Consider this.. let’s say you work for a school district, you’re a male teacher.  You give some female student a bad grade she feels she doesn’t deserve so she thinks she’s going to get back at you by reporting that during a short conference you had with her about her grade you showed her naked pictures and touched her ‘inappropriately’.  You get suspended pending an investigation and in the meantime some overzealous local police detective gets a warrant and searches your home.  Of course your computer is seized.  They look into it and let it leak to the press that ‘certain material was found containing pictures and/or references to child pornography, rape, and other deviant sexual activities’.  The female student confesses the charges were a hoax, she’s released and sent home with a slap on the wrist and your charges have been dropped.  You get your PC back (and whatever else the cops took) and all is back to normal.  Or is it?  The public, the parents specifically, recall the nasty material found on your PC and figure that while these charges were false there must be something ‘shifty’ about you anyway and certainly question your ability to teach their innocent offspring.  They demand the school board fire you.

Obviously to suggest this was a bad hair day in your life would be an understatement.  Given the fact that male adults in general are extremely vulnerable to accusations of sexual improprieties, finding things in your home that are seemingly innocent yet can be construed to paint a picture supporting those allegations just makes it all the more a problem.   Let’s explore for a bit what was on ‘your’ PC that made you appear to be the town’s sexual predator.  Let’s also presume that you have no sexual interests normally… are generic in your thoughts about sex… have no sexual fantasies at all… and never ever have visited a porn website and downloaded adult pics.  What could anyone find on your PC then?

Email spam.  I dunno about you but I don’t traverse hard core porn sites as a rule yet somehow my email address has gotten on every porn list in the nation it seems.  Generally speaking, one doesn’t have to have visited a porn site to start getting porn email solicitations.  In these modern times of hi-tech, computers just search and grab email addresses from many seemingly innocent sources.  In fact, porn solicitation is really only part of all email spam.  It’s email solicitation of any kind, from ads selling a secret wireless camera to spy on your ‘babysitter’, to solicitations for breast enlargements and Viagra.   Some of these you can avoid by using certain filtering features but even at that many still get through.  On any given day I get up to 50-75 spam emails… and a few of those are solicitations from rape, pedo, and beastiality porn sites… some even containing a graphic picture that opens up before your eyes… “See Teenage Cheerleaders Being Ravaged By Horses!” and up pops a pic showing a girl and a horse.

So, what do we all do when we et this garbage email?  We delete it, of course.  But simply sending it to the ‘delete’ folder doesn’t quite delete it from your computer.  Anyone who has access to your PC can check that folder… and tell others that they found deviant sexual material showing women being victimized and abused.. oh, and don’t forget the all-damning pedophile ‘material’… that one ad asking you to join a pedophile website you thought you deleted forever.  In our above scenario do you think the cops would have answered to the press, “Other than a number of spam emails in the ‘deleted’ folder we found the PC clean of any deviant or illegal sexual content.”?  I hardly think not.

In a section on my site I mention about the Georgia crematory case from early in 2002.  The fellow operating that business simply decided it was easier to toss the bodies out back in the woods to rot rather than burning them.  I believe the authorities have found 349 corpses.  It was a big mess to clean up and quite expensive for the state.  Of course, that said nothing for the bereaved relatives and the pressure from the public to hang this guy.  Well, in the course of the investigation the local states attorney had confiscated the owner’s PC and let it leak to the press that there were pictures on it of dead and rotting corpses.  Immediately the assumption was being made that this guy was not only too lazy to burn bodies but was a necrophiliac to boot.  On one hand you have the authorities anxious to charge this fellow with whatever capital offenses they could conjure up (the crime of necrophilia in Georgia is a major criminal offense) and a public wanting to know why this guy did this.  After a day or two the states attorney’s office issued an apology about leaking the contents of the PC so prematurely.  It seems those pics of dead and rotting corpses were not from out back but rather from websites like www.rotten.com that anyone can download.  But more to the point was that it was determined those pics were already on that PC when it was acquired, quite legally, from a local school district’s outdated equipment disposal program.  On top of that, the corpses that could be examined revealed no sexual contact had been made.  No necrophilia charges.  In the end the owner was simply lazy and could care less.

Years ago, well before the internet, if the police searched your home you were still open to the same threats to your image with seemingly innocent material around your home.  I used to belong to five book clubs at one time.  I was an avid reader of history and particularly the history of warfare through the ages.  If someone had decided to ‘search’ my home for some allegedly character-damning ‘contraband’ they would have found I had a copy of Mein Kampf, pictures of concentration camp victims (inside books about histories of WW2), my old military manuals (from when I was in the service) showing weapon disassembly, camouflage techniques, and marksmanship…  and catalogs of weapons and sources to buy militaria through mail order.  One could presume I was a modern neo-nazi revolutionary wannabe hell-bent on overthrowing the government.  But that’s far more ‘colorful’ than saying they found two copies of the Holy Bible (one King James and the other The Common Bible), three multi-volumn sets of science, world geography, and the papers of Abraham Lincoln; the collected works of Shakspeare, the memoirs of Winston Churchill, the Sherlock Holmes collection, and an Introduction to Accounting.