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May 06, 2005
Star Trek and Child Abuse
Ernest Miller has details about an LA Times story that claims that an abnormally high percentage of child molesters in Toronto are also Trekkies (or as they like to be called "Trekkers")(via kausfiles). He writes:
Last week I wrote a post about a claim in the LA Times that of the more than one hundred arrested in the past four years by the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit Child Exploitation Section "all but one" were "hard-core Trekkie[s]". I thought the claim was improbable, so I called and spoke to an officer in the unit, who denied the specific accuracy of the claim, but not the high percentage of pedophiles arrested who were Star Trek fans
In cases like this is it is important to define your terms. I probably like Star Trek more than the average person and would even consider myself a Star Trek fan and have seen most of the original series and next generation episodes. However, I am definitely not a Trekkie as I have never gone to a convention, watched more than handful of the post Next Generation episodes, and have never bought any Star Trek items. Trekkies fall a bit lower on the Geek hierarchy chart than I would place myself. I suspect that to define someone as a hard core Trekkie they have to spend a significant portion of their time and money on Star Trek.
Some of the criminals described in this story seem to dress as Klingons. This is always a bad sign. One night I went to see one of the Star Trek movies in the movie theater and several audience members were dressed as klingons. I was wearing normal human clothes, while the usher (who had been forced to dress in a Star Fleet uniform) was very disturbed by all this. I recommend the documentary Trekkies for a good look at how some people use Star Trek like a religion. For these geeks it gives them meaning, purpose and an ethical system for their otherwise fairly pointless lives.
Posted by Pete at May 6, 2005 04:22 PM
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