Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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).
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.