Tag Archives: boing-boing

Oh boy—where even to start with this one. Use of penile plethysmography (PPG), which measure your penis for arousal while viewing questionable content, is being ceased by the Canadian government. After being used on kids for 25 years. PPG testing, almost too perverse to believe it was actually a government-sanctioned procedure, was employed in British Columbia as a means of interrogating child sex offenders. A sensor was strapped to a child's penis, monitoring blood flow while the kid was subjected to images of other nude children, and audio descriptions of rape. Reread that sentence if necessary. The reasoning—if you can even call it that—behind the test was to discern whether a child offender was lying about his or her desires, though we have a feeling this treatment probably created far more sociopaths than it screened. As Boing Boing points out, and as any adolescent can tell you, erections aren't exactly the most objectively predictable phenomenon, refuting entirely the purpose of the test. British Columbia's Minister of Children and Family Development has put an end to PPG after the revelation that a technician administering the test was himself a sex offender. The levels of perversion-within-perversion here are dizzying. The Canadian government will now begin an official inquiry into trauma victims among the children subjected to PPG over the past decades—an investigation we have a feeling will not be a short one. added by: Omnomynous