No, I do NOT want any. I agree that this type of material is very offensive but am genuinely curious as to whether or not banning it is a universal practice.
I was reading this thread where there is a discussion regarding the difficulty in catching perverted purveyors of potent and puerile prepubescent pornographies. One reason appears to be that the Internet is international and that there are jurisdictional issues in going after people who post stuff they oughtn’t. I do understand that there are jurisdictions in the world where local law enforcement basically isn’t interested in helping the FBI and other foreign agencies arrest local citizens, either because they just don’t want to help or because they don’t have any room in the budget for it.
Anyway, is there any jurisdiction anywhere in the world where child pornography, in the sense that it is generally defined in the US and other similar countries, is substantively legal, for example a small island country where you can actually walk down to the corner Pornomart and ask for the elementary school girl section and everything is 100% out in the open, legal, and no effort whatsoever is made to hide anything?
That site is playing a bit of a trick though, they are listing countries that have no law specifically against child porn as it being legal, even if all porn is illegal.
I recall a discussion - I’m thinking it was Harlan Ellison - in musings about censorship mentioned that every politician always brings up the bugaboo about kiddie porn. Just as an experiment, in the days when the area near Times Square was noted for porn, he mentioned going into several of the shops and asking for child material. (Sounds like Harlan to have that nerve) He said even the guys selling the scuzziest material gave him dirty looks like he was dogshit they’d stepped in and had to scrape off their shoe.
His conclusion - if you couldn’t get it in that area of NYC, there was no such material in North America on the open market.
I recall in some discussion too that the age limit for photography in Holland is/was(?) 16 not 18.
The map linked also categorizes whether the ISP cooperates. If the illegal activity is under investigation, then I seriously doubt there’s anywhere in the first world that they will not cooperate. However, expecting the ISP to put in place any massive tracking, filtering, and other firewall software is just an added expense in an already marginal industry. All it does is increase the process of forcing out the little guys in favour of national telephone and cable providers, and then giving them an excuse to raise rates.
Some of the “no laws” countries have more important things to think about (like food) and typically have law enforcement that don’t need details like explicit laws to chase someone doing objectionable work. However, they also do not have the sophistication to run an Internet Crimes unit in their police departments.
Is it such a trick, though? By my reading of that law, you can legally buy and own pornography of any kind, so long as you don’t sell, distribute or display it. That meets my definition of legal.
Cayman is similar to Trinidad & Tobago… the law bans all porn. Not sure what the exact wording in the issue states but the below linked article refers to bans on importation and distribution. I’m not sure how possession or manufacture is addressed in the law for porn in general.
I’m sure many of the third-world countries can stretch a charge like “Public Indecency” to cover whatever action completely offends their morality. Part of the problem may be that in countries where marriage at 14 is typical and legal, they may not see 14 or 15 year-olds as victims in the same way that, say, a 6-y-o victim may totally gross out the authorities. Of course, in a land where connections and power counts for a lot, your social standing and that of the victim’s family may count as much as rule of law.
Afghanistan may not have had specific laws for example, but I doubt anyone during the Taliban era lasted long if they were caught…
IIRC this is what happened in Russia after the Soviet Union fell. The USSR had an age of consent for sex of 14, and it had laws against making pornography and against prostitution. When the laws against pornography & prositution were repealed the government neglected to set a higher age of consent for those. That oversight wasn’t corrected for several years.
Also sometimes older material get’s grandfathered in as legal when new laws are passed. Traci Lords made dozens of pornos before she turned 18, and 1 afterward. That last film is the only one that’s legal in the US, but several of her earlier films remain legal in European countries that have since made it illegal to make porn with under18s.
Huh? What trick? They specifically mark countries of that status with a special color (the lightest of the three shades of green), according to the key.
When Europe decriminalized porn in the late 60s Denmark didn’t exclude child pornography. A company called Color Climax (Wiki link, SFW) produced & sold hardcore kiddie porn all thru the 70s! They’re still in the porn business today, but only 18+.
I’ve read about this too and find it extremely disturbing. The production of child porn by definition involves serious child abuse. How could that company get away with it and operate in full daylight as a legit business in Denmark which is after all a civilized country in the Western World?
The Wikipedia article talks about children younger than 7.
Among the several good French movies that have a lot of Algerian themes, plots etc. there is one with scenes in a female bath house. Young boys are allowed in the female bath. There is one with a scene where a young adult woman is playing with a boys penis. It can be rented in the US. So, is that porn? Is it legal?
It was only towards the mid-70s that “civilized countries in the Western world” barely began really taking child sex abuse seriously and bothering to follow up aggressively rather than sweep it under the table to “avoid scandal”. That’s when specific laws explicitly against CP began passing.
As the article said, 1969-79 even if sale and distribution were legal, creation of the CC CP material itself was still unlawful under Danish AoC laws. So it may have been a matter of poor enforcement. You would need someone to actually go to a police station or DA-equivalent’s office with some porn and say, hey, look at this, WTF? And I have a WAG that if the particular photograph or 8mm film clip could not be proven to have been created IN Denmark, and CC claimed that their CP division operated as a packager (the negatives being mailed to them from wherever), there would have been no jurisdiction.
It took a lot longer in many countries to go for an explicit ban than one would have thought, partly because of societies being in denial or in failure-of-imagination mode (as in, "oh, come on, who’d be so twisted as to actually put such a thing out openly for commercial sale") and that in turn partly because it probably was not THAT widespread (no Internet, remember? Had to get yourself a real photo studio and a real commercial print shop and drop actual physical magazines or reels in the post in plain brown packages).
*“Holy smack, that’s sick” * without a law to enforce it, may keep the porn shops at old 42nd St. from carrying the material, but is nothing to the mail-order (or fileshare) customer.
It is 16, but there are some ifs and buts. It is only nude photography, they aren’t allowed to be paid, it can’t be in any place accesible to the public (?) and they can’t be performing anything that might be construed as a sexual act.
Considering that nudity is really not a big deal at all here, and that the legal age to have sex is also 16 I think the law makes sense. It would be stranger if you weren’t allowed to do that.
