Okay, I’ll take a stab at it, though I’m no lawyer. Horse sense and actual laws about morality are two very different animals anyway, so whatever conclusion I come to on a purely philosophical level has nothing to do with one’s actual chances of getting arrested.
Child porn laws basically exist to prevent abuse to actual kids (whether that kid realizes he/she is being abused or not). To me, suggestive photographs of naked children are not a crime per se: they’re EVIDENCE that a crime was committed in real life, at the moment the pictures were taken.
Now let’s look at the first ingredient in your hypothesis: a web site where adults could post naked non-suggestive pictures of themselves when they were kids. Personally, I don’t see where the crime is. Of course, that site might be a boon to pedophiles, but then again, a lot of non-prurient pictures (Sears catalog, medical textbooks, National Geographics, you know the list) are used every day by people who choose to view them as sexually charged, and that doesn’t make those pictures X-rated in the first place.
Second ingredient now: adding suggestive captions to said pictures. That’s kind of pushing it, of course, and would definitely qualify as bad taste or a sign of warped mind to most people, but those aren’t crimes (if it were, I guess a lot of people posting stuff on this message board would have to be put behind bars, pronto – myself included). Once again, where is there actual harm here? I certainly don’t see a real-life victim, that’s for sure.
(Of course, if this inspires a pedophile to go out and rape a kid, the crime would be in the actual rape. But I never bought the argument which says that “the pictures made me do it” and neither did the Court. The movie “Natural Born Killers” did get cleared of having inspired a real-life murder spree, and I guess the same logic would apply here. The moment we accept that a murderer is not responsible for his/her actions, but that the source of inspiration is, all the detective novel writers in the world become guilty of murder. But I digress…)
If matching a picture with a suggestive caption WERE a crime, we’d have a big problem trying to determine at what point a legitimate picture/caption combination BECOMES a crime. Say the kids were in ordinary swimsuits instead of being naked. Would adding a suggestive caption turn these into child porn as well? Say the kids were 16? Say they were 18 but looked 16?
Adding suggestive captions to non-erotic pictures is nothing new anyway: a lot of humor magazines have done that with old movie stills, and that didn’t turn them into X-rated skin mags.
So, to answer your question: no arrest from me. Then again, a lot of people DO get arrested for things that I didn’t even think were crimes, so what do I know? You might have heard about the Canadian 17-year-old who actually got thrown in jail for 36 days when he wrote and read a short story in class about a student who prepares to blow up his school (the story ends before he does). And we know of plenty of cases where parents who had taken non-suggestive pictures of their kid in the bathtub were seriously investigated by the police when they had their film developed at the Photomart. Accordingly, when it comes to “morality” arrests, no one can ever be sure.
Who knows, maybe someone somewhere is frantically investigating who we both are just for having discussed this, and trying to come up with a charge that will stick…
