Cite?!?! Sorry but I’ve gotta do it.
Are you saying that if a guy masterbates while looking at a picture of a kid on a box of Life cereal, without editing or altering it at all, he should be locked up? For that matter, are you arguing that pedophiles ought to be arrested wether or not they’ve victimized any children?
It might as well be. If it’s found out that a person is a paedophile, it’s pretty much over for them, regardless of whatever else they may have done. Even a paedophile who has been through prison and supposedly paid for their crimes is still treated the same as one who hasn’t. I’ve always heard that psychology can’t do anything for them besides curb their overall sexual desire chemically.
No, and Yes, respectively.
But why does a single soul know that he created those pix? That’s the question.
Yeah, but finding out someone’s intent only after conducting a search that they didn’t seem to have any right to do in the first place seems like a way of embarrassing and harassing a hell of a lot of perfectly innocent citizens in the course of turning up one guy like this.
And even in his case, we don’t know what his intent was, beyond jacking off.
You can’t pay for your crimes by going to a prison, it is not equivalent - if it was so then you could first go and serve a sentence and then do something awful freely.
Anyway, tastes vary and the society takes a dim view of grown men who go about dreaming about fondling little boys (“Dumbledore: The schoolboys are like Riesling wine. They are best enjoyed young”)
Makes sense. I’m kind of wondering how he came to be on law enforcement’s radar in the first place… but I can see how what you’re saying applies if the case is literally and completely as described.
So, that was a while ago. Anyone know how it turned out?
It seems to me that whoever publicized the contents of that briefcase is responsible for embarrassing and possibly harming the kids, as much as the principal.
It’s at least in part illegal because it encourages people to fantasize about children, which makes it more likely for them to abuse one. The pictures of the Gerber baby face pasted on to a nude adult would presumably encourage the same kind of desires, so it seems to me they should qualify as illegal child p*rn.
Cite? I have heard this said, but never seen anything even vaguely resembling a proper study to back it up.
I have also heard the opposite argued, that it makes people less likely to abuse one if they can satisfy their urges via masturbating to such material. I also have not seen any studies supporting that viewpoint, either.
He was convicted and then successfully appealed in 2010.
Given how tenuous this logic is, how did simple ‘accessing’ ever become a crime. Is a blip on a sever log considered to be contributing to the market?
I think you can argue about whether someone owns rights to their own likeness, but what seems pretty clear to me is that if deemed a legal issue, it would be a civil and not a criminal matter. It would be up to the person affected or their parents to press charges.
Regarding underage p*rn in general, I think there would be some fairly clear ethical issues running that kind of study, so I’m not anxious to see one done anytime soon.
Regarding whether porn in general (involving adults), it’s inconclusive. The common argument is that rape rates in western countries declined contemporaneously with the increase in availability of porn. The counterargument is that lots of other things were going on at the same time- more focus on women’s rights, taking lead out of paint and gasoline, throwing more people in prison, etc.- that may have masked the effect of porn on rape. My friend who’s a professional statistician (and generally on the sex positive, pro-porn liberal end of the spectrum) recently looked at a study from Norway which purports to show the opposite, that porn contributes to rape. They found that areas of Norway which got internet access earlier (and thus greater access to porn) also had higher effects of rape.
LOL!!!
I believe it’s a justifiable defense, if you access computerized kiddy porn, to immediately destroy it and avoid that site in the future. Naturally, that defense is no good if it’s established that you “accidentally” accessed it 100 times a day for the past six months…
(By the way, am I crazy or did some replies get “disappeared” from this thread?)
Not “LOL” but “LOLI.”
Yep a bunch of posts vanished, including some of mine.
Sadly, I know little to nothing about how to perform studies of this sort, so I can’t quite imagine how it would be done, but assuming we’re talking strictly about fictional depictions of children and not real ones, I don’t really see ethical concerns there.
If those findings in the Norway study are shown to be correct within a reasonably small margin of error, then I can see it being extrapolated toward pedophiles as well with pretty decent justification, but without strong evidence I just don’t support criminal penalties on any fictional depictions of children just because some people believe it may make pedophiles more likely to abuse real children. It strikes me too much as a ‘we’ve got to do something!’ attitude because people are so outraged. Granted, there are a lot of laws made that smack of a similar attitude in many fields that I also don’t support.
I haven’t either, but I have indirect anecdotal evidence. Obviously I don’t consume CP, even the kind that doesn’t involve actual child abuse in its production. But I have had experience with pornography that depicts $THING. As a result, I’ve noticed myself regarding $THING as normal and common, despite my belief that $THING is actually a part of only a minority of sexual encounters and actually plays a part in the sex lives of only a relatively small number of people.
Similarly, a consumer of CP might come to regard children as legitimate targets of sexual attraction, or to regard it as possible that children might welcome sexual contact, even if they don’t believe that to be the case, and even if they don’t consume CP that records actual abuse of actual children.
I don’t know if sticking the Gerber Baby’s head on porn stars’ bodies will have that effect. Besides, everyone knows the Gerber Baby grew up to be Marilyn Chambers.
As pornography was becoming more available in our society the social conservative cry was ‘porn will lead to more rape’ it hasn’t. Pornography is more available than ever before and instances of rape have gone down.
Based on that I wouldn’t expect manufactured child pornography to lead to more instances of rape either.
My opinion is the crime committed regarding child pornography is victimizing children. If no children are involved I don’t think it should be a crime. Draw or photoshop dirty pictures all you want. I’ll want nothing to do with you but i don’t support legal action against you.
As I said, “more porn, less rape” is not necessarily an argument against the “porn causes rape” thesis. If porn causes prevalence of rape to increase by 5%, and lead exposure causes it to increase by 10%, then by simultaneously removing lead from paint and gasoline, and deluging society in porn, you can expect an overall decrease of about 5% in the rate of rape. But that doesn’t really mean that the claim “porn causes rape” is untrue, it just means the effct was masked by other factors. Society has changed in many other ways since 1967 or whenever, that might cause the rate of rape to decrese.