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The Slippery Legal Slope of Cartoon Porn
BenFenner writes "Two out of the three Virginia judges involved with Dwight Whorley's case say cartoon images depicting sex acts with children are considered child pornography in the United States. Judge Paul V. Niemeyer noted the PROTECT Act of 2003, clearly states that 'it is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exists.'"
If pedophiles will get in jail whether they are looking at real CP or drawings depicting children, then why would they bother with fiction? I believe this can only bring a higher consumption of real 3D child porn.
Any idea where the "nude = porn" mentality came from? For thousands of years, there was a difference between nude and porn. Taking a picture of your 1-3 year old kids playing in a bathtub, covered with suds, is not child porn. Yet under most current laws, it could be prosecuted as such.
Where did your point number two disappear? When did a nude photo become "porn" in any sense? Are we going to start burning 12-15th century paintings now, because they "depict child porn"? Destroying Greek and Roman statues? Hell, even the Sistine Chapel might be in trouble. Those cherubs look a pretty young...
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
That's, imo, a hugely insightful question. My answer is also just my opinion.
I believe we lost that point (defining CP as absolutely requiring that a child had to be raped to make it) when we criminalized simple possession. The problem is we didn't know we had lost anything when we did that.
In the context of the time, criminalizing simple possession was obviously the right thing to do. Back then, the only way to get CP was to buy it. If you possessed it, you had to have bought it. If you bought it, you were giving money to people to encourage them to rape children. That's bad, no matter how you look at it.
Nowadays, things have radically changed. Most CP isn't bought; it's found. Most CP isn't made for monetary profit; it's made by kids messing around and by adults who are seeking self-validation for their perversion by producing and releasing the material. Thus, possessing CP no longer encourages it to be made. If we were just now getting around to outlawing it, we probably wouldn't because outlawing possession no longer has any real purpose, i.e. outlawing possession no longer does anything to encourage or discourage production.
In response to this, lots of other justifications have come along to keep possession illegal. There's the grooming argument; pervs can show their porn to little kids, thus convincing the kids that this behavior is normal. There's also the "continuing rape" theory that says children in CP are raped again, mentally, every time someone looks at the CP in which they appear. That second argument is just goofy-stupid and I dismiss it out of hand. The first argument, however, probably has some small (very small) merit and is enough for me to argue that no change in the legal prohibition against possession is necessary.
The problems arise when we accept any of these arguments *separately* from the original requirement that kids have to be raped to produce the stuff. If, for example, we accept that the possession of any material that can be used to groom children for abuse should be legally proscribed, then we are forced to look the other way when the forces of anti-freedom start outlawing anything they claim can be used for that purpose. They can outlaw text, drawings, photos - literally anything - if we allow the argument that anything that has the potential for misuse should be outlawed.
Since we, as a society, have accepted that the definition of CP no longer requires children to be hurt, we have opened the floodgates. Anything that a legislator considers icky enough can be outlawed. Anything that offends a prosecutor can get you arrested. Thus, things that were previously just dismissed as being, at worst, in bad taste can now result in people doing jail time. Take a picture of kids in the bath or your 10-year-old topless on the beach while vacationing in Brazil? You're risking your freedom. Use a computer to make a picture of some non-existent person who's apparently short and undeveloped? Same story. All a prosecutor has to do is convince a jury you got some kind of sick jollies from the process of creation and, wham-bam, you're in jail.
If you want to define an exact point in time, you should probably look to the early-1980s U.S. Supreme Court case where a film showing shirtless boys counting money on a bed while an adult male got dressed in the background was found to be CP. Given the overall context of the case and the implication of the film that the boys had just been paid for sex, the court held that neither nudity or sexual activity was necessary for the harmful-to-kids production of child porn. Really, though, it was a long process to get to this point. Short of Barack's oldest girl making a porn vid with her best friend and releasing it to the world, I can't imagine anything that could awaken the general populace to the notion that you really shouldn't call something child porn unless it involves grown-ups physically abusing little kids.
Any broader definition is an invitation to rampant irrationality. Just like we have now.
No flamebait intended (some hyperbole ahead), but parents are idiots when it comes to their kids, and often kids in general. They will abandon the pursuits and benefits of a free society to "protect the children" at all costs. The problem is nowadays they don't actually know what the real threat is and so they are ripe to be manipulated.
There is nothing wrong with the protective emotion in that nature has selected people with this tendency to survive, as this emotional/instinctive reaction was probably exactly what was needed to actually "protect the children" from an attacking tribe. It's the emotion that causes you to cast aside your fears when something real is attacking but it's now being used to fuel fear of an unknown enemy.
We need to balance our emotional response. Children need protection from real threats. Looking at the child abuse stats from 2006 (most recent on the USDHHS site) only 10% of all child abusers are non-parental (and half of that 10% are relatives, with almost half of what's left after that foster parents/relatives).
If we stick with sexual abuse statistics, parents and relatives still account for 60% of that, with friends, neighbors, daycare providers and other professionals making up 10%. Under 25% of sexual abuse is "other", which I guess is your classic "child predator" that we hear about on the news. I was always lead to believe that parents never hurt their children and we really need to pass laws against the people "out there" who are stalking our kids. The enemy is in the home already.
A purely emotional reaction ignores these facts and might put resources in the wrong places than it would really be needed to help more of the kids getting abused.
Uuuh....You DO realize that a jury is 12 people too stupid to get out of jury duty, right? You may think I'm kidding, but here is a true story that should make you think-My mom served on a jury a few years back. When the trial was over she came in white faced and said to me "Don't you EVER have a jury trial if you get in trouble,you hear me? NOT EVER!" When I asked her what was wrong she explained what happened.
A guy was accused of burning down his business. According to her there was NO evidence that it was arson, even the fire investigator admitted on the stand they weren't really sure what caused the fire. The defense pointed out it would have been insane to burn it, as he didn't have enough insurance to cover his losses and now would most likely lose his home as well. Easy Not Guilty,right? WRONG! My mom ended up having to hang the jury at 11-1 because the jury said, and I quote, "He is Italian and they burn down businesses because they are in the mob and he looks shifty anyway." So this guy would have been in jail for years not because of any actual evidence, but because he looked shifty and he is Italian and mobsters burn down buildings.
So don't bet you life on a jury having a brain ESPECIALLY on a hot button issue like kiddy pr0n. I would love to see the conviction rate because I'm willing to bet that just by having the words kiddy pr0n in the charge you are probably guaranteed a 95% conviction rate. And I don't know about you but I don't want my freedom decided by somebody guessing how old some CARTOON character is. I mean seriously, we are now going to have to look at everything from stick figures to mythological characters and decide whether some judge would view them as "jailbait" or "looking lolita". Does anybody else see the problem? How old is a vampire? Are they the age when they turned or the centuries that they have lived? This is just beyond insanity. I am all for protecting KIDS, but these are not kids. They are splotches of ink and paint on a page. This is just nuts.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.