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Germans Pursuing Kiddie Porn In Second Life
Several readers sent in links to the BBC, which has picked up news of a German investigation into child pornography in Second Life. A German TV station captured images of two avatars, an apparent adult and an apparent child, involved in sexual activity. The station also said they had infiltrated a ring trading real-world child porn in SL. SL creator Linden Labs is cooperating fully with the investigation, they write on their official blog: "Our investigations revealed the users behind these avatars to be a 54-year-old man and a 27-year-old woman. Both were immediately banned from Second Life." The German prosecutor's office hasn't responded to Linden's offer of help in identifying the real-world traders.
RTFA. It's not just that some people were PRETENDING to be children, there were, allegedly, groups in there trading actual illegal material within SL.
Members of this group also offered to put him in touch with traders of real child pornography.
Depressingly, yes. Not only could you model it with your avatars (I'm sure someone out there has a poop script), but you can also pipe movies into the client from anywhere you want.
I read the internet for the articles.
It's legal in the US, but not in Germany.
In Germany photographs/videos of adults who look like children performing sexual activities are considered child porn.
Don't know about other countries.
TFA didn't make it 100% clear but the reason for the investigation is that someone (or more) had set up a place in Second Life where you could pay to enter and see REAL kiddie porn in addition to simulated.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Juliet is 13 years old.
FWIW, sex above the legal age is not "underage" anywhere, by definition.
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make install -not war
Japan has a generally low crime rate, so it is not really that surprising that sexual crime is also low.
The traditional example is Denmark, where there was a statistically significant decrease in rapes after the legalization of pornography. That statistic actually helped getting pornography legalized in other countries, not always with the same effect (so it might have been a fluke).
The way I understand it, the two users were not banned from SL for their avatar hanky panky but for being involved in the exchanges that others have pointed out - things that have a real correlation to real child exploitation. As for the question of whether or not expressing these urges helps control them: I don't believe there's much statistical data, but it seems logical that having a virtual outlet might be an option for some (probably not all) pedophiles. Others might find this stimulating in such a way that it encourages them to act out the fantasy. Who knows? There haven't been many studies done. Still, this incident occurred in a public enough online space that the investigators were able to capture it. If they were able to find and see it, others would be as well. It may be a virtual act between consenting adults, but SL is full of underage people. If people want to engage in graphic virtual sex, they need to do so in a forum that is adults-only, for the same reason that real consenting adult sex is not legal in public.
A Sherman can give you a very nice...edge.
There are a couple importing things to note here:
A major component of this news story was not just that it was virtual child pornography, but that *there was real child pornography also in the mix*. If you haven't played Second Life, you must understand that it is possible to do anything with images in SL. Wallpaper a building. Send it via the equivalent of a Private Message--a "notecard." Wrap it around a 3D object so that it can walk and talk.
A few weeks ago, there was an alarmist article that alleged terrorists might use Second Life to conduct virtual training sessions. It was ludicrous, and still is, to think that terrorist cells, who obviously value anonymity, would use an open and unprotected medium such as Second Life to conduct covert activity.
On the other hand, quite a few of these "ageplayers" feel that they are doing nothing wrong. And while I certainly don't begrudge anyone their sexual fetishes, and acknowledge that in the U.S. (unlike much of the rest of the world) virtual child pornography is legal, I think it is important to note that we're not talking about what you or I would consider "ageplay" in the real world.
Some people have compared this to dressing up your girlfriend like a schoolgirl while you play principal. While it is analogous, it is not by any means comparable to the actual content at hand.
After the Second Life Herald conducted a widely circulated interview with the operator of Jailbait, a couple SL griefers and I went into the sim to try to figure out exactly how we could fuck with it. It was difficult to enter--a highly protected area. When we finally got in, it was somewhat shocking, even by SL standards. There were apparently prepubuscent avatars screaming and crying in baby talk as they were tortured by older figures. There were "adoption agencies", so that the ageplayers--and yes, I will go out on a limb here and say "pedophiles"--could add a pinch of incest to the mix.
The ageplaying in Second Life is *on another level*.
Sure, none of that stuff is unheard of on the Internet.
But on the Internet, it is generally limited to dark, unknown, secret corners: password protected forums, underground Usenet groups, anonymous image boards.
Contrast this to Second Life, which is experienced as an open, freely accessible world, where one can walk around and see anything as it exists. No effort is needed to find these things--they can be found through mere wandering. It is experientially different, even if qualitatively similar, to the most depraved shit the Internet has to offer.
What is worth noting, in my opinion, is not whether or not this is thought crime or harming anyone or worthy of legal action. There are different traditions of jurisprudence--or, to use a term coined by the jurist Jeffrey Rosen, "jurisprurience"--that govern different areas, and we are unlikely to reconcile international obscenity laws when our own are so obfuscated.
Rather, it is interesting to note the widespread media and political reaction to the seedier side of Second Life, which is nothing new, but whose presence was glossed over or ignored in the initial rush to adopt virtual worlds technology based on media hyperbole.
"After the Second Life Herald conducted a widely circulated interview with the operator of Jailbait, a couple SL griefers and I went into the sim to try to figure out exactly how we could fuck with it. It was difficult to enter--a highly protected area. When we finally got in..."
vs.
"Contrast this to Second Life, which is experienced as an open, freely accessible world, where one can walk around and see anything as it exists. No effort is needed to find these things--they can be found through mere wandering."
Something's wrong with your brain.
I wish I had some mod points to give, but instead I'll respond.
I agree that Japan is a good example, but they also have a different view on sex.
Back in the late 90s they had a crazy (still do in some ways) for the school girl look. Many teenage school girls started having side jobs as prostitutes. It got so bad that Prime Minister of Japan made some comments about the practice.
As far as I know it just quieted down on its own. There was no country wide busts.
Contrast that with America...
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
IANAPBISPAU (I am not a psychologist but I studied psychology at university.) Pretty much all universities have their own ethics committee whose job it is to come up with very pedantic rules for how any experiments should be done so that no-one is hurt or distressed. Getting permission from these groups can be incredibly difficult and they will often hold up grad students' research for months.
Going another level up, the APA (American Psychology Association) is the dominant body with regard to psychology (around the world, not just in the USA). They have an ethics committee which set a best practice policy on what other ethics committees should think about.
While I agree that it would be nice to be able to study anything without having to worry about the ethics, the can lead to interesting, yet morally flawed experiments such as the Stanford Prison experiment or the Milgram experiment, which were informative, but quite traumatic for participants. As a rule psychologists don't like to leave people more messed up than when they got them, so they tend to view overly cautious ethics committees as a necessary annoyance.
"If an adult who appears to be a child chooses to be photographed naked, that is perfectly legal. "
actually in may places that is NOT legal.
In fact, if you go someplace to have that developed, they are obligated to notify the authorities.
In the US, that is.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Its a good example and Japan does have a low crime rate but they do have serious problems with sex crimes and sexual harassment that the numbers don't show. For example, the train gropping thing is a problem that I have experienced first hand, and I am a man. I have been grabbed by men and woman on the train in Tokyo. Oh I found it down right hilarious but I'm sure plenty of the women there don't. The funny thing is I have seen Japanese porn where the theme was gropping and then raping women on the train. Its a really common theme and there are even places you can go to pay to act out the scenario yourself. And yes recently there are women only trains because the train gropping is that bad. One reason the numbers are low is because a lot of this stuff is tolerated on a level that would never happen in the US.
My gf's experience is also a good example of the situation in Japan. She was certain science field that was mostly dominated by males. If you were a woman in a lab you were probably the only one. As she started her job in the lab she met the woman who recently quit her position there and she told her she left because she was being harassed by the boss. Eventually my gf gave up the field entirely because her male cowokers were alwasy watching porn in front of her at work, talking dirty to her, touching her etc and this happen in more then one place including the university. It goes without saying that when you do hear about this stuff in Japan's news its a small minority of cases where the person even bothers to say anything.
Child sex crimes are another example. Various regions in Japan have different laws regarding sex with minors but many of them are lower in the US. Regardless of the law there is a big illegal market for underage prostitution. The numbers for sex crimes in Japan mean squat because it has one the largest illegal sex industries in the world and a huge amount of it is tolerated or goes unreported. There's even plenty of cases where some of these more ametuer videos weren't entirely consensual. Even the part of their sex industry that apears legal is almost always run by yakuza who are just as criminal as any gang memeber in the US but are often treated like real corporations, not that there is much of a difference anyways (recroding industry).
Stalking is also a big problem there. Its not a case of there is porn that involves stalking themese so you see less of it in real life. Again, I have experienced this first hand. I have been stalked by several women and when I told people some of them thought it was cute and they were just persistant women, but other foreigners immediately knew what the deal was and had experienced it or seen it themselves. Again it wasn't really a criminal matter and after telling my collegues I was the one who was almost transferred until one of the girls started doing things that were so off the wall they couldn't ignore it. In any event police were never involved and I was told not to involve them. Put that in the stat books.
But... I'm totally for porn and against censorship. Japan is just a really bad example for this argument. I could go on and on with examples because sexually Japan is screwed in almost every way from an unexceptable amount of adults doing audacious stuff in public to declining birthrates. If we were talking about violence and crime in general then you would be right on even if you include the higher rate of suicide and bullying. They don't have the censorship we have, yet their crime rate is much lower and your not as likely to get shot, robbed or approached by crack heads.
Members of this group also offered to put him in touch with traders of real child pornography.
The investigation also uncovered so called "age play" groups that revolve around the abuse of virtual children. So, it looks like there were three issues:
That last one is nonsense, and the first is shaky but maybe defensible as a crime (only because you have no way of even trying to confirm the age of the participants in the first case). I can't imagine any court in the developed world saying that that's any more illegal than an adult putting on a sailor moon costume before jumping in the sack with another adult. As long as the people involved are aware that the other people involved are not REALLY children, there's no harm being done. Harmless kink is harmless kink.
Counterstrike isn't a useful trainer, but games like Area 51, Virtua Cop, and other light gun games are. No link handy right now, but "some guy" (helpful I know) who had never fired real guns before went to the range with his video game skills and managed to do DRAMATICALLY better than people who had never fired video game guns or real guns in the past.
Light gun games are also some of my faves these days :)
I remember seeing an old school gangbanger (super tattooed, older dude in his late forties I'd guess, mexican, spare me the stereotype complaint because A) I was right next to the Flats in Santa Cruz and B) I'm a quarter mexican myself) playing Time Crisis at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk... He was laying the fucking smack down. Guess those skills go both ways...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The reason he cited a 20-30 year old study was because it was virtually the only study ever to come up with the results he wants to hear and to quote.
Zillmann and Jennings Bryant, the authors of the study, are a pair of crusaders for a cause. Their results are what are known as "irreproducible". Other legitimate researchers have tried repeating the work and did NOT come up with the same results. In other words the original results were either:
(A) Good science that was the unfortunate victim of an EXTREME statistical fluke... like a genuine random sample of 40 coins that came up 35 heads and 5 tails.
(B) Deliberately manipulated and fabricated.
(C) An honest attempt at good research by a pair of bad researchers with such extreme drive and motivation to (honestly) prove what they believed, with extremely deeply held biases, with such distorted mental definitions of terms due to those biases, and thatit lead them to overlook errors and distortions in their process and led them to discard "obviously erroneous" data that inconveniently contradicted the "truth" they were trying to prove, and that their peculiar definitions miscategorized things and produced results that were anywhere from outright wrong to horribly misleading.
Whatever the reason, in science "irreproducible" results are deemed absolutely worthless. He's citing 20-30 year old results because they are the the only (irreproducible) results he likes, the only ones that say what he wants.
Zillman came up with the term "callousness towards women", and his work revolves around proving that exposure to porn causes "callousness towards women". According to another researcher, Avedon Carol, Zillmann's concept of "callousness towards women" means: In a sense Zillmann generally got the results he wanted to get because they were generally *right*.... at least according to his peculiar definitions. If callousness towards women means the idea that women might actually enjoy sex, that women might want to have sex as something other than a means to get pregnant or as an unpleasant DUTY and SERVICE to her husband's needs... then yeah... it is quite plausible and even likely that familiarity with porn really does increase "callousness towards women". If callousness towards women means the idea that women are and should be equal and free to do something in life other than (or in addition to) the role of housewife... then yeah... it is quite plausible and even likely that familiarity with porn really does increase "callousness towards women". If callousness towards women means a reduction in homophobia... it is quite plausible and even likely that familiarity with porn really does increase "callousness towards women". If callousness towards women means the idea that marriage is something that men and women choose, rather than an obligation... then yeah... it is quite plausible that familiarity with porn might increase "callousness towards women".
Zillmann and Jennings Bryant are women-belong-in-the-kitchen-barefoot-and-pregnant misogynists who define modern liberation and social equality for women as "misogyny". Yeah, according to their neandertal notions, familiarity with and social acceptance of pornography really is "corrosive to society".... corrosive to the "family values" misogynistic society that they honestly believe to be right and good.
That is the context around (and explaining) the results that our Stormin' Mormon crusader is so eagerly trolling* back 20-30 years to cite.
(*) Note that I am using "trolling" as in the fishing technique of dragging an giant net through a vast quantity of ocean to catch what your looking for, as opposed to using trolling in the the internet-troll sense.
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we see increasing numbers of child attackers
Actually according to official US Federal crime statistics, the youth violent crime rate has gone MASSIVELY DOWN in the last twenty-odd years.
The "increase in youth violence" is a straw man being held up by social crusader causes, and an illusion being created by media coverage. Every once in a while the mass media latches onto and hypes up the latest shocking event. Out of a country of 300 million people there's some nutcase or some evil-fuck somewhere doing something, each and every day, and there always have been. Two kids go psycho at Columbine and people start screaming that society to going to hell. It's the Leave-it-to-Beaver mentality... that the world was all shiny and better back in the good old days... that bad things didn't happen back in the good old days.
The biggest difference was that "back in the good old days" we had 5-to-7 TV stations if you were lucky, most of them ran a grand total of an hour or two of news a day, and news wasn't so much the sensationalist entertainment medium it so often is now. We didn't have three or four or five dedicated 24-hour entertainment-news channels competing to overhype the select story of the day. Scott and Lacey Petterson.... umpteen hundred hours of news coverage on one stupid arbirary murder... just one random over hyped murder out of the daily stream of un-newsworthy anonymous murders there always have been. Umpteen hundred hours of news coverage on the dissapearance of Natalee Holloway... just one random over hyped dissapearance out of the daily stream of un-newsworthy dissapearances there always have been.
Umpteen hundred hours of news coverage on Columbine... just one random over hyped mass rampage out of the... ok not DAILY stream of mass rampages... but the at least yearly stream of mass rampages that have always happened. And in entertainment-news, any youth/school violence item anywhere in the country gets to ride on the coattails of Columbine and get hyped up newstainment as well.
If you ignore the news and look at the actual crime statistics, total youth violence has gone way down in the last two decades or so.
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Oh, and back to the porn study subject... the reason Stormin' Mormon is citing that decades old study is because it is almost the only study giving the results he wants to hear and wants to cite. With just a few minutes of Googling it turns out that other researchers in the field have found the results to be.... anomalous... and non-reproducible. In other words these restuls do NOT show up when other people try doing the same sort of study. The people who did this study were.... lets say they were highly motivated. A pair of women-belong-in-the-kitchen-barefoot-and-pregnant crusaders.
From their point of view individual familiarity with porn and general social acceptance of porn is damaging for all sorts of... interesting.... reasons. The idea that women might WANT to have sex other than a means to obtain a child or as wifely duty to satisfy their husband's needs. The idea that women may want to chose something in life other than (or in addition to) a role as housewife, and that that is OK. The idea that marriage is something men and women choose, rather than an obligation. And... horror of horrors... the terribly socially destructive idea that individuals who are familiar with porn... and a society that accepts porn... might be less homophobic.
By that standard, yeah... I would generally agree that individual familiarity with porn and and social acceptance of porn probably does cause or correlate with most if not all of those things. That religious and social oppression and criminalizing porn would cause or correlate with the opposite of those things.
So yeah, I agree porn really is harmful... if that is how someone defines harm. Chuckle.
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