I think the concept of some one watching child porn that was produced in the 80's and converted from VHS to DVD is harming a child today is a bit odd one.
Don't get me wrong going after the producers of new material is very important just as it is important to go after the human traffickers that facilitate the production.
I suspect that this is not due to there being anything morally wrong with what they are doing but that instead of going after the perpetrators, which might be very difficult, we target the economy which pushes them to commit the crimes in the first place. Although it might be imperfect, from what I understand sometimes this is the best way to get results.
In a way it's similar to prostitution, where there might be nothing morally wrong with selling or buying sex, but it (potentially?) promotes human trafficking. I doubt that'd the only reason it's illegal though, at least in the US.
I think it's similar to ivory resale. It's illegal to sell ivory, and other endangered species products, even though the particular animal may have been killed before a ban. Because the market itself attracts new product.
It's hard to take these kinds of rationalizations seriously. Simply, most people in our society find this sort of pornography revolting, and the law, which reflects public outrage, has banned it. We didn't reach that outrage from evidential reasoning. Moral revulsion is an irreducible position, and it's not subject to dispute. Likewise, we've never had a rigorous experiment to test whether murder should be illegal or not. That isn't how laws get made.
The problem with the public outrage however is that is makes any rational discussion almost impossible
When the topic of child porn comes up, emotion takes over and logic goes away.
One of the largest problems with child porn is the actual definition of child porn. To most people when they hear of child porn, they think of a Person under the age of puberty being forced to engage in a sex act with an adult person.
However 2 17 year olds having sex and video taping it is also child porn, they can (and have been) charged with producing, and distributing said child porn
Many many many teens were arrested and convicted before states starting passing exceptions to the law, and many states today it is still illegal for a 17year old person to send a nude photo of themselves to another 17year old person, haven forbid a 17 year and 364 day old person send picture to a 17 year and 366 day year old person....
Yes, a lot of "child porn" charges are deeply stupid. When we talk about child porn rings and websites, we are not talking about those. We are talking about the "raping 8-year-olds" kind.
That's really not important though is it. If you're being prosecuted (at least in the UK) for such crimes then the age of the children and the level of the pornography is assessed and taken in to account in your sentencing. If the only image you'd acquired was a nip-slip of a teenager -- or you had a selfie with a same-age partner -- then the sentence would be entirely different to having thousands of images of pre-teen rape. Whilst USA law is often ridiculous it doesn't seem to be that lame that such differentiations aren't being made.
Where are you trying to go with this rhetorical question?
Did you? No? Then you don't have any more information than I do.
Nobody visits a darknet site called "The Playpen" to trade pics of consenting 17-year-olds. For all you or I know, the site never existed in the first place and the FBI set up the entire thing as a cover to silence dissidents. But that would be a problem with government corruption, not with the definition of child porn.
I think that's unduly reductive. He seems instead to be saying that if you were abused in the 80s, you should just get over the thought of people watching footage of it today for kicks.
Which is an interesting viewpoint, to be sure. I wonder whether he'd say the same to an adult victim of rape whose abuse was videoed and passed around for other people to get off on. That's a pretty close parallel, but it never seems to turn up in discussions like these, and I wonder why that is.
It seems to me that distributing such videos would have far more in common with defamation than with the original abuse. Merely having or watching them... is probably bad and wrong but not something that ought to actually be legally punishable.
Those women are personally identified so they can suffer real world embarrassment from people they know. Children in child porn are probably far more anonymous and untraceable as adults just from their images.
I think the idea of being imprisoned for viewing a picture on a website is pretty draconian. We would never stand for it if we weren't so obsessed with vilifying sexual deviants.
The argument that consumers fuel the market for producers to abuse children surely fails when there's no payment being made. Perhaps the crime should be limited to paying for it, a bit like why we don't allow payment for organ donation.
> The argument that consumers fuel the market for producers to abuse children surely fails when there's no payment being made.
Does it? In warez rings, new releases are the surest route to high reputation and broad access to content. I don't see an a priori reason why the same might not be true for other sorts of illicit content, including this.
Jennifer Lawrence declared that everyone who looked at the leaked nudes of her was committing sexual assault against her (or words to that effect). The idea being that by knowingly viewing "private" content without consent is invasive.
I'm not sure you can legislate it, but I found her position far more satisfying than "oh no I should never have taken the pics in the first place what a mistake to think I wouldn't be hacked".
Most people would consider it a moral wrong I'd warrant. It's like not a crime only by virtue of being a relatively new thing, and other mitigations like it being difficult to police (is there a point in making crimes you don't police and can't prosecute under).
Revenge porn will to me always be a copyright issue, and being one, it's up to those women (and men) to sue when they find someone violating their copyright.
It might normalize child pornography in someone's mind. They could keep watching it long enough to the point where it just seems like another genre, albeit the only genre that works for them. They could start manufacturing their own, to join other rings and trade.
I know it's all maybe's and could-be's, but they're maybe's and could-be's that ruin children's lives.
Most of the academic research I am familiar with suggests fairly strongly that the legalization of pornography and child pornography is correlated with a reduced rate of rape and child molestation.
That's been the argument against porn in general, and against strip clubs and against prostitution. Without good science behind it, it's just more made-up political rationalizing. You could equally argue the opposite that having access to porn satisfies people so they don't need to use real children. Without science, we can't know.
I recently saw an interview with a conservative Indian figure about porn where one man said "I'm not harming anyone by watching porn in my room" and the conservative man responded with "You might become corrupted and turn into a sex maniac". It sounded like hilariously backward thinking, but that's still how many people think of child porn.
Your argument is corrupt. It doesn't take science to recognize morality. Each and every child in a porn video is someone's son or daughter. Each and every child has value. Society chooses to make and enforce laws which dissuade deviant behavior. Erode the moral foundation of a society is to watch it crumble.
Absolutely. You are right. No science needed to identify morality. Therefore lot's of western countries are inherently immoral. Letting gay people openly kiss each other? Some states even let gay people marry. What an abomination to thy Lords rulings.
Not to speak of black people being allowed to vote. To marry without consent of their owners.
Sorry - but do you really need more examples, that arguing with an universal morale is just one big smelly pile of bullshit?
Morale and societal norms change and shift over time. We develop and there is no basic morality, just societal contracts. And that is good. We do not need an entity enforcing or dictating our morals. We need rationality to identify the right rules to live as a society and then a system to enforce these rules in the best possible way (not that we do have that in place anywhere in the world). But given your comment/idea and our current systems I rather live in our current systems. I just do not want to be ruled by some morality dictators.
Morality is personal. What you believe to be immoral is not what another person would believe to be immoral.
When government attempt to legislate morality is when atrocities and abuse occur.
To millions of people in various religions, being gay is immoral, a woman showing her face or hair, is immoral
Adult pornography is considered immoral by a large part of the population.
Instead of making a case for morality, one should use science and logic to make the case for victimization.
Each person has the self evident right to their own body, aka self ownership. We accept this has as the fundamental foundation of Human Rights.
Society through science has shown that children are mentally not equipped to make a choice to have sex as such society has prohibited adults from manipulating children into having sex. We also recognize that any time one person forces another with violence to engage in sex is a violation of their person hood. We have grouped these 2 crimes into the category of rape and created punishments for these crimes
No morality involved.
Using science should also come into play when evaluating the punishment and criminality of viewing or possessing child pornography.
It could also work in the other direction preventing people from acting out. If you look at one path you can probably find people that became more violent from playing grand theft auto. But, looking at the other path more (or less) people may become less violent from playing GTA.
There are sites out there with pictures and videos of people being tortured and killed freely available for download. Also animal crush videos is a thing. Very disturbing stuff - I accidentally clicked on one link on 4chan. I don't want to elaborate on what it was, but I closed it immediately, almost vomited, and I am very careful about clicking random internet links from now on. Surely this stuff is not any better than child porn and there are people who enjoy looking at this material so why don't we ever go after the people sharing this stuff?
This is just where society originates from, instincts allowing for the forming of social contracts.
For example if you exchanged resources with another party (your wife) for drugs and hugs, both sides would want for this contract to last.
So you need a third party, which can be forced by both sides to enforce the contract.
Enter the pedophiles and gays. Your wife is going to make certain you hate them and she can switch of that hate, via sanctioning there existence (e.g. church/political inclination). That instinct-switch is as important to her, as beauty is to you.
Now, ten years into a cellphone society, where even thought offenders soon will be blatant obvious by constant NN observation all that remains are the instincts.
The function is gone, but the gears of this bio-machinery still churn on.
I miss those days, where i still felt burning hatred for some Gears and was involved in affairs of the species in general. Life was so much easier if one just glued arguments to what one feels.
I looked into this whole messy affair, because one of those bastards tried to get on my younger brother when i was young. And for such there should be punishment, even a lifetime in prison.
But though crimes, like a deprecated bio-machine, masturbating to a Victorian child-labour-sweatshop , to prosecute those is foolish.
Does this comment read like written by a (not very well programmed) NLP script - or is it only me not understanding a single bit about what the (alleged) author tries to convey?
Parent is arguing that sexual assault of children is evil, but viewing CP is OK. There's also something about enforcement of heterosexual monogamy through scapegoating. And a general misogynistic undertone. Yes?
I always wonder if these kind of comments (they seem common amongst conspiracy theory debaters and on-line political extremists) are ever understood by any of their peers, or if it is just the author.
It bewilders me that this comment makes perfect sense in someone's mind.
Don't get me wrong going after the producers of new material is very important just as it is important to go after the human traffickers that facilitate the production.