Me and a coworker were discussing the subscription child model sites that make money by making available suggestive pictures of pre-teen girls, presumably to pedophiles. We both agreed that it was wrong and that no good parent would get their child involved in that, but then conversation turned to naked pictures taking of us as children that could be considered child pornography, which led to an interesting but morally questionable idea.
What if you scanned old pictures of yourself that might be appealing to pedophiles and charged for access to them? I know there are some embarassing pictures of me as a little kid stashed away in some of my parent’s boxes, including one of me when I was 4 or so bent over looking between my legs at the camera, naked. That along with many pictures of me in the bathtub or grabbing myself in my underwear (when I was little I was always playing with myself and there are quite a few pictures that have captured me that way) make me think I might have enough content for a website.
These pictures would not be endangering any real child, as I am 29 years old now, so that argument against them is ruled out. They were not posed nor was I in sexual situations (unless grabbing my crotch counts), so the child in question was not harmed in the production of them, and since the kid is me there are no consent problems.
Could I be prosecuted for having those pictures if I could prove they were myself? Would my parents, who took the pictures, be endangered in any way? Since they are the ones who took them I think they would be the most vulnerable link in this, but I think it would be hard to prove which one of them took the pictures if they were judged criminal.
But I’m pretty sure the consensus last time we had the thread on the children subscription sites, was that any pics of kids USED in a sexual manner became child porn.
It struck me as strange that the intent and actions of the end user could have an effect that made the same pic legal and illegal in different circumstances.
OTOH…
As far as not endangering any other child…
While I’m not convinced there is a cause and effect relationship between child porn and molesting children, I think many people would see a connection there.
So, by you selling pics of yourself as a kid, you could be endangering children today.
Putting up a “Legal” child porn site would probably draw just a teensy little bit of attention.
Even if you were a lawyer and believed that this fight was a valuable fight to beat back unreasonable moral interference in people’s private lives…
You had better be ready for people to complain and for some politician to use you as political fodder. With John Ashcroft at the the helm of the Justice Department, you know they would shut you down, ransack your house looking for more evidence and toss a couple of you in jail before you ever knew what happened.
After all that you could start trying to convince them that you were running a legal site.
When the government wants to be a bully, they really suck and they have all the money to screw with you for as long as they want.
yep, I remember, Stoid started the thread, it got a heated response, Scylla & Erislover got into it, got ugly.
Roughly what I posted there, the disclaimer ‘no child was hurt, therefore, it’s ok’ doesn’t work for me.
I agree that the line between ‘pornography/fantasy …actions IRL’ isn’t necessarily a causation one, however, I have no difficulty figuring out what could go wrong.
Kids get seduced by the peodophiles. Part of the seduction can be ‘see, here’s some pictures of a little boy naked, and grabbing himself, see, it’s natural and normal, so…’.
From what I remember of you as a poster, the liklihood that such a thing **could ** be used to harm real live children would be enough to convince you that you shouldn’t.
Outlawing a picture because it possibly could be used for bad purposes… that sounds an awful lot like outlawing a VCR because it possibly could be used to breach copyright, or outlawing a hammer because it possibly could be used to bash someone’s head in.
IMO, there’s nothing wrong with possessing or selling pictures of yourself, no matter what they depict or when they were taken.
All of those other things have a legitimate, seeable alternative use. You wish to post pics of yourself on the internet, have at it.
the OP asked a question about ‘should’ this be done, describing pics, that the person involved personally was not harmed, therefore it’s ok. However, the design was to be used by peodophiles.
Please take a moment to read the thread that got linked, we went round and round on it, where the parents were having darling daughter pose for pics, targeted (as is the OP) the molesters out there.
To then ignore the **intended ** use by the population and the ultimate use is, IMHO, wrong.
Just a thought:
Couldn’t legally taken pictures of children (like the one every parent takes of their kid playing w/ self in the bath) be posted on the internet (w/ permission of course) as a tool to find pedophiles? - i.e. Couldn’t cookies etc. be used to track repeat visitors & have police perform background checks?
Indeed, but if everything was kosher when the picture was taken, and the picture isn’t used in the commission of a crime (i.e., “look, this boy in the picture has no clothes, why don’t you let me take a picture of you?”), I don’t see anything wrong with that.
I read your post as suggesting that it should be illegal to sell the picture because it potentially could be used to commit a crime, just like a VCR or a hammer. But there’s no reason to believe that it necessarily would be used for such a purpose - most hammers are used to pound nails, most porn is harmless whacking material.
In the previous thread, the pictures were taken by the parents for shady purposes, and sold by the parents. The daughter was unaware that she was posing for pedophiles. In this situation, though, the picture wasn’t taken for any questionable purpose, and it’s being sold by the subject, who knows exactly who it’s targeted at. The only person who could be directly harmed by the production or sale of the picture is the one offering it for sale.
Certainly, if he knows an individual customer intends to use the picture to entice little boys into the back of his van, he has an obligation not to sell to that customer. But I see no grounds to prevent selling it completely simply because some people might commit a crime with it.
I was thinking the site would be marketed as ‘Embarassing Childhood Photos’, with keywords like ‘naked children’. As long as you were careful not to mention sex anywhere on the site I think it would be hard to prosecute.
IANAL, but I believe the applicable legal standard would be the obscenity standard, which says that content cannot appeal purely to a “prurient interest” which lectlaw.com defines as “a morbid, degrading and unhealthy interest in sex, as distinguished from a mere candid interest in sex.” My guess is that the legal powers-that-be could go after you for appealing to a prurient interest, despite your stated intentions. They can go after content showing simulated underage pornography (using little people or adults with childlike features) so I’m sure they could get you for your baby picture scheme.
There seems to be a misconception floating around, especially by Freedom. With some very limited exceptions (medical use, law enforcement), the USE of the photos makes no difference to the law. What the law looks at is the picture itself, not who or why someone is viewing it. And in most states, it’s not the obscenity statute that is used, it’s the particular child pornography statute. Let’s put aside those pictures that are obviously child pornography (graphic sex). In Illinois, if the picture depicts “in any pose, posture or setting involving a lewd exhibition of the unclothed genitals, pubic area, buttocks, or, if such person is female, a fully or partially developed breast of the child or other person.” Although it begs the question, the meaning of the term “lewd exhibition” is a question generally left to the jury. But a child’s nudity does not necessarily equal lewdness.
Likewise, the law isn’t much concerned with whether the kid now says they consent. Badtz Maru at age 29 saying that he consents, or that he wasn’t harmed has no relevance to whether the pictures are illegal.
The situation here is that we, as a society, Don’t Like child porn. We consider it Icky, and we want to ban it. The problem is that “it’s Icky” is not a good enough reason to ban something (else we wouldn’t have Thomas Kinkade); we have that pesky little First Amendment getting in the way. So we have to come up with a Plausible Excuse why it’s not merely Icky, but actually Harmful.
The ban on child porn rests on the (very meritorious) argument that making child porn using actual children is harmful to the child, but that’s just the Plausible Excuse for making it illegal. The real reason it’s illegal is that it’s Icky. And so we have no problem banning other Icky Things that can be roped into the same category even though the Plausible Excuse doesn’t apply to these other Icky Things. All that matters is they look alike. We can always find ways to stretch the Plausible Excuse to apply to them. For example, it is well-regarded that “simulated child porn” using computer generated images, small-looking adults, whatever is “harmful to children”, even though there is no evidence for this position whatsoever, because this position is required in order to stretch the original Plausible Excuse to cover this particular Icky Thing, too.
Amen, sister! Spoken like a true civil libertarian. In addition, prostitution (except for Las Vegas County), gambling (except as sponsored by states, large corporations, or Indigenous Peoples), marijuana, and gay marriage are all illegal for no good reason other than the Ickiness Factor. People, get over your Ick, quick, or the Bill of Rights is going to get the short end of the stick!
It’s illegal because the creation of it harms children in a most evil, cruel, and exploitative way. It’s illegal because children do not have the capacity to protect themselves from physical or psychological abuse at the hands of exploitive and fundamentally evil people. It’s illegal because the possession and distribution of child pornography continues to create the need for more of it, so more is created and more actual, real, children are harmed.
I don’t think KellyM was mounting a defense of child pornography per se, O Danish Prince. I think the point she was making is that one should not outlaw something solely on the basis of its ickiness. Child pornography, in addition to being utterly icky, is illegal for all the reasons you mention. However, the penumbra illegalities that KellyM outlined fall into much more of a grey area. Certainly the government’s interest in protecting children is utterly compelling and easily overrides the free expression interests of overt child pornographer and overt child pornography consumer, but how do the interests measure up in the case of more questionable material?
Some food for thought:
One of the hobbies enjoyed by the Rev. Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice In Wonderland books, was painting prepubescent girls in the nude. This interest was strictly chaste and done with full knowledge of the girls’ parents. Was Carroll guilty of creating child porn, and were the parents guilty of complicity with this act?
There are two big-budget Hollywood movies that feature underage nudity in an erotic context: Zefferelli’s “Romeo and Juliet”, and “American Beauty”. Both films have been viewed by millions of people and have made millions of dollars for their respective studios. Should these works be illegal under the law?
But you don’t get it! That’s not why it’s illegal! It’s illegal because we don’t like it. It makes us (most of us, at least) feel dirty and disgusting (witness your own reaction).
Do you honestly believe that lawmakers banned child porn originally because “it harms children”? Of course not. Child porn has historically banned as a form of obscenity, which is just a fancy word for “Icky”. However, our Constitutional doctrine protecting free speech prevents us from from banning things just because they are Icky, and so the Supreme Court told us, some years ago, that most “obscenity” was in fact not bannable (they called this category of nonbannable obscenity “profanity”). This annoyed a lot of people who really dislike Icky Things, like child porn, and wanted to ban them anyway despite what the Supreme Court had said. They (and their lawyers) thought about it for a while, and realized that, while we can’t just ban child porn for being Icky (because the Supreme Court said so), we can ban it because it harms children. And so they proceeded to ban it, and when the Supreme Court asked how they thought they could get away with that, they said “because it hurts children”. The Supreme Court agreed with this Plausible Excuse (which happens to be true) and let them go ahead and ban it.
And so, you see, the argument about banning it “because it hurts children” is just the excuse. The reason is, and always has been, because it’s Icky. The “harm to children” argument is just an after-the-fact justification to rationalize a gut reaction.