in this way could have value. "If it makes the perpetrators internalize how they've hurt the victims—if it makes them see there are real victims—then you deter them from doing this again when they get out," he said.
Berman also favors a proposal that has been discussed at the Justice Department: a general compensation fund that would systematically collect restitution from child-pornography offenders and pay it out to victims like Amy and Nicole based on the harm they suffered and the costs they've incurred because of it. A compensation fund could give more victims the financial means to put their lives back together. And it could force more defendants to reckon with the children in the pictures and with their own role in supporting a market that depends on abuse.
Restitution has allowed Amy and Nicole to get the counseling they need, but receiving large sums can be complicated. When Amy received her $130,000 check from Alan Hesketh, she went on shopping sprees at the mall, splurging at stores like Abercrombie & Fitch. She had never been able to earn a steady paycheck, and the money was a sudden windfall. By the time the $1.2 million check came last spring, she was more considered. She didn't want to stand out in her small town. Last summer, she bought a modest three-bedroom house a few miles from her childhood home, where her mother and brothers still live.
Amy has also discovered that she likes giving money away—to her mother for a new deck, to a close friend who wanted kitchen cabinets she couldn't otherwise afford. It's her way of dealing with the discomfort of having resources that people around her don't and repaying those who helped her along the way.
1/
submitted by chronic-venting to Prevention [link] [comments]
When Nicole was a child, her father took pornographic pictures of her that still circulate on the internet.
Victims of child pornography can now collect damages directly from those convicted of possessing their images. But how much can restitution help them repair their lives?
By Emily Bazelon Jan. 24, 2013
The detective spread out the photographs on the kitchen table, in front of Nicole, on a December morning in 2006. She was 17, but in the pictures, she saw the face of her 10-year-old self, a half-grown girl wearing make-up. The bodies in the images were broken up by pixelation, but Nicole could see the outline of her father, forcing himself on her. Her mother, sitting next to her, burst into sobs.
The detective spoke gently, but he had brutal news: the pictures had been downloaded onto thousands of computers via file-sharing services around the world. They were among the most widely circulated child pornography on the Internet. Also online were video clips, similarly notorious, in which Nicole spoke words her father had scripted for her, sometimes at the behest of other men. For years, investigators in the United States, Canada and Europe had been trying to identify the girl in the images.
Nicole's parents split up when she was a toddler, and she grew up living with her mother and stepfather and visiting her father, a former policeman, every other weekend at his apartment in a suburban town in the Pacific Northwest. He started showing her child pornography when she was about 9, telling her that it was normal for fathers and daughters to "play games" like in the pictures. Soon after, he started forcing her to perform oral sex and raping her, dressing her in tight clothes and sometimes binding her with ropes. When she turned 12, she told him to stop, but he used threats and intimidation to continue the abuse for about a year. He said that if she told anyone what he'd done, everyone would hate her for letting him. He said that her mother would no longer love her.
Nicole (who asked me to use her middle name to protect her privacy) knew her father had a tripod set up in his bedroom. She asked if he'd ever shown the pictures to anyone. He said no, and she believed him. "It was all so hidden," she told me. "And he knew how to lie. He taught me to do it. He said: 'You look them straight in the eye. You make your shoulders square. You breathe normally.'"
When she was 16, Nicole told her mother, in a burst of tears, what had been going on at her father's house. Her father was arrested for child rape. The police asked Nicole whether he took pictures. She said yes, but that she didn't think he showed them to anyone. A few months later, while her father was out on bail, Nicole was using a computer he gave her to work on a presentation for Spanish class when she came across a file with a vulgar name that she couldn't open. She showed it to her mother and stepfather, and they brought the computer to the police.
A search detected five deleted video files of child pornography, two of them showing Nicole and her father. In the spring of 2006, he was charged with a new crime—producing the videos—and he fled the country. At this point, the police didn't realize that Nicole's father had also distributed the images.
Months later, the police said they had no leads on her father, so Nicole went on television to ask the public for any tips that might help them find him. A police officer in Toronto involved in tracking child pornography around the world saw the broadcast and recognized Nicole as an older version of the girl in the notorious videos. The Toronto officer set off an alert that reached the police in Nicole's hometown, informing them that she was the victim in a major pornography-distribution case.
The alert brought the local detective to Nicole's house on that December day, to confirm that she was in fact the girl in the pictures that circulated around the globe. "It was the worst moment of my life," Nicole said of seeing the pictures of herself. "In a way, I didn't remember it being that bad with my father—and then I saw that it was. Knowing that other people, all over, had seen me like that, I just froze. I could hear my mother crying, but I couldn't cry."
Nicole's appearance on TV produced a tip that eventually led the police to arrest her father in Hong Kong. But by going public, she had inadvertently exposed her identity to thousands of men who for years had collected her images. On one Web site with an American flag design, on a thread that continued for four years, commenters described in detail the acts of rape and bondage Nicole had experienced. One called the videos "legendary." Another called her "an eager participant" because her father instructed her to smile and talk in the videos. "The fact remains that she is the most searched for, sought after and downloaded ever," a third commenter wrote. "There are hours of video out there. It's just too bad there are not more willing like her."
For Nicole, knowing that so many men have witnessed and taken pleasure from her abuse has been excruciating. "You have an image of yourself as a person, but here is this other image," she told me. "You know it's not true, but all those other people will believe that it's you—that this is who you really are."
Until the 1970s, magazines with titles like Lolita were rife with sexual images of minors and routinely sold alongside adult pornography at red-light bookstores. In 1978, Congress made child pornography illegal, and four years later, the Supreme Court upheld a state law banning its sale. The court's decision changed the market along with the law. "The commercial distributors started to go out of business," said Kenneth Lanning, a retired F.B.I. agent who consulted on child pornography cases for decades. For a time, distribution and production plummeted. But then came the Internet. By the mid- to late 1990s, Lanning said, "there was a way for people seeking it to find each other and send images."
A decade later, the Justice Department interviewed veteran experts like Lanning for a 2010 report, and concluded that "the market—in terms of numbers of offenders, images and victims"—was growing to a degree described as "overwhelming" and "exponential." In the early-Web year of 1994, only 61 defendants were sentenced in federal court for child-pornography offenses; in 2011, 1,880 were, a 30-fold increase. The federal definition of child pornography extends to young people up to age 18, but the 2010 report noted that it had become more common for images to involve young children, as well as violence and sadism.
Precise numbers of child-pornography viewers are hard to come by. Unicef estimates that there are at least hundreds of thousands of Web sites with child pornography worldwide. Child-pornography consumers are even more likely to swap with one another via hidden networks. Using a tool developed at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 2009, police have logged close to 22 million public I.P. addresses offering child-pornography pictures or videos via peer-to-peer file sharing, which allows users to download content from one computer to another; almost 10 million of the I.P. addresses were located in the United States. Many of the users shared only a single illegal image, perhaps downloaded inadvertently, but others offered collections of hundreds or thousands of pictures.
To gain access to a group of downloaders, a recent arrival may have to prove himself by delivering new material. Often this involves digitally altering an existing image, but in some cases, it can also mean seducing children to create new pictures to trade. The most desired series zoom around the Internet. "A lot of these guys have a collector's mentality," Lanning said. The pictures Nicole's father took became must-haves and went viral.
For Nicole, knowing that her photos were circulating was an unrelenting burden. It was hard to concentrate at school and hard to forge new friendships. She stayed close to just a few friends from her church. Her family is deeply Christian—"I've found comfort in my faith," she says—and she was home-schooled for a few years as a younger child. Her friends from church were the only ones she told about her father. "Everyone else I held at arm's length," she told me when we met this summer at her lawyer's office. Nicole speaks deliberately and carefully, and on that day she was wearing an outfit that matched her coral nail polish and perfectly applied makeup. "But other kids found out after my father was charged. I remember walking down the hallways and thinking I could hear people saying, 'There's the girl who was raped by her dad.'"
In her junior year, Nicole transferred to a community college with a program for students who wanted to earn an associate's degree while finishing high school. "At the time I'd have said I went for academic reasons, but looking back, it was also to isolate myself," she said.
Late that spring, Nicole got a series of messages on Myspace from a man who said he had been looking for her for five years. He asked, "Want me to come visit u?" When Nicole blocked him, he wrote to one of her friends on Myspace, telling her that Nicole was a "porn star"—and sending two images. "That's when I fully realized what it meant for these pictures to be out there," Nicole said. "I couldn't get away from it, not really. I started getting paranoid and having nightmares."
The man was arrested and went to prison, but Nicole couldn't avoid the knowledge that other men were still looking at the sexual photos of her young self. Later that year, she got a letter from the Victim Notification System at the Justice Department. Congress had passed a law in 2004 mandating that crime victims receive notice every time a suspect is arrested or has a court appearance. The letter was addressed to Nicole's mother and stepfather because she hadn't yet turned 18; it informed them that a man in California had been arrested for possessing a pornographic photo of her. "It just sat there on the counter for days," Nicole remembered. "We didn't really know where to put it." More arrests followed and more letters—piles of them. "We stacked them in a laundry basket in a walk-in closet so I wouldn't have to see them," Nicole said. "Then there were more baskets, and we had to move them to the garage. It was really hard for me. I was still scared of my father, but I knew him. These other people, they were strangers, and there were so many of them."
The piles of letters would eventually connect Nicole with another young woman who had also been abused and then lead them both to court. Back in April 1998, in one of the first investigations into Internet trafficking of child pornography, the F.B.I. started tracking an AOL user, with the handle HAZMAT029, who was posting on an AOL bulletin board service. HAZMAT029 sent 80 illegal pictures to another user, BMR169, along with e-mails that included the message: "do me a favor. get a peice [sic] of paper and wright HI HAZ on it and take a pic of her in nothing but stockings pulled down below her [genitals]." BMR169 e-mailed back pictures of a young girl, her shorts and underwear pulled to the side, sitting on a gray carpet in front of a wooden dresser. Next to her, a note read, "HI HAZ."
The F.B.I. traced BMR's AOL account to a suburban house in a small town, and in October of that year, a team of agents arrived with a search warrant. In a basement bedroom, they found the gray carpet and the dresser. They also seized a computer full of illegal images, including pictures that showed the same girl being forced to give oral sex and being raped. The man the F.B.I. suspected was BMR wasn't home, so the agents showed the face of the child in the photos to his wife and his adult son. Did they recognize the girl?
They did. As they spoke, one of the agents looked out the window of the house and saw the girl playing in the yard across the street. "It's something I'll never forget," he told me.
Amy, as she's called in the court documents, was BMR's 9-year-old niece. Shown sanitized versions of the pictures, Amy denied that her uncle had abused her. She said he told her she was special and took her to buy treats like beef jerky, and she didn't want anything bad to happen to him. "How is he?" she asked her parents in the weeks after his arrest. "Is he going to be mad at me?"
Over months of therapy, Amy began to talk about the abuse. "My mind has everything in it," she told her therapist, according to court records I read with her permission. She remembered her uncle trying to have sex with her—it hurt, and she pulled away. And she remembered, at his direction, chatting with men over the Internet about the photos he sent them.
Amy's uncle pleaded guilty to one count of rape and two counts of child sexual abuse in state court and was sentenced to the minimum for each one, adding up to 12½ years in prison. In federal court, he pleaded guilty to one count of production of child pornography and received a 12-year sentence. Amy's current lawyer, James Marsh, says her parents were told the state and federal penalties would run consecutively, but instead, her uncle was allowed to serve the two at the same time.
Amy was given a diagnosis of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder the year her uncle was sentenced, but she also asked to stop going to therapy—she told her parents that she didn't want to talk about the abuse anymore. Her mother, who worked in health care, and her father, a tradesman, blamed themselves for trusting Amy's uncle with her. For years Amy's mother barely spoke to Amy's aunt, who remained married to her husband, even though the sisters continued to live across the street from each other.
As Amy grew up, she tried to push aside what had happened to her. Every few months, in middle school and high school, her parents would ask if she wanted to talk about it, and each time she would say no. "I was always thinking about it, but I wasn't ready to deal with how I felt," she says now. Amy threw herself into her social life, going out and drinking in the hills behind her house. Even to the friends who knew, it almost seemed as if the abuse hadn't happened.
When she was 17, Amy received her first crime-victim notice from the Justice Department. "My mom said it was a mistake, because I was still a minor—the letter should have been addressed to her and my dad," she said. "But it had my name on it, and I never got mail, so I wanted to open it. My parents took me into their room and said we needed to have a talk." Amy's parents had never told her that her uncle had distributed images of her to other men. "It had been so long by then, eight years," she said. "They didn't know how to tell me."
Amy's parents took her to see Marsh, who had started the public-interest Children's Law Center in Washington. At their first meeting, he explained to Amy that the letters meant her pictures had been traded countless times online. "I just felt so full of shame," Amy said. "I started wondering, Has he looked at them? He said he hadn't, and that made me feel better. But then I thought, Who has?"
Marsh researched legal remedies for Amy. Combing through his casebooks, he found a provision in the Violence Against Women Act that he had never heard of before: it gave the victims of sex crimes, including child pornography, the right to restitution or compensation for the "full amount" of their losses. Enumerating what those losses could be, Congress listed psychiatric care, lost income and legal costs and concluded, "The issuance of a restitution order under this section is mandatory."
The provision for restitution, enacted in 1994, had yet to be invoked in a case of child-pornography possession. The basis for such a claim wasn't necessarily self-evident: how could Amy prove that her ongoing trauma was the fault of any one man who looked at her pictures, instead of her uncle, who abused her and made the pornography?
Marsh suggested that Amy see a forensic psychologist, Joyanna Silberg, who evaluated Amy and said she would need therapy throughout her life and could expect to work sporadically because of the likelihood of periodic setbacks. Silberg attributed these costs—Amy's damages—to her awareness of the ongoing downloading and viewing. "Usually, we try to help survivors of child sexual abuse make a very strong distinction between the past and the present," Silberg, who has given testimony on Amy's behalf for restitution hearings, told me. "The idea is to contain the harm: it happened then, and it's not happening anymore. But how do you do that when these images are still out there? The past is still the present, which turns the hallmarks of treatment on their head."
Marsh put together a lifetime claim for Amy totaling almost $3.4 million. With the crime notices arriving in the mail, Marsh started tracking men charged with possession of her pictures. He looked, in particular, for wealthy defendants. He planned to use the concept of joint and several liability to argue that each defendant should be on the hook for the full amount of his client's damages—that is, for millions of dollars. Joint and several liability is often used in pollution cases: when several companies dump toxic waste in a lake over time, a plaintiff can go after the company with the deepest pockets, and a judge can hold that single company responsible for the entire cost of the cleanup—with the understanding that it's up to that polluter to sue the others to pay their share.
In July 2008, Marsh learned about the arrest of Alan Hesketh, a former vice-president of Pfizer, who was charged with trading nearly 2,000 child-pornography photos online—among them four pictures of Amy. Marsh filed one of his first requests for restitution with the prosecution. Hesketh pleaded guilty, and his sentencing was scheduled for later that year.
At the time of the Hesketh case, Amy was struggling. She was 19 and living with her boyfriend. She had enrolled at a local community college, but she drank too much to concentrate on studying. The crime-victim notices had stirred up the past for her, and she wasn't in regular therapy. "The last class I went to, there was this PowerPoint slide, something about child sexual abuse, and I thought, I can't do this," she told me as she sat in her kitchen smoking a cigarette. "It just brought everything back." Amy dropped out after that, without telling her parents. "I told myself I would just take a year off," she continued. "But you know, statisticwise, once you leave school, the chances you'll finish go down about 80 percent."
Amy has a quick intelligence—she's a college dropout who can rattle off her own odds of going back—and asks lots of questions. She has focused her curiosity on the legal strategy that Marsh has pursued for her. When Hesketh was sentenced, Amy decided she would be there. "I kind of wanted to face my fear," she told me. She also wanted to prove a point: Hesketh was arguing, through his lawyer, that he had committed a victimless crime—a common defense in cases of child-pornography possession. "I thought, I want him to look at me and know that I'm not a picture; I'm a person," she said.
In a federal courthouse in Bridgeport, Conn., in October 2008, Amy sat on the opposite side of the courtroom from Hesketh's family. The judge opened the proceedings by acknowledging that there was a victim in the courtroom. Amy listened as Hesketh's grown children asked the judge for mercy for their father. "His kids kept saying he was the best grandfather ever," she said. "And I was like: 'But you know. You know what he did.'"
Then Hesketh took the stand. As Amy remembers it, he said, "I'm so sorry." Earlier, he said that "he hadn't hurt anyone," Amy told me. "Now he totally flipped around. I felt like I'd made an impact. It was like, 'He knows now.'"
Hesketh was sentenced to 6½ years. Four months later, in an unprecedented move, the judge advised Hesketh to settle the restitution claim and he agreed to pay $130,000.
Not long after, Amy found out she was pregnant. She wasn't sorry—at the time she had faith in her boyfriend, whom she had told about the abuse and the photos. But he was a heroin user and dealer, and he went to jail two months after their son was born. Amy started seeing another man who she says had a jealous streak and broke her nose, twice. He also broke her infant son's leg, she told me. She took the blame when he threatened her, and she had to give up custody to her mother for six months.
As she recalled this time in her life, she took out her phone and scrolled through her photos until she found a close-up of her beaten face: lip split, one eye half-closed, nose swollen and cheek yellow with bruises. The young woman next to me had clear skin and bright eyes, and I had just watched her charm a police officer into calling us a cab. The girl in the photo was expressionless.
Amy stared at the picture on her phone. "That was my normal," she said.
Six months after Hesketh's sentencing, Marsh went after another child-pornography defendant, Arthur Staples, a 65-year-old sheriff's deputy in Virginia, who had chatted online with an undercover detective and expressed an interest in young children. Staples sent one image of a young girl (not Amy), and he was caught with more than 600 pictures on his computer, including hers. Staples agreed not to appeal any sentence or restitution judgment. The judge sentenced him to 17½ years, and made the unusual move of ordering him to pay all of Amy's claim. To Marsh's surprise, Staples turned out to have $2 million in assets. He has since paid $1.2 million to Amy. (Marsh says the government let Staples's wife keep part of the estate.) While Amy has been turned down for restitution by some courts, which have stated that there was not enough proof that any one man who viewed her pictures was responsible for the harm she has suffered, she has won more than 150 cases, totaling $1.6 million. Most of the amounts aren't large: $1,000 or even $100, paid out in checks as small as $7.33.
Nicole has also been pursuing restitution. Her lawyer, Carol Hepburn, did her own research and got in touch with Marsh when she learned about the claims he was bringing for Amy. The two lawyers now collaborate on ideas and strategy, though they represent their clients separately. Since receiving her first check for $10,000, Nicole has collected more than $550,000, mostly in small amounts from 204 different men. So far only a few other child-pornography victims have gone to court for restitution. Many may not know there is a legal remedy; others don't know their images have circulated.
The restitution checks gave Nicole a lift when they started to trickle in, but, like Amy, she had trouble with the transition into adulthood. In the fall of 2008, Nicole was attending a one-year bible college and working at an ice-cream shop. At work she felt increasingly self-conscious around male customers. Had they seen her pictures? Were they like the man who stalked her on Myspace—were any of them coming to the store because they knew? That spring, Nicole testified at her father's sentencing. She asked the judge to give him a long punishment, and her father was sent to prison for 50 years. Her roommates, one of whom was a friend from her childhood church, supported her. "But I didn't have a counselor there, and that was tough," she said. "I called my parents and said: 'I have to quit my job, and I need to come home. I feel like I'm going crazy.'"
During her first few weeks at home, Nicole slept all day in her childhood bedroom and stayed up late watching sitcoms like Sabrina and The Nanny. Finally, she started counseling and was able to get a job doing administrative work at a nuclear-waste site. That June, she testified at the sentencing hearing of four child-pornography defendants caught with her images, hoping to gather strength from speaking out. Instead, the experience made her feel exposed.
More than a year later, in the fall of 2010, she left for a four-year college away from home. She was worried about being on her own, but she wanted to try. "I push myself," she told me. "I don't like to say something is too much for me." Like Amy, however, she took a psychology course, about child development, that brought up unbearable memories. During lectures, she began going blank. "All of a sudden class would be over, and I would be like, 'What happened?'" she said. She started skipping class for fear of continuing to disassociate.
Nicole, who wasn't in counseling at the time, failed all but two of her courses that spring. "I just totally broke down," she said. "I'd come home and sit in the same position and stare into space, and then I'd look at the clock, and it was six hours later." Nicole talked about this period of her life with Hepburn and me over dinner one night last summer. She showed us a tattoo on her right wrist: a heart sheltered by wings that she got after her father's sentencing. She also learned to make tattoos, and she took out her phone to show us a picture of the first one she created, an anchor with a rope curled around it. "My cousin is a tattoo artist, and he taught me," she said. "We grew up together, and he was a very easy person to hang out with during that bad time. I'd go over to his place, and he'd be drawing, and he said, 'You're into design, you could do this.' When I tried I felt this release of emotions. We started drawing for hours to music—Tom Petty, Cake, everything. You have to learn how to go smoothly and keep the same pressure on the line the whole time. I drew anchors over and over again on grapefruit. I'd been numb for months, and now I could feel again. I actually felt joy."
In the fall of 2011, Nicole transferred to a campus closer to her family. She made her way through her course work by avoiding subject matter that upset her and by allowing for her own limitations. "I had to accept that, because I have this extra stressor, I get overwhelmed by things that other people can do," she said.
Nicole decided to spare herself going to court, so she wasn't in El Paso, in September 2011, for the sentencing of Luis Enriquez-Alonso, a student at the University of Texas. He agreed to plead guilty after being caught with thousands of illegal videos and images, including Nicole's, on his computer. At the hearing, Enriquez-Alonso and his parents listened while the prosecutor read into the record a statement Nicole wrote about what it is like to know men are looking at her pictures: "After all these years and going to different counselors, I still haven't learned the trick to let my mind rest," Nicole wrote. "When I do sleep, my dreams are vivid and I remember them for weeks. A common theme is finding myself naked in front of a crowd of people or in an enclosed space and I can't escape or run away fast enough."
That day, without a court order, Enriquez-Alonso's family handed over a check for $150,000, along with an expression of remorse. "That really touched me," Nicole said, "that his family wanted to make sure that I was taken care of, that I could get all the counseling I need. Most of the time when I get restitution, there's no story behind it. I feel like they're forced to give the money. In this case, they wanted to do it, and there were words behind it, kind words." Enriquez-Alonso, who faced a maximum of 10 years in prison, is serving 5.
Study after study links child sexual abuse to psychological trauma, addiction and violent relationships in adulthood. There is almost no research, however, that deals with the specifics of Amy and Nicole's experiences: What additional harm comes from knowing that pictures of your childhood exploitation are circulating widely?
The Supreme Court actually addressed this question in its 1982 decision upholding child-pornography bans. "Pornography poses an even greater threat to the child victim than does sexual abuse or prostitution," Justice Byron White wrote, quoting from a book about abused children. "Because the child's actions are reduced to a recording, the pornography may haunt him in future years, long after the original misdeed took place."
David Finkelhor, a sociologist who directs the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, sees the moral weight of the Supreme Court's proclamation, but not the empirical proof. "The evidence doesn't yet tell us to what extent the experience of being a pornography victim aggravates the experience of the sexual abuse itself," he told me. "How do you separate it out?"
Courts have disagreed on this question. In at least a dozen cases, defendants have appealed restitution decisions and mostly won. In five of those cases, federal appeals courts have expressed skepticism that Amy and Nicole should receive more than nominal restitution. Two other appeals courts have allowed the young women to recover from individual defendants as members of the group of viewers but, so far, only for amounts of $10,000 or less. (Amy collected a far greater sum from Arthur Staples because he waived his right to appeal.)
Last spring, the legal battle was focused on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. One panel of three judges upheld full restitution to Amy of millions of dollars from a Texas man. Based on that decision, a second three-judge panel affirmed a separate $529,000 restitution order for Amy against a New Orleans defendant, but voiced its fundamental disagreement with the original ruling. To address the dispute, 15 Fifth Circuit judges gathered last May for a hearing in New Orleans. James Marsh and Carol Hepburn were there along with Amy; Nicole chose not to go. Amy knew this was the most significant hearing to date, and she wanted to show the judges that she was real, just as she had shown Alan Hesketh.
At the lectern to argue her side was Paul G. Cassell, a former federal judge who teaches law at the University of Utah. Cassell is a staunch conservative (he challenged the right to a Miranda warning before the Supreme Court), and Marsh and Hepburn, both Democrats, were surprised at first to be allied with him. But as a leading advocate for victims' rights, Cassell sees in Amy's claims a chance to lay the groundwork for broader change.
For 30 years, the victims'-rights movement has fought for a larger role for victims in criminal prosecutions. Victims have gained the right to make statements in court about the impact a crime has had on them, which judges can take into account in determining punishment. Restitution remains an ambitious next step. The standard context is crime involving financial loss—a bank robber ordered to return stolen money to the bank or an embezzler who must repay the employer he defrauded. Cassell sees Amy and Nicole's cases as a route to expand the idea. "I'd like to pursue the concept of total restitution for all victims, for whatever crimes and losses a defendant has caused," Cassell told me. "This is a good opportunity to show how it can work."
In the courtroom, Cassell linked the defendants to the network for child-pornography distribution. "What the defendants have done is collect images of an 8-year-old girl being bound, raped and sodomized," he said. "If you participate in a market, you become responsible for that market." The lawyer for the New Orleans defendant disagreed. She argued that there was no proof that her client, in particular, had harmed Amy—no way to show that his viewing of her images caused damage. She also called the restitution order for $529,000 "grossly disproportionate to his culpability relative to other people who have abused Amy."
Michael Rotker, the lawyer for the department, told the court that the problem with the restitution awards was that there was no statutory authority for joint and several liability—nothing in the law, as Congress wrote it, which allowed a victim to recover a large award from one defendant who could then seek to recoup those losses by suing other defendants. Instead, Rotker argued, each defendant could be held responsible only for a small and roughly equal fraction of the whole. He offered this hypothetical example: if 200 men were convicted of possessing Amy's images, and her claim for damages totaled $3 million, then a judge would have discretion to order a defendant to pay restitution of $15,000 to $30,000.
As the lawyers spoke, Amy's eyes filled with tears. "Some of it was hard to listen to," she told me later. "But my therapist said to think of it as a store, with different compartments you can take out and put back. She said, 'When you were a little girl, you had to compartmentalize to deal with everything you went through.' So I can still do that now, and sometimes it's good, I guess."
At one point in the proceedings, Judge Emilio Garza stopped Cassell, not to challenge him, but to pick up on his theme. "It seems to me that we're in this brave new world, where not only was there an actual rape, but I'm going to suggest to you there is a continuing digitized rape," the judge said. "Possession of the digitized recording of the rape contributes to the system, contributes to the economic benefit of those who produced this thing."
The judges would not announce their decision for several months, but at the end of the hearing, Amy focused on what Garza said that day. "To hear that from a judge—I couldn't believe it," she told me. "It was so relieving. It was like he really got it. He understood."
Just six weeks after Amy got home from New Orleans, her uncle was released from prison after completing his concurrent 12-year sentences. Amy says she was greatly relieved when her aunt told her that she wouldn't allow him in the house. Instead, he was paroled nearby. When Marsh texted to give her the address, Amy happened to be only a few blocks from it. "I almost dropped the phone," she said. "Oh, my God, it was just so weird. I thought, He's got binoculars, he's looking for me. I thought the worst." Marsh reminded her that if her uncle contacted her, he would go back to prison. And also that she was an adult now and safe from her uncle's [abusiveness toward children].
Last month, while standing in line at Wal-Mart with her brother and a friend, Amy saw a man who she thought was her uncle looking at her. "I wasn't positive because I haven't seen him for so long," she said. "But as soon as I made eye contact, I didn't breathe." Was she being paranoid? She couldn't tell. The man seemed to follow them out of the store. As they got into her car, the man stopped to light a cigarette, and she thought he was staring at them. "It was very, very scary," she said.
Today, a sentence like the one Amy's uncle received—with no additional prison time for a federal conviction for pornography production and distribution—is extremely rare. The penalties for distributing or receiving pornography have become harsher. Receiving one illegal photo carries a mandatory minimum penalty of five years. The number of images a defendant downloads increases the punishment, as does his use of a computer. Now that large volumes of data stream with a click, the average recommended prison term for possession has jumped to 10 years, even if a defendant has no criminal record and there is no evidence that he produced or distributed porn. Because some child sexual abuse cases still end in relatively low penalties in state court, there's a paradox: defendants who look at sexual pictures of children can spend more years in prison than people who abuse children but don't have pornography of them.
The United States Sentencing Commission held hearings last February to discuss whether the punishment for child-pornography offenders has become both disproportionate and unfair—with people who committed similar crimes receiving vastly different penalties, based on the subjective decisions of judges. Restitution was discussed even though the prevailing view is that technically it isn't considered part of punishment. Its purpose is to "make the victim whole," as the legal phrase goes. "Simply put, an innocent victim should not suffer financial losses from a crime—the defendant should make good on those losses," Cassell said.
But Douglas Berman, an Ohio State University law professor who writes a frequently cited blog about sentencing, argues that the commission could rethink the role of restitution. In some cases, restitution could be considered commensurate to prison time—and courts could recommend shorter sentences for child-pornography collectors who agree to compensate victims based on their ability to pay. Berman thinks the key to making this leap is adopting the point of view of the victim. "Victims are shrewder than most prosecutors about the diminishing returns of long incarceration," he said. "They want perpetrators to serve some time. They want these men's lives disrupted, and they want the deterrence that helps protect other people. But they're often wise enough to realize that there's not much gain in deterrence from a 5 or 10 year sentence to 15 years. If victims are saying that restitution is as, or more, important to them than five extra years, I very much think the sentencing commission and Congress should listen."
When I asked Amy about such a trade-off, she supported it. Nicole had mixed feelings: she liked the idea of greater incentives for restitution, but she wasn't sure about giving up longer punishments, given how easy it would be for someone to leave prison and go back to downloading child pornography. Cassell says that using restitution in this way could have value. "If it makes the perpetrators internalize how they've hurt the victims—if it makes them see there are real victims—then you deter them from doing this again when they get out," he said.
Berman also favors a proposal that has been discussed at the Justice Department: a general compensation fund that would systematically collect restitution from child-pornography offenders and pay it out to victims like Amy and Nicole based on the harm they suffered and the costs they've incurred because of it. A compensation fund could give more victims the financial means to put their lives back together. And it could force more defendants to reckon with the children in the pictures and with their own role in supporting a market that depends on abuse.
Restitution has allowed Amy and Nicole to get the counseling they need, but receiving large sums can be complicated. When Amy received her $130,000 check from Alan Hesketh, she went on shopping sprees at the mall, splurging at stores like Abercrombie & Fitch. She had never been able to earn a steady paycheck, and the money was a sudden windfall. By the time the $1.2 million check came last spring, she was more considered. She didn't want to stand out in her small town. Last summer, she bought a modest three-bedroom house a few miles from her childhood home, where her mother and brothers still live.
Amy has also discovered that she likes giving money away—to her mother for a new deck, to a close friend who wanted kitchen cabinets she couldn't otherwise afford. It's her way of dealing with the discomfort of having resources that people around her don't and repaying those who helped her along the way.
1/
2023.03.26 21:28 newsu1 Pick Me!, the Poet - By Newsu
Let me tell you a tale of Pick Me, A boy so eager, yet not athletically He'd stretch his hands up to the sky "Pick me, pick me!" he'd loudly cry
Though sports weren't his forte, He would play, come what may So when the team needed a sub, He'd be there, ready to rub
But the other kids would moan and sigh, "Pick Me's gonna make us lose, oh my!" They didn't want him on their team, But Pick Me had a different dream
He'd run and jump and try so hard, But alas, he never made the guard The ball would slip from his clumsy grip And the other team would take a sip
Of victory, that is, and they'd all cheer While Pick Me stood, oh so near He'd shrug his shoulders and walk away "Maybe next time," he'd softly say
But dear Pick Me never gave up, Never surrendered or ran amok He kept on trying, day by day And eventually, he found his way
He discovered his true passion, you see It wasn't basketball or hockey It was writing that made him shine And he became a famous poet, so divine
So, if you ever feel like giving up, Remember dear Pick Me, don't get stuck Keep on trying, don't be afraid to fail And one day, you'll tell your own tale.
submitted by newsu1 to poetry_critics [link] [comments]
Though sports weren't his forte, He would play, come what may So when the team needed a sub, He'd be there, ready to rub
But the other kids would moan and sigh, "Pick Me's gonna make us lose, oh my!" They didn't want him on their team, But Pick Me had a different dream
He'd run and jump and try so hard, But alas, he never made the guard The ball would slip from his clumsy grip And the other team would take a sip
Of victory, that is, and they'd all cheer While Pick Me stood, oh so near He'd shrug his shoulders and walk away "Maybe next time," he'd softly say
But dear Pick Me never gave up, Never surrendered or ran amok He kept on trying, day by day And eventually, he found his way
He discovered his true passion, you see It wasn't basketball or hockey It was writing that made him shine And he became a famous poet, so divine
So, if you ever feel like giving up, Remember dear Pick Me, don't get stuck Keep on trying, don't be afraid to fail And one day, you'll tell your own tale.
2023.03.26 21:27 redditcaneat2dicks fuck.
 | submitted by redditcaneat2dicks to Connecticut [link] [comments] |
2023.03.26 21:27 Majestic_Badger_3986 Should I (F23)leave my husband (M26)
TLDR: My husband wanted to swing, and I kissed a girl. Now I think we are getting a divorce
After reading many of these stories, Iam going to assuming if I’m asking the question the writing is on the wall, but here we are. I have been with my husband since we were 18, and 21, living together since roughly 6 months after dating. We got married this last summer. We have no kids, and two dogs. It’s been 5 years . My husband has always been a gruff man, but things just seemed to get worse after the pandemic. We are both front line workers. My husband has always had a wandering eye. Since we got together he has had a collection of photos of girls. He’s taken photos of them in public (this was in high school), and currently has screen shots of girls in bikinis from the social media (ie instagram, girls he went to high school with) The winter before we got married my husband began to bring up the idea of swinging, and a threesome etc. I told him no many many times. I have dated women and men before, but I am strictly a monogamist. I love my husband and sharing him, or swapping would simply break me. He has told me since I moved in that his dream was always a tall skinny blonde, and I a petite curvy brunette always was taken a back. I always assumed this was his way to eat his cake and have it too. In the past year, we have been fighting insanely often. He ran away twice in the week before our wedding threatening suicide. He’s broken things, tried to shoot me with a pellet gun (he missed and hit the paper towels), and just been mean. In turn I have smacked him, and been mean as well. Before the most recently incident ( see below), he would constantly call me a bitch, smack the air in front of my face, and say the n word and other racial slurs to piss me off. There are two times he’s put a gun to my head while I was asleep. The first time I was asleep on the couch and my brother thought it would be funny (he has austism) and my husband (my fiancé woke me up with an unloaded gun to my head). The next time was after a fight. He has a thick cardboard cut out that looks like his real Glock in the dark. He placed it to my head and woke me up. Anytime we would get into a fight he would run into the other bedroom, which is fine. Aside from the time he downloaded POF, and the time he broke my things. Many of these fights were simply because he wanted to be itched to bed and I fell asleep before he did. Many other fights were due to me deleting the screenshots he’s taken while he was sleeping, or calling him gross for the swinging ideas. These fights became more frequent after he downloaded an app, and found out there was a club near us. On the app, he would send my photos or photos of us to other people in exchange for the photos . I told him no, but I couldn’t stop him. He would then give them my Snapchat and put me in groups with them. I would ignore them or tell them I had to work . We would then fight and repeat. They often ended in me being called a fat bitch and him asking for divorce. A few times he drafted the papers. He would ask to go to the Club to “shoot pool”, but has always been disgusted by bars and normal clubs.
Fast forward to this weekend. One of my friends had broken off her engagement, and needed time. My husband had a party with his coworkers at a version of Dave and busters and I decided to bring her. Everything was fine. After this, we decided to get some beer and play cards against humanity. I generally do not drink as i am on Prozac, but I wanted to let looose and I was in my own home. I don’t remember much that happened but my friend told me I made out with her 3 times in one night, with my husband watching and egging us on. I am imagining I started to sober up roughly an hour and half later. I remember being on my husbands lap with my top off, and my friend on the couch next to us making out with another man. I get dressed and feel embarrassed. Shortly after everyone leaves and my husband is upset she didn’t sleep with us. The following Friday, I had made plans with my friends to go out after work to a club. My husband was supposed to go with us, but decided to stay home. While at the club, my friend begins to play with my hair. She rubs my back. I text my husband that she is touching me, and his only response is go for it. Time passes and I realize my husband hadn’t touched me like that in so long. Outside of sex, he wasn’t cuddling me , he wasn’t wooing me, etc. it was all about him. She kissed me, and I let her. She asked to go back to her place but I said I can’t I love my husband. We then leave the club, and get back to my place. We walk in and my husband is there in his boxers and a shirt . He asks me, while she is in the bathroom if she’s coming to bed with us, and I say no. After she leaves i explain the kissing and he became upset. Called me a slut, and a whore and a cheater. He was so upset. I think it was becaus she didn’t like him. He yells and asks for a divorce. Over the course of the next several days he calls me names, and demands a divorce. I begin to plan my leave. I had it all set up, until Wednesday. My husband can be mellow dramatic . I was sure if I left without a plan and all my things he would break them all. Wednesday, while plotting he picked up my phone and began to read my text. He found out I planned to take the dog and he was. Very upset. He said it was better to shoot her, and said let’s d it now. He then sat down and we talked without talking. I eventually walked away and went to the shower to cry. As I got out, he was there crying and begging me not to leave. He’s sorry . He agreed to counseling. I didn’t leave like was planning to. He’s been better, but I’m just waiting the other shoe to drop. Last night he said we don’t have time or money for counseling. I have rerouted my paychecks to my own account. Next time he is home I will tell him. Even if we stay together, he has started his own business, and always has our joint account in the negative. He has a thing for big flashy things and cars.
A few things of note 1. He’s not a bad guy. He works so much and so hard. When I met him I was a waitress , and he took me in. I don’t think I would have been able to finish college without him. Outside of the stuff above, he’s never like hit me hit me. I have smacked him. 2. I am 80% sure he has bipolar, but will not get help . 3. I have worked 36 hours while going to school full time. He says this not not full time. He believes I am lazy and allergic to work 4. Until our most recent pow wow, I did not have his phone password for deleting his screen shots 5. I am not a great wife. I don’t cook very well, and I will pinch and hit if he’s repeating something I don’t like or if he is being extra mean. 6. Worst of all, I told my friends who asked that he was cheating on me rather than explain the swinger stuff . 7. He is the only man I’ve ever been with. 8. His dad is a cop. My dad is a felon.
I guess I have a few questions 1. Should I leave ? 2. Did I cheat on him?
submitted by Majestic_Badger_3986 to relationship_advice [link] [comments]
After reading many of these stories, Iam going to assuming if I’m asking the question the writing is on the wall, but here we are. I have been with my husband since we were 18, and 21, living together since roughly 6 months after dating. We got married this last summer. We have no kids, and two dogs. It’s been 5 years . My husband has always been a gruff man, but things just seemed to get worse after the pandemic. We are both front line workers. My husband has always had a wandering eye. Since we got together he has had a collection of photos of girls. He’s taken photos of them in public (this was in high school), and currently has screen shots of girls in bikinis from the social media (ie instagram, girls he went to high school with) The winter before we got married my husband began to bring up the idea of swinging, and a threesome etc. I told him no many many times. I have dated women and men before, but I am strictly a monogamist. I love my husband and sharing him, or swapping would simply break me. He has told me since I moved in that his dream was always a tall skinny blonde, and I a petite curvy brunette always was taken a back. I always assumed this was his way to eat his cake and have it too. In the past year, we have been fighting insanely often. He ran away twice in the week before our wedding threatening suicide. He’s broken things, tried to shoot me with a pellet gun (he missed and hit the paper towels), and just been mean. In turn I have smacked him, and been mean as well. Before the most recently incident ( see below), he would constantly call me a bitch, smack the air in front of my face, and say the n word and other racial slurs to piss me off. There are two times he’s put a gun to my head while I was asleep. The first time I was asleep on the couch and my brother thought it would be funny (he has austism) and my husband (my fiancé woke me up with an unloaded gun to my head). The next time was after a fight. He has a thick cardboard cut out that looks like his real Glock in the dark. He placed it to my head and woke me up. Anytime we would get into a fight he would run into the other bedroom, which is fine. Aside from the time he downloaded POF, and the time he broke my things. Many of these fights were simply because he wanted to be itched to bed and I fell asleep before he did. Many other fights were due to me deleting the screenshots he’s taken while he was sleeping, or calling him gross for the swinging ideas. These fights became more frequent after he downloaded an app, and found out there was a club near us. On the app, he would send my photos or photos of us to other people in exchange for the photos . I told him no, but I couldn’t stop him. He would then give them my Snapchat and put me in groups with them. I would ignore them or tell them I had to work . We would then fight and repeat. They often ended in me being called a fat bitch and him asking for divorce. A few times he drafted the papers. He would ask to go to the Club to “shoot pool”, but has always been disgusted by bars and normal clubs.
Fast forward to this weekend. One of my friends had broken off her engagement, and needed time. My husband had a party with his coworkers at a version of Dave and busters and I decided to bring her. Everything was fine. After this, we decided to get some beer and play cards against humanity. I generally do not drink as i am on Prozac, but I wanted to let looose and I was in my own home. I don’t remember much that happened but my friend told me I made out with her 3 times in one night, with my husband watching and egging us on. I am imagining I started to sober up roughly an hour and half later. I remember being on my husbands lap with my top off, and my friend on the couch next to us making out with another man. I get dressed and feel embarrassed. Shortly after everyone leaves and my husband is upset she didn’t sleep with us. The following Friday, I had made plans with my friends to go out after work to a club. My husband was supposed to go with us, but decided to stay home. While at the club, my friend begins to play with my hair. She rubs my back. I text my husband that she is touching me, and his only response is go for it. Time passes and I realize my husband hadn’t touched me like that in so long. Outside of sex, he wasn’t cuddling me , he wasn’t wooing me, etc. it was all about him. She kissed me, and I let her. She asked to go back to her place but I said I can’t I love my husband. We then leave the club, and get back to my place. We walk in and my husband is there in his boxers and a shirt . He asks me, while she is in the bathroom if she’s coming to bed with us, and I say no. After she leaves i explain the kissing and he became upset. Called me a slut, and a whore and a cheater. He was so upset. I think it was becaus she didn’t like him. He yells and asks for a divorce. Over the course of the next several days he calls me names, and demands a divorce. I begin to plan my leave. I had it all set up, until Wednesday. My husband can be mellow dramatic . I was sure if I left without a plan and all my things he would break them all. Wednesday, while plotting he picked up my phone and began to read my text. He found out I planned to take the dog and he was. Very upset. He said it was better to shoot her, and said let’s d it now. He then sat down and we talked without talking. I eventually walked away and went to the shower to cry. As I got out, he was there crying and begging me not to leave. He’s sorry . He agreed to counseling. I didn’t leave like was planning to. He’s been better, but I’m just waiting the other shoe to drop. Last night he said we don’t have time or money for counseling. I have rerouted my paychecks to my own account. Next time he is home I will tell him. Even if we stay together, he has started his own business, and always has our joint account in the negative. He has a thing for big flashy things and cars.
A few things of note 1. He’s not a bad guy. He works so much and so hard. When I met him I was a waitress , and he took me in. I don’t think I would have been able to finish college without him. Outside of the stuff above, he’s never like hit me hit me. I have smacked him. 2. I am 80% sure he has bipolar, but will not get help . 3. I have worked 36 hours while going to school full time. He says this not not full time. He believes I am lazy and allergic to work 4. Until our most recent pow wow, I did not have his phone password for deleting his screen shots 5. I am not a great wife. I don’t cook very well, and I will pinch and hit if he’s repeating something I don’t like or if he is being extra mean. 6. Worst of all, I told my friends who asked that he was cheating on me rather than explain the swinger stuff . 7. He is the only man I’ve ever been with. 8. His dad is a cop. My dad is a felon.
I guess I have a few questions 1. Should I leave ? 2. Did I cheat on him?
2023.03.26 21:25 fedswatching2121 Review May Itinerary
Hi all,
I will be visiting Iceland from May 20-28th and drew up a rough draft of an itinerary. I will be accompanied by a friend and we are wanting to road trip around the entire island. Could anyone review my itinerary and give me tips? Maybe let me know if some things i have written down aren't worth seeing or places I should check out? Here is what I have:
submitted by fedswatching2121 to VisitingIceland [link] [comments]
I will be visiting Iceland from May 20-28th and drew up a rough draft of an itinerary. I will be accompanied by a friend and we are wanting to road trip around the entire island. Could anyone review my itinerary and give me tips? Maybe let me know if some things i have written down aren't worth seeing or places I should check out? Here is what I have:
- Day 1
- Arrive at KEF airport on May 20th at 9AM
- Grab rental car from airport (I have a corporate discount that would get me about 40% off with National. Planning to grab an SUV. Has anyone had experience with National in Iceland?)
- Leave airport and stop by Blue Lagoon and have brunch/lunch there.
- Stop by Reykjavik to grab rental gear (mostly sleeping gear since we plan to sleep at campsites for the most part), groceries/snacks, gas.
- Start road trip and stop by Thingvellir National Park and/or Kerid Crater.
- Visit Gulfoss then drive to Hella for the night (we reserved an airbnb).
- Day 2
- Seljalandfoss and quick dip in Seljavallalaug Swimming Pool.
- Skogafoss
- Dyrholaey
- Stop at Vik to have some food and restock
- Vatnajokull Glacier Hike (we reserved this tour at 6PM)
- Skaftafell for the night at campsite.
- Day 3
- Jokulsarlon
- Hofn
- Vestrahorn & Stokksnes Beach
- Dettifoss
- Myvatn Nature Baths
- Campsite or Hotel nearby after Myvatn (TBD)
- Day 4
- HveriNamafjfall Geothermal area
- Gooafoss
- Akureyi
- Fosslaug
- Varmahlíð campsite for the night
- Day 5 and 6
- Some parts of Westfjords?
- Snaefellsnes Peninsula
- Go back to Reykjavik or stay near Snaefellsnes for the night
- Day 7
- Flight back to the U.S. in the afternoon.
2023.03.26 21:24 Certain_Specific9206 Ear, nose & throat problems
30 years old Male Taking: nebilet for blood pressure. Anxiety about health for 10+ years. Been scared of cancers etc. Sitting job for 10 years.
Maybe getting some thoughts till i get to ENT doctor. Thank you for taking time & focusing on my problem.
No headaches, no vertigos, no fever (never these 3) Smoker, smoking makes my tinnitus worse. Fresh air sometimes makes my ears weird. (Tinnitus comes in different tones) Ears get easily pressure inside on low Mountain rides. Like flying on plane but just sometimes only on car-ride. Let's Start:
Tinnitus, I've had this for a long time. As far as I remember. 2013 things started going weird. Different tinnitus noises started coming up. (Changing sounds, extra sounds.) Always had problems with wax. (Once a while need to flush wax out). Always had problems with facial nerves, if it's windy outside then sometimes my skin on my head, ear gets tender. Hurts to touch (one-side). That's normal i guess. Fever I'm having really rarely, probably once in a 2 years. Used to have a lot of problems with tonsils whole life. 2-3 times a year tonsillitis. 2017 i did cut them off. Year after that, i felt like my nose started having troubles. One side constantly tendenumb/sore. No runny nose, more of a dry. But no air going trough. Also problems with ears started before or after that. Can't remember. Woke up with hard tinnitus and not hearing anything in one ear. Takes 48hours to stabilize. And how it does Start? Pressure feeling behind ears, wanting to blow nose to air go trough. Hard to explain Also noises i receive will change if this happens Once or twice a year this happens. First time it happened i went to urgency care. They did nothing and gave me pills. I've kind of been ignoring doctors after that. Kind of depressed, scared etc.
Now let's get to 2023. Sometimes pressure on face. Clicking noises like mucus wants to come out etc. Sensitive to loud noises. Sometimes feels like ear-drums vibrating. If i close car door really loudly. Or if i hit metal to metal, my hearing goes to zero/"wiiiii". For a moment. At morning my nose is almost always fully stuffed. No runny nose. But more like mucus. A lot of mucus constantly coming back of my throat. Mucus problem I've had for a really long time. Right side of a nose is almost always closed, if i lay down other side, then other side gets closed. And mostly my right ear has also more problems. Bad hearing. Get clogged inside more than left one. Don't know about allergies. Never tested. I have two dogs.
Now 2 weeks ago. As usual. Ears started getting clogged, tinnitus went 200% same time. Tried to blow nose, things went not that well. Next day i woke up. Right ear clogged, left ear took weird sounds in. Used vaxol. Used sticks. Hearing 100% lost. Went to flush out wax. A lot of wax came out. Doctor said it's red. Probably irritated with sticks. But i didnt hear anything Gave me anitibiotics. After almost 2weeks my hearing came back let's say. 100% deaf to 65% deaf. Hearing has recoverer about 35%? Hearing comes back few % day. Doctor watched eaear-drums all fine Also throat upper side/right side is tender near uvula. Sometimes more tender than other days.
Now waiting for a ENT. Really depressed & scared same time I've read people go for ENT long roads to get diagnosis. Trying to maybe get some ideas. Could sinus problems affect upper throat/ears? I wanna hear your thoughts, experiences, diagnoses. Tell what you think. Thank you.
submitted by Certain_Specific9206 to AskDocs [link] [comments]
Maybe getting some thoughts till i get to ENT doctor. Thank you for taking time & focusing on my problem.
No headaches, no vertigos, no fever (never these 3) Smoker, smoking makes my tinnitus worse. Fresh air sometimes makes my ears weird. (Tinnitus comes in different tones) Ears get easily pressure inside on low Mountain rides. Like flying on plane but just sometimes only on car-ride. Let's Start:
Tinnitus, I've had this for a long time. As far as I remember. 2013 things started going weird. Different tinnitus noises started coming up. (Changing sounds, extra sounds.) Always had problems with wax. (Once a while need to flush wax out). Always had problems with facial nerves, if it's windy outside then sometimes my skin on my head, ear gets tender. Hurts to touch (one-side). That's normal i guess. Fever I'm having really rarely, probably once in a 2 years. Used to have a lot of problems with tonsils whole life. 2-3 times a year tonsillitis. 2017 i did cut them off. Year after that, i felt like my nose started having troubles. One side constantly tendenumb/sore. No runny nose, more of a dry. But no air going trough. Also problems with ears started before or after that. Can't remember. Woke up with hard tinnitus and not hearing anything in one ear. Takes 48hours to stabilize. And how it does Start? Pressure feeling behind ears, wanting to blow nose to air go trough. Hard to explain Also noises i receive will change if this happens Once or twice a year this happens. First time it happened i went to urgency care. They did nothing and gave me pills. I've kind of been ignoring doctors after that. Kind of depressed, scared etc.
Now let's get to 2023. Sometimes pressure on face. Clicking noises like mucus wants to come out etc. Sensitive to loud noises. Sometimes feels like ear-drums vibrating. If i close car door really loudly. Or if i hit metal to metal, my hearing goes to zero/"wiiiii". For a moment. At morning my nose is almost always fully stuffed. No runny nose. But more like mucus. A lot of mucus constantly coming back of my throat. Mucus problem I've had for a really long time. Right side of a nose is almost always closed, if i lay down other side, then other side gets closed. And mostly my right ear has also more problems. Bad hearing. Get clogged inside more than left one. Don't know about allergies. Never tested. I have two dogs.
Now 2 weeks ago. As usual. Ears started getting clogged, tinnitus went 200% same time. Tried to blow nose, things went not that well. Next day i woke up. Right ear clogged, left ear took weird sounds in. Used vaxol. Used sticks. Hearing 100% lost. Went to flush out wax. A lot of wax came out. Doctor said it's red. Probably irritated with sticks. But i didnt hear anything Gave me anitibiotics. After almost 2weeks my hearing came back let's say. 100% deaf to 65% deaf. Hearing has recoverer about 35%? Hearing comes back few % day. Doctor watched eaear-drums all fine Also throat upper side/right side is tender near uvula. Sometimes more tender than other days.
Now waiting for a ENT. Really depressed & scared same time I've read people go for ENT long roads to get diagnosis. Trying to maybe get some ideas. Could sinus problems affect upper throat/ears? I wanna hear your thoughts, experiences, diagnoses. Tell what you think. Thank you.
2023.03.26 21:23 sleepyboiimorpheus AITA for my mom’s friend/obsessed dude starting a fight with her about my trauma?
I’m 20. I visited my mother for my birthday and I was supposed to be there for a week. On the night before my birthday, her friend (10 years younger than her) was chatting with me as we walked. I had gone with him to walk to his apartment to grab something or other (and see his puppy). He asked me why I’m low-contact with my mother and I explained truthfully. She is extremely dismissive of my trauma and claims that parts of it didn’t happen. She actually doesn’t think any of it happened and is mad that I’m struggling with it. She’s one of those people who think that if a depressed person is struggling, they should just think happy thoughts and they’ll be okay again. She refused to get me medicated for my severe depression and anxiety while I lived with her. I got myself medicated in 2020 because I was dangerously close to killing myself. I explained all that to this guy and he proceeded to make excuses for her. He’s obsessed with her and thinks he’s perfect for her. She only liked him as a friend and doesn’t talk to him anymore after this. He gave me really really bad vibes so I told her to make sure he couldn’t get into her apartment. Anyway, about an hour after that conversation with him, he and my mother began drinking. I was also inebriated a little bit, but the following sobered me up very quickly. This dude began telling my mother that I was unhappy and she started getting defensive (which is understandable. She’s never liked other people confronting her about things, especially when they have no part in it.). Then he promoted me to talk. I didn’t want to, but he kept pushing both of us to talk and it turned into a yelling match. I was finally overwhelmed and reacted by telling her why I was upset. Then he started telling her she needed to be a better mother to me and listen (true, but not his place). She got more defensive and claimed I was lying about being beaten by my brother multiple times. Even my brother knows and remembers that he used to beat the absolute shit out of me and nobody would help. Luckily he and I have an excellent relationship now and I’m trying to get custody of him from our Nfather, but that’s another story. The night ended with me actually kicking the dude out after he made my mother and I hug it out.
A few months later, she’s telling me that she’s mad I’m telling family members that I don’t think she accepts me. She’s still mad about the situation and it holding onto it. As far as I know, she’s going to be mad forever.
Other things that she’s done include yanking my head around and then letting her friend make fun of me. “What are you gonna do? Call CPS?” In a very mocking tone. I previously thought my mother was drunk, but she’s the one who drove us home that day. We were at a public restaurant. She also pretty much refused to be emotionally available for me ever. She’s also called me a narcissist for my depression. That was before I got medicated and it was like a realization that I am exactly like my father. It hurt even more because I’d been making an effort to stop the manipulative behaviors I picked up to survive around my father. Anyway, long winded vent over, I need advice. I feel like an awful person and she keeps making it out to be that I made it all happen on purpose.
submitted by sleepyboiimorpheus to raisedbynarcissists [link] [comments]
A few months later, she’s telling me that she’s mad I’m telling family members that I don’t think she accepts me. She’s still mad about the situation and it holding onto it. As far as I know, she’s going to be mad forever.
Other things that she’s done include yanking my head around and then letting her friend make fun of me. “What are you gonna do? Call CPS?” In a very mocking tone. I previously thought my mother was drunk, but she’s the one who drove us home that day. We were at a public restaurant. She also pretty much refused to be emotionally available for me ever. She’s also called me a narcissist for my depression. That was before I got medicated and it was like a realization that I am exactly like my father. It hurt even more because I’d been making an effort to stop the manipulative behaviors I picked up to survive around my father. Anyway, long winded vent over, I need advice. I feel like an awful person and she keeps making it out to be that I made it all happen on purpose.
2023.03.26 21:22 BUZZZY14 Can someone review my Kauai itinerary? I have not added beaches or restaurants yet. This is just me getting an idea for my trip.
 | submitted by BUZZZY14 to VisitingHawaii [link] [comments] |
2023.03.26 21:22 playnbagpipesonatank Floor 3 of hallowed sepulcher is absolute bullshit
There’s this tiny fraction of time where the stupid fucking darts go by, and the flames go away, but if you click to run, the hit box for the darts gets you despite being NOWHERE FUCKING NEAR YOU!!!!! Then you need to wait 90 fucking seconds, because the darts keep choosing the least optimal fucking configuration, so even if you try to run by you’ll get hit.
Jagex, this one trap gives me high blood pressure and makes me want to commit war crimes.
submitted by playnbagpipesonatank to 2007scape [link] [comments]
Jagex, this one trap gives me high blood pressure and makes me want to commit war crimes.
2023.03.26 21:22 Several-Standard1961 What's the best way to arrange this mission?
Ok, I did some thinking about how and why my child OC will end up in Konoha from his/her home village. Something serious enough to warrants that kind of act.
Kakashi no Suiren and its sequel take place during the Kakashi ANBU arc, when Kakashi is between the ages of 14 and 25 years old. He's nineteen in the sequel. Some enemies of that arc are mentioned—like Danzo, and even more nefarious, Orochimaru. Rewatching that arc gave me a plot idea.
My OC and their mother are from a minor village far, far to the west of Konoha. On a map I collaborated with a friend, it is near the Land of Woods, surrounded by ocean to the west and south, and by landmasses to the north with some islands that make up some of the country. It's the closest neighbor to the Land of Wind and Sunagakure, despite having smaller countries between them.
Due to the fertile land and vast environment, I can see Orochimaru having interest in it and promising the people to put their village on the map. Making such promises under the condition of being provided experimentation material—their village's young, preferably kekkei genkai holders.
I love how this plot will place Suiren in a situation similar to Sakumo. Her village being all for the arrangement if it will give them a chance to be acknowledged by the major powers, but because the arrangement sacrifices the life and future of their children, she's heavily against it. She'll risk getting labelled a traitor and possible execution by her people to secretely secure asylum in Konoha for her young child.
She chooses her child and his/her safety over a future that might not even happen for her village.
Having read the circumstances behind her mission request, what rank would it be given? I know this is fanfiction and I can do what I want, but what I want, is for the ranking of this mission and its personnel to make sense. I plan on having Suiren pay for the very best that Konoha can offer, not caring one bit for the price tag if it ensures her child gets out of the country safely.
Who existed during this timeline; nine to ten years before Naruto canon, was loyal and still in Konoha (cannot be Kakashi obviously), and could handle any threat (with encountering Orochimaru being the highest possibility) that might target the subject of their protection?
My thoughts are Hiruzen would send the previous Ino-Shika-Chō (Inoichi, Shikaku and Choza) to guard the child, with the rank being listed as A or S. I'm open to discussion and if it makes sense, I'm willing to adjust based on commentator recommendations.
submitted by Several-Standard1961 to NarutoFanfiction [link] [comments]
Kakashi no Suiren and its sequel take place during the Kakashi ANBU arc, when Kakashi is between the ages of 14 and 25 years old. He's nineteen in the sequel. Some enemies of that arc are mentioned—like Danzo, and even more nefarious, Orochimaru. Rewatching that arc gave me a plot idea.
My OC and their mother are from a minor village far, far to the west of Konoha. On a map I collaborated with a friend, it is near the Land of Woods, surrounded by ocean to the west and south, and by landmasses to the north with some islands that make up some of the country. It's the closest neighbor to the Land of Wind and Sunagakure, despite having smaller countries between them.
Due to the fertile land and vast environment, I can see Orochimaru having interest in it and promising the people to put their village on the map. Making such promises under the condition of being provided experimentation material—their village's young, preferably kekkei genkai holders.
I love how this plot will place Suiren in a situation similar to Sakumo. Her village being all for the arrangement if it will give them a chance to be acknowledged by the major powers, but because the arrangement sacrifices the life and future of their children, she's heavily against it. She'll risk getting labelled a traitor and possible execution by her people to secretely secure asylum in Konoha for her young child.
She chooses her child and his/her safety over a future that might not even happen for her village.
Having read the circumstances behind her mission request, what rank would it be given? I know this is fanfiction and I can do what I want, but what I want, is for the ranking of this mission and its personnel to make sense. I plan on having Suiren pay for the very best that Konoha can offer, not caring one bit for the price tag if it ensures her child gets out of the country safely.
Who existed during this timeline; nine to ten years before Naruto canon, was loyal and still in Konoha (cannot be Kakashi obviously), and could handle any threat (with encountering Orochimaru being the highest possibility) that might target the subject of their protection?
My thoughts are Hiruzen would send the previous Ino-Shika-Chō (Inoichi, Shikaku and Choza) to guard the child, with the rank being listed as A or S. I'm open to discussion and if it makes sense, I'm willing to adjust based on commentator recommendations.
2023.03.26 21:22 beofina A Closed Chapter
The past two years were filled with many incredible memories, and many terrible memories. It's finally over - you're gone from my life and you'll never be a part of it again. A sense of relief fills my head daily, and yet so does a great deal of residual pain and reminiscing of those incredible moments. The worst part about this chapter closing is the fact that now I have to start over - I miss having a person to go to when times are tough, I miss having someone to love and cherish, and I miss being able to imagine my future with someone I thought was the love of my life. Now that it's over, I have to find someone else that I can love even more than you. I need to find someone that will not leave me, as that will be the person that truly loves me, because if you leave someone you didn't love them enough. I don't want to have to go through a talking stage again, I don't want to have to pour my heart out and my past out to a new person, but I have to and that's going to be both very tough and very hard to find.
There's so many good things about life, but there's a feeling of happiness I could only ever find in having a partner. I want to progress forward and have someone there to plan my future with, I want someone to be able to support me as I get surgery and do so many huge things in life this summer. I want someone to take to concerts of my favourite artists - I really hope I find someone that loves me and will do these things with me.
You weren't the one for me. Leaving shows me you didn't love me enough, and with that in mind I'll kindly never speak to you again and will happily forget about you in your entirety. In a way it's like you died - you're not the same person you were on the outside when in a relationship with me. All of the lies about things you told me, all of the things you hid from me, all of the times you upset me immensely and I let it slide and just forgot about it. Now that I know your true colours I know you're genuinely not the person I want ever. I don't think you'd ever match my aspirations anyway and hopefully I find someone that does. You're someone that didn't care much honestly, you just took things as they came and you didn't strive to always better yourself. You never improved your behaviour after hurting me, you'd just repeat it and upset me again at a later date. I guess I realize now that you were simply a person that was meant to take up a small chapter of my life to help me learn what it feels like to truly love someone, and despite all the pain you caused at least now I know what type of person to look for and what I deserve in a partner.
I'm going to miss our memories. I'm going to be upset at the fact that I won't have someone as close to me as you were to go do fun things with this summer. It's going to feel bittersweet when I go to the taylor swift / the 1975 concert, to restaurants, to museums, to festivals, to piers, and to many other things this summer, because I'm going to be doing them with people I'm not as close to, or just on my own.
I know I'll be able to navigate the upcoming chapters just fine. I'm doing great in life, and I need to remember my strengths and what I bring to the table and how much I deserve from a partner. I need to remember that you're simply a terrible match for me - you're not a good person to me. It's funny realizing how much of a facade you live with - are you even truly yourself to a single person in the world? I doubt it. Concealing your true self to even the one you're closest to, putting on a front in front of friends and family and not even having anyone know your true identity, including me. It's quite a marvel to look at and I guess I'm proud of myself for actually being me around you, for not lying about important things, for being a truthful and caring person the whole time.
I learned more about you after breaking up than I ever knew about you before. I learned that you're a rude person when you're not in a relationship with me - that you simply ignore my messages. I learned through speaking to friends that what you did was terrible and not normal - that my being concerned about you having private socials / other things is actually not me being paranoid and yet u made me feel like it was normal. I learned that you were just lying to me all of this time. God I wish when we broke up in September that it lasted forever. I wish I never got back with you after that - it would have been so much better. To break up with me 3 days before my birthday and then again 3 days before your birthday is hilarious. In reality, not even meeting you would've been best, but at least there's some good memories. I hope you never appear again. I have a feeling you're going to struggle in a lot of areas in life on your own, so hopefully you find someone to push you, because I don't think you'll be able to push to do great things alone. That'll never be me again though: I do not care for you anymore and I do not want to see you. I don't give a single fuck about a person that decided I was not meant for them and left me out of nowhere. In all honesty right now I don't wish you the best, I don't feel like I should wish the best to the person that was not willing to work a single thing out and just left out of the blue saying it's not my fault. Fuck that and fuck you for instantly getting over me and dancing with another girl right after breaking up with me, I hope you are hurting emotionally even more than I am because I don't deserve to be the only one suffering. I hope you continue to feel pain and I hope you miss me, because I am an incredible girl and I don't deserve to be thrown away in an instant. I deserve someone that actually loves me, I deserve to feel loved. That's all I want.
I can't wait for you, whoever you may be, to come into my life and show me what true love is and feels like. I can't wait to hug you, to kiss you, to go on dates with you, to get engaged to you, and to eventually marry you and commit to a life of love with you. Whoever you are, I hope you come soon, and I hope you and I spend many years together. I hope you're not just a chapter, I hope you're the rest of the book.
I hope I never remember this chapter again once May arrives. I'm going to start anew in a big city and I'll never think of you again. I can't wait to start dating again, I'm not gonna sit around and wait and do 'inner healing' - I'm ready for someone, I hope they come.
submitted by beofina to UnsentLetters [link] [comments]
There's so many good things about life, but there's a feeling of happiness I could only ever find in having a partner. I want to progress forward and have someone there to plan my future with, I want someone to be able to support me as I get surgery and do so many huge things in life this summer. I want someone to take to concerts of my favourite artists - I really hope I find someone that loves me and will do these things with me.
You weren't the one for me. Leaving shows me you didn't love me enough, and with that in mind I'll kindly never speak to you again and will happily forget about you in your entirety. In a way it's like you died - you're not the same person you were on the outside when in a relationship with me. All of the lies about things you told me, all of the things you hid from me, all of the times you upset me immensely and I let it slide and just forgot about it. Now that I know your true colours I know you're genuinely not the person I want ever. I don't think you'd ever match my aspirations anyway and hopefully I find someone that does. You're someone that didn't care much honestly, you just took things as they came and you didn't strive to always better yourself. You never improved your behaviour after hurting me, you'd just repeat it and upset me again at a later date. I guess I realize now that you were simply a person that was meant to take up a small chapter of my life to help me learn what it feels like to truly love someone, and despite all the pain you caused at least now I know what type of person to look for and what I deserve in a partner.
I'm going to miss our memories. I'm going to be upset at the fact that I won't have someone as close to me as you were to go do fun things with this summer. It's going to feel bittersweet when I go to the taylor swift / the 1975 concert, to restaurants, to museums, to festivals, to piers, and to many other things this summer, because I'm going to be doing them with people I'm not as close to, or just on my own.
I know I'll be able to navigate the upcoming chapters just fine. I'm doing great in life, and I need to remember my strengths and what I bring to the table and how much I deserve from a partner. I need to remember that you're simply a terrible match for me - you're not a good person to me. It's funny realizing how much of a facade you live with - are you even truly yourself to a single person in the world? I doubt it. Concealing your true self to even the one you're closest to, putting on a front in front of friends and family and not even having anyone know your true identity, including me. It's quite a marvel to look at and I guess I'm proud of myself for actually being me around you, for not lying about important things, for being a truthful and caring person the whole time.
I learned more about you after breaking up than I ever knew about you before. I learned that you're a rude person when you're not in a relationship with me - that you simply ignore my messages. I learned through speaking to friends that what you did was terrible and not normal - that my being concerned about you having private socials / other things is actually not me being paranoid and yet u made me feel like it was normal. I learned that you were just lying to me all of this time. God I wish when we broke up in September that it lasted forever. I wish I never got back with you after that - it would have been so much better. To break up with me 3 days before my birthday and then again 3 days before your birthday is hilarious. In reality, not even meeting you would've been best, but at least there's some good memories. I hope you never appear again. I have a feeling you're going to struggle in a lot of areas in life on your own, so hopefully you find someone to push you, because I don't think you'll be able to push to do great things alone. That'll never be me again though: I do not care for you anymore and I do not want to see you. I don't give a single fuck about a person that decided I was not meant for them and left me out of nowhere. In all honesty right now I don't wish you the best, I don't feel like I should wish the best to the person that was not willing to work a single thing out and just left out of the blue saying it's not my fault. Fuck that and fuck you for instantly getting over me and dancing with another girl right after breaking up with me, I hope you are hurting emotionally even more than I am because I don't deserve to be the only one suffering. I hope you continue to feel pain and I hope you miss me, because I am an incredible girl and I don't deserve to be thrown away in an instant. I deserve someone that actually loves me, I deserve to feel loved. That's all I want.
I can't wait for you, whoever you may be, to come into my life and show me what true love is and feels like. I can't wait to hug you, to kiss you, to go on dates with you, to get engaged to you, and to eventually marry you and commit to a life of love with you. Whoever you are, I hope you come soon, and I hope you and I spend many years together. I hope you're not just a chapter, I hope you're the rest of the book.
I hope I never remember this chapter again once May arrives. I'm going to start anew in a big city and I'll never think of you again. I can't wait to start dating again, I'm not gonna sit around and wait and do 'inner healing' - I'm ready for someone, I hope they come.
2023.03.26 21:21 GrCappuccino Best type of CBD for anxiety/ADHD?
I have anxiety and I think some sort of mild ADHD due to overthinking. THC weed helps a bit however I still overthink a bit, so I started looking at CBD. I bought some CBD cigarettes from a CBD/Kratom shop near me which made me feel a bit OK, but I think it was low quality because I also felt kinda groggy/gross on it. What kind of CBD Should I be looking for? Full spectrum? Broad spectrum? I was looking at getting it from an actual dispensary and not some smoke shop.
submitted by GrCappuccino to CBD [link] [comments]
2023.03.26 21:21 letmespoilu30 SD looking for sexy SB! (USA)
Looking for a long term online/IRL sugar baby! Right now, it would mostly be online with a weekly allowance but I would love to turn it into much more. I'd be willing to pay to travel to you or you travel to me. I would also in the future like a travel companion! One of my dreams is to have a sexy SB accompany me on a cruise to the caribbeans! Ideally, you would be in the US and located near the east coast ( I can work around that if you're really worth it ;). Please excuse the new profile just had to make it for privacy reasons. But I am real and willing to verify. So, DM me and let the spoiling being! ;)
submitted by letmespoilu30 to SugarDaddyMeetMe [link] [comments]