The recent thread about child porn laws (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=95644#newpost) got me wondering about something else:
Why isn’t a book like Nabokov’s “Lolita” considered child pornography? That book is all about an underage girl having a sexual relationship with an older man.
Can only visual media be considered child porn? Or is it simply a 1st Amendment issue?
No, also written material can be considered child pornography (at least in some state, I remember one case where a person was convicted for creating written child pornography). But often in these cases it’s not the material itself that counts but the intention with which it was made (or used). In the same way when parents take a picture of their naked child bathing, it is not considered child pornography. But if someone has a large collection of these kind of pictures and uses them for his sexual gratification, it usually is considered child pornography. That is at least how it works in some parts of the world. The line between what is morally or legally acceptable and what is not, can ofcourse be thin sometimes. For example, a painting depicting a child being sexually abused, is it art or is it child pornography? Or a photo that has been created with photoshop in which a sexual act appears to have taken place which actually never happened? In the last case, people in the U.S. have already been convicted for creating so-called “virtual” child pornography. The definition for (visual) CP now is, I believe (copied from an old article):
I couldn’t find anything about the person who was convicted for writing CP, but I remember having read about it in the newspaper some time ago. All in all, the above definition is certainly a definition one can disagree about (IMHO), for when taken too far it can indeed consider posessing Nabokov’s book to be CP someday.