You read my mind.
This is exactly WHY I think it’d be obvious to steer clear of any porn that explicitly says the girl is underage. All of the phrases used suggest the girl is underage but don’t actually SAY it.
Barely Legal = legally adult.
Hot Teen, Innocent Teen, etc. = 18 or 19* year olds are legally adults and still teens.
High Schooler = 18 year olds** are legally adults and many (most?) high school students turn 18 before graduating.
Daddy’s Girl = this legally adult woman has a father.
And so on. Actually stating the girl is NOT of legal age should set off warning alarms.
- or 20+ but look younger; I doubt most viewers will be outraged at such a technicality.
** or 19+ [and insert the rest of the first footnote].
Fixed the spelling for you in the OP, as you asked.
If someone has signed on to a web site once and that’s all there was to it then the government should have to show other evidence to prove intent. In addition if it was a government sting and it wasn’t directed at someone in particular who could reasonably be suspected of breaking the law then that should be considered entrapment. I don’t think our prisons are full of guys convicted on those grounds, although there may be some.
For anyone who intentionally was accessing child porn we don’t have any choice except for a lifetime quarantine. And that’s too good for many of them.
Except for the children who were forced to participate in the making of said porn, they have to deal with the fact that people are still viewing it, over and over and over again. How do you think THEY feel about it?
The idea that, “well, it’s just pictures”, is bullshit. A child was harmed to create those pictures. Imagine if you were raped, and someone filmed it. Would you want that film to be viewed, over and over again? Would you consider it “just pictures”?
I think it should be decriminalized, like marijuana has been in many places. Don’t punish possession of small amounts, punish the filmmakers and distributors. Use the small fries to go after the big fish. IMO, crackdowns on possession of child porn are political acts more than anything else–because those dirty child molesters are the lowest-hanging fruit (insert testicular reference here) in our society. Very few are willing to risk standing up to defend them.
I’ve looked at many different kinds of porn out of curiosity. A great deal of it contains simulations or acts that I would never dream of performing myself (seriously, what culturally-literate adult hasn’t seen “2 girls 1 cup” yet?). To some, it’s simultaneously disgusting and entertaining to watch a Japanese woman crap into a tank of water while tied up. But if they don’t want to do those things themselves, they are not necessarily scatophiles.
No matter the crime, we don’t allow victims to determine the punishment of their tormentors–for a very good reason. Vengeance is not justice.
I agree that child molestation is a serious problem. I was molested as a child. But I don’t like witch hunts, no matter how well-deserved they seem to be at the time.
Agreed, I was really taken aback by the way he noted they were “white” men and then followed it up by the idea that they wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Hmm… for a writer, Grisham was very clumsy with language with that “60 year old white men web-surfing while drunk” line of discourse. Libe Ibn Warraq says, the “white men who would not hurt a fly” seems to suggest or imply an element of “as opposed to the dangerous thugs”.
(Same principle under which older white men who futz up the banking system don’t do “hard” time?)
OK, so he may have been really trying to say: “The guy I’m talking about, he may be a pervert, but is **not **a predator, why treat him like one” but he failed at making his case. It is true that American criminal justice is too focused on maximally harsh punishment and not enough on rehabilitating or, most cost-effectively of all, fixing r controlling the root problems, but that was a lousy example.
Thing is, even if that is true, there is majority opinion out there to the effect that they prefer things to be the way they are now. That’s why the Court of Public Opinion so swiftly and effectively forced Grisham to walk it back.
Unfortunately for the individual in question, in our societies it has been adopted that when it comes to protecting the children all bets are off, AND that for these purposes, all minors are “children”, and circumstance be damned. Nuance? That will get you suspicious looks and comments about how come you care about the pervs’ rights.
And yes, considering that this IS 2014, by now one should expect that any link path in the regular net apparently leading to actual minor-porn is likely to be sting bait.
(Timed out) Oh and yes, re: the question. Evaluation of the whole of the circumstances of the case. Of the CASE, NOT of the person. Should be immaterial if it’s a 60 year old white man, a 35 year old latina or a 21 year old black gay man, the point should be what is it they have in their possesion, how did they get it and what were they doing or going to do with it. (One 1985 Tracy Lords VHS tape in back of the attic? Don’t even bother)
For clicking on a link? The only rational responses to that question are “Hell no” and “Dear Lord, no”. Ignoring the fact that the gender of the person in question doesn’t matter (I assume most of us agree on that), can you imagine the damage done when a new “rickrolling” fad starts up? Someone Anonymous clown hacks into your work email database, sends an email from your boss’s account that seems completely normal and contains a link to “our third-quarter sales reports”. You click it and, boom, have fun in prison! It’s an extreme example, but in a world where prank “swatting” exists, you can’t say it wouldn’t happen. What you’re proposing is a zero-tolerance rule, and when have those EVER been a good idea?
In the US, and to a lesser extent, as a global society (I’m not knowledgeable enough to speak with certainly of any specific others) we have decriminalized and are making good progress on destigmatizing homosexual activity. We’re making progress toward the day when we can stop lying about a person’s absolute asexuality before their eighteenth birthday, and open a cultural dialogue discussing sexuality and the myriad issues surrounding it like reasonable, intelligent beings, rather than like screaming hysterical fanatics. Do you really want to risk throwing all that away?
Our desire to protect the weak and defenseless does us credit. Our Puritanical tendencies don’t. I’m probably younger than many of the people who’ve posted in this thread, and no doubt that affects my opinion on the matter, but you do you really want your children to grow up as afraid of sex as your grandparents were? If the paranoia about child porn gets worse, before long no one will be willing to tell them anything, and they’ll end up just as under- and mis-informed as they were.
Given the number of times I’ve been tricked into seeing goatse, tubgirl, or a Wingerdoodle, the idea of being liable to imprisonment for carelessly following a link is terrifying.
(And if there is anyone who is wondering what those terms mean…rejoice in your innocence! There are some things that one cannot forget…no matter how hard we try…)
A couple of years ago I was cite-checking an online article, which involves clicking through and making sure the links take you where they say they do, no 404s, nothing bad. The article was on cybercrime and it did touch briefly on kiddie porn online. None of the links led to anything that even looked like kiddie porn. But the next day, and for a couple of days thereafter, I got various emails from sites with names like “hotlittlegirls.com” and “littleLolitas” and a few other pretty suggestive things. Mostly they were a header with only one link in the body.
I did not click.
However, the article itself said that nobody can download these things by accident. You have to look for them and you have to pay. But it also said that once they were on there, they were pretty hard to delete and law enforcement could find them.
Now…those links looked pretty easy to click to me. Not being at all interested in “littleLolitas” and, also, being fairly paranoid–which is to say I wouldn’t have clicked on a bare link that said “free shoes” without doing some checking–I don’t know what I would have seen if I’d clicked. Maybe an actual site, maybe a sting operation, maybe something that asked me for money and led me along.
But all that said, I don’t think anybody should go to jail just for looking. Buying? Maybe something a little less drastic than jail. Say, fine + probation. Selling? Again, first offense, fine 'em & take away the computer. Making? Okay you can put these folks in jail for a long, long time. I don’t even care if the guy is white, or even if it’s a woman making the stuff: Jail.
Are you sufficiently conversant with the inside workings of the porn industry, to categorically state that 15 or 16 year old actresses are always victims who are forced into allowing themselves to be brutalized entirely against their will? And that none of them willingly enter into the profession as a means of furthering their own well-being? Just like a lot of other people who get up in the morning and go to a grunt dead-end job and work for a shit boss for shit wages doing demoralizing work at a convenience store counter or a telemarketing cubicle in order to enrich some slimeball who grudgingly gives them minimum wage, less deductions.
What other options does your glowing free-enterprise system offer to a runaway who is already abused by her family, and cannot legally be hired for any legitimate work?
Ordinarily of course you’d be dead right, but this all about context; the context being knowingly clicking a link that will take you to a kiddy-diddling site.
Thanks, I promise to use the preview post feature one of these days.
I think his story there is rather fishy, from his use of “…or something like that” which can cover a multitude of sins. On the buying/viewing point, in this case is there any real difference? To put it frankly the child abusers know that they’re supplying a…‘commodity’ that is extremely illegal and hard to find, why wouldn’t they ask for money for it? A lot of busts of people looking at this stuff have involved the cops looking at credit cards, Operations Ore (in the UK) and Avalanche (in the US) used this method.
I dunno, I think you’re being far too forgiving. Wouldn’t it give a message of being able to, for lack of a better term, ‘get away with it’?
I voted “For some, depending”…nobody should be jailed for having a Traci Lords movie on their HD , fined or just cautioned, maybe.
But looking at actual sex abuse victims? Sure, jail the guy. My heart bleeds for any 60yo outed as looking at “teen” “girls”, even if they are really 21. Not. Even less so if they are actual sub-18 teens…
Oh right, so when a 60 year old black man does it, then it’s wrong? Shame on you Grisham!
It’s worth pointing out that it’s a little more in depth than just push the wrong buttons, and you’d need to get caught. So you’d likely have to visit a darknet, then have the FBI just happen to be setup there with a JavaScript exploit, then just happen to have them follow through on the IP. So to be put into this situation would take quite some doing.
This is why I think we should disabuse the notions of it being a simple matter to accidentally stumble over if you get drunk and just follow links. It’s the most reviled and suppressed stuff online, in other words to find it you’d have to be looking for it.
jtur88 brought up the point that we don’t jail people who have ivory items, even though its production is illegal. I think it’s a good point since it expresses the necessity in this case to give jail time to both (higher for the producers, obviously) - if owning ivory meant a prison sentence, I’ll bet the market for it would be swiftly decimated and the producers hit hard.
Oh, found more on the case he related, again from the Telegraph. The relevant passage is;
However there have been those who have spoken up in his defence at the internet outrage and dogpile (although you might have gathered what side I’m on);
Some idiot uploaded his illegal porn collection to the cloud. The digital signatures quickly were found and he’s facing prison time.
Who knows, maybe a more serious crime has been averted. I hope so. I’m guessing the really bad stuff has those digital watermarks. I doubt they are using that technology to search for 17 year old Traci Lords photos.
No, CP is not specially watermarked. Every digital file can be identified by a cryptographic hash. Once an image is identified as CP a hash can be calculated and law enforcement, service providers, etc. can use it to identify exact copies without actually passing copies of the original around.
There is also a technique known as “perceptual hashing” that can characterize the appearance of an image so that derivatives that aren’t bit-wise identical (resized, cropped, rotated, brightness adjusted, etc) can be identified.
Actually marking CP images would require someone to (1) obtain CP images, (2) insert a watermark, and (3) host them on the internet and allow them to be disseminated. This is highly unlikely to happen, for obvious reasons (facilitating the dissemination and viewing of additional copies harms the subjects of the photos even more, which is what is trying to be prevented).
I don’t agree with Grisham’s premise that you can “stumble” across real child porn. Unless you are working the deep end of the shadow internet or some dark site this kind of thing doesn’t pop up and molest your PC like “MILFS WANT TO FUCK NOW” and similar nonsense that hits your PC windshield. You’re not in kiddy porn land unless you deliberately took 3 buses and a taxi to get here.