While the term child pornography is still widely used by the public, it’s more accurate to call it what it is: evidence of child sexual abuse. That’s why RAINN and others have stopped using the term child pornography and switched to referring to it as CSAM — child sexual abuse materials.
While some of the pornography online depicts adults who have consented to be filmed, that’s never the case when the images depict children. Just as kids can’t legally consent to sex, they can’t consent to having images of their abuse recorded and distributed. Every explicit photo or video of a kid is actually evidence that the child has been a victim of sexual abuse.
Bald assertions like
are wrong - the change in terminology was made for good and valid reasons. The Dope is, of course, going to dinosaur its way over this like it does over any change younger than disco <insert Grandpa Simpson GIF here> but it actually is about respect for the child victims here.
I agree completely and emphatically. I’m sometimes skeptical of language that mutates for no good reason, but this is one hundred percent a valuable and important evolution, for the reasons you describe.
If anyone argues the point in this thread, you have my sword.
Thanks for creating this thread. I have never before heard that there’s a preference to use the phrase “child sexual abuse material”, and agree that it’s a topic worth discussing.
I have to admit that I don’t care for the vagueness of that phrase. If i heard “child sexual abuse material” out of the blue, i would think it was describing physical materials used to abuse children, maybe small restraints or such. But language evolves.
I wonder if the connotations of the word “pornography” are different in the US, though. It was mostly illegal until recently. There’s still a widespread belief that the creation of mainstream pornography is abusive towards to actors, especially the women involved.
Pornography is protected under the First Amendment.
Child pornography is not protected under the First Amendment.
Calling it child pornography allows the ‘waters to be muddied’ with First Amendment questions. Calling it “Child Sexual Abuse Material” (or anything that does not raise the question of First Amendment protection) does not.
Are we talking about what the technical legal term should be, or about how members of the general public are “allowed” to refer to it in conversation (which, as I understand it, is how this started here on the SDMB).
I don’t have a problem with “CSAM” (or something like that) being the official term in legal contexts, used by people who are familiar with what it legally means. But it seems weird to leap from that to “nobody should ever refer to it as child pornography.” Sort of like how someone can get arrested for DUI, but we can still refer to what they did as “drunk driving.”
Well, this isn’t FQ…
But it’s not just my opinion - it’s the opinion of RAINN, of the NSPCC - and the UK Government as of 2015.
Well, whose opinion to trust - the various orgs who deal with this kind of thing on a daily basis, or some guy on the internet… that’s a tough one.
It implies it’s the same class of thing as regular old professional adult pornography.
Do they, though? I mean, CSAM in all its forms.
CSAM is only one subset of evidence of child sexual abuse. And it’s CSAM that is replacing “Child Porn”. And it’s not vague in the slightest.
Because linking back to the thread wasn’t good enough?
And I definitely don’t want this thread to be a proxy for people put off by chela’s tone or whatever. It’s about educating some people that actually, the language around Child Sexual Abuse Materials has already changed where it counts the most.
Scare quotes and defensive phrasing aside, I’m talking about both.
With some trepidation, i googled “child sex abuse material” and got a lot of hits from US agencies that try to prevent it. I thought this, from a department of Justice publication, was helpful.
The term “child pornography” is currently used in federal statutes and is defined as any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a person less than 18 years old. While this phrase still appears in federal law, “child sexual abuse material” is preferred, as it better reflects the abuse that is depicted in the images and videos and the resulting trauma to the child. In fact, in 2016, an international working group, comprising a collection of countries and international organizations working to combat child exploitation, formally recognized “child sexual abuse material” as the preferred term.
Right. “Evidence of child sexual abuse” sounds like a term that applies to child pornography when it’s being held in official custody for purposes of presenting as evidence at a criminal trial.
The first thing that came to my mind was that thread we had here on the dope recently about training AI to detect child pornography. In other words, it made think that this is the sanitized term that is used when the material is in possession of the authorities and is being used for legal purposes (mainly to present at the trial of someone accused of pedophilia), as opposed to when it is “out in the wild” and being used for the prurient interest of pedophiles.
Yeah, that’s my question. It doesn’t imply that to me (any more than the phrase “drunk driving” implies that that’s the same class of thing as driving).
Is there evidence that some people do think that way?
They are free to use whatever phrase they want. I am not part of their organization, so I am not beholden to whatever jargon they choose to use. I accept the euphemism treadmill exists, it’s one of the ways language evolves, but calling it child pornography confuses no one nor does it somehow make it less horrifying. Child sexual abuse material might be preferred in a clinical setting, but most of us don’t live our lives in such a setting.
In general, can we stop pretending that getting everyone to use the New Correct Term for a thing, instead of the commonly used term that everyone already knows*, will somehow improve the world? At best, it just means that discussions about serious topics get derailed into meaningless arguments over semantics; at worse, it’s elitist, because it shuts people out of the conversation who don’t have the education or the verbal dexterity to learn a New Correct Term every five minutes.
With exceptions for situations where the commonly-used term is an actual slur weaponized against a class of people, but that is obviously not what’s happening here.
