"Pedophiles use children for their own self-serving purposes"
I understand the point that you were trying to make with your post, but that's a rather misguided statement. If you think that paedophiles "use children for their own self-serving purposes", you clearly haven't discussed the topic with any paedophiles or other neutral and informed individuals. Most people who are attracted to adults don't hunt adults to "use for their own self-serving purposes", so why do you think that most paedophiles do that? Most people who are attracted to adults obviously try to have sex with people they are attracted to (if both are available, consenting, etc), but for paedophiles there are some very, very good reasons to not act on one's feelings.
As someone who is attracted to children, I know many other people who are attracted to children, both online and offline. Many of the people who I know have friends who are children, but the majority of those people understand the importance of not actually acting upon their feelings towards children (and the others are apparently deterred by potential legal consequences).
Your view of paedophiles is bastardised by the media and the governments whom you are critical of. When everyone accepts the absurd constructed image of "the paedophile", the authoritarian legislators win.
"Children are sexually and emotionally abused. Would you say that it's okay to molest children as long as its just a "hobby?""
Neither I nor any of the respondents suggested that children being abused is "okay"; that would be a ridiculous assertion. My argument was that distribution and availability of child pornography on anonymous networks is extremely unlikely to encourage people to produce it.
I also question your assumption that "child pornography" is necessarily a depiction of children being molested. I don't know of any definition in any part of the word which dictates that an image must show children being molested in order for the image to be considered "child pornography". In the UK, for example, an image is illegal if, in the opinion of the jury, it "offends against the recognised standards of propriety"; the image does not need to meet any other criteria.
"Nobody profits from being a pedophile, but they still hurt children in ways you obviously could never sympathize with."
Paedophilia is a sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children. Most paedophiles don't hurt children for the same reasons that you wouldn't try (nor wish) to hurt adults who you're attracted to. Do you really think that most paedophiles fantasise about children suffering and don't know the difference between fantasy and reality? The alleged "threat" of "paedophiles" is as overblown as the threat of terrorism.
"Child pornography is at worst an unpleasant nuisance."
"This is insane. You seriously don't understand the effects on the victims?"
I think ObsessiveMathsFreak was accounting for context, which is a key issue here.
If you think that child pornography is a depiction of children being molested, do you not feel that those producing the images would molest the children anyway? In cases where children are actually molested and filmed, it is the molestation that is the problem, not the camera.
While everybody is panicking about child pornography, children are being abused by their parents and being killed by armies around the world, while the inherent rights of all people are being systematically stolen by governments in the name of protecting those children.
In the context of all that is done to children and also to adults, ObsessiveMathsFreak's statement is understandable.
If child pornography is being freely distributed amongst anonymous networks of paranoid people, what is the problem?
The vast majority of people who use onion routing are very cautious people, so very few will be stupid enough to leave a trail which could identify them (such as a payment) as doing anything which is seriously controversial or illegal. It would be absurd to suggest that anybody is going to profit from producing child pornography and distributing it through anonymous networks.
If somebody produced child pornography as a "hobby" (instead of for profit, which would result in a swift arrest anyway), it's pretty obvious that the producer would produce the pornography for themself regardless of whether they distributed it. So again, anonymous networks are not contributing to a problem, nor is the alleged availability of child pornography.
The majority of perpetrators of child sexual abuse are the parents of the child. If people genuinely wanted to stop child abuse, they would focus on protecting children from abusive parents. Instead, politicians and police chiefs tend to focus on matters which score politicial points and win votes; parents are not an acceptable target because they constitute a major component of the electorate. Claming to fight child pornography is much easier for politicians and police chiefs, as they will not lose significant support and they can easily claim a victory without any risk of being exposed as liars; after all, who is going to check the evidence?
"The law covers indecent images of children. They must be engaged in, or appearing to suggest, a sexual act."
That is not true at all. An indecent image of a child is a photograph or pseudo-photograph which offends against the recognised standards of propriety*. Figures collected by Garda, the Irish police, showed that 44% of convictions for indecent images did not involve images depicting any suggestion of sexual activity**. Some people have even been successfully prosecuted for possessing images of children which contained no erotic posing; just nudity*.
Don't believe the claim that UK law only criminalises images of child abuse. CEOP, the IWF, the NSPCC and others make a lot of money by untruthfully claiming that they require significant funding to fight a massive industry which systematically abuses children.
The images produced by airport scanners are likely to offend against the recognised standards of propriety and will therefore be illegal under UK law.
"Pictures of naked kids are only a problem if there's a reasonable possibility that they will end up in the wrong hands."
So if somebody masturbates to an image of a child, the child is harmed, but if nobody masturbates to the image, the child is not harmed? In the case of the airport scanners, the feeling of one's privacy being breached will be caused by being forced to walk through the scanner. Harm cannot be caused by the sexual interests of the person who views the scan, which are obviously not known to the child. Photographs of children are only harmful if a child was forced into a situation which made him or her feel uncomfortable, and in such a case, the child will be harmed to the same extent regardless of who views the image.
The moral panic about paedophiles viewing images of children is an adult concern, not a typical child's concern.
Actually, there's no reason to be more "cautious" simply because sexual attraction to children is fairly common. The majority of the population is attracted to adults, however sexual violence against adults is not a regular occurrence (in the context of billions of people) because people have an instinctive aversion to hurting those who they fall in love with, and that doesn't change simply because the subjects of one's fantasies are of a different age or gender. A sexual attraction to and a tendency to care for and love children in a platonic way are therefore not mutually exclusive, and only a very small minority of paedophiles actually "touch" children.
I am sexually attracted to children, but I would never try to have any kind of sexual contact with a child (or anyone else), and I know many other paedophiles (not just on the internet) who have the same policy. The fact that our sexual orientation didn't develop as we developed into adults does not mean that we didn't develop a conscience or an understanding of consequences. Furthermore, the fact that most paedophiles had difficult childhoods means that many of us know what tramautic childhoods are like, and don't wish to have such an effect on other children.
Anyway, most offenders against young children are generally not paedophiles (adults with a primary or exclusive attraction to young children); they are typically non-paedophilic men or women who have suffered trauma as a result of sexual relationships with other adults (which is of course no excuse for their abuse of children). Many child molesters are parents or other close relatives of the children who they abuse, so if a non-abusive parent is confident about the behaviour of their close family, they shouldn't be consumed with fear over the relatively small risk of their child being sexually assaulted.
"Does anyone have statistics on what percentage of the population are pedophiles? I'm willing to bet that it's a pretty low number."
It's not a low number at all, although the occurrence of "paedophilia" of course depends on how you define "paedophilia". I've posted these figures before, but since you asked the question, I'll take the risk of sounding repetitive:
Consistent with previous data (Barbaree & Marshall, 1989; Briere & Runtz, 1989; Fedora et al., 1992; Freund & Watson, 1991), 20 % of the current subjects self-reported pedophilic interest and 26.25 % exhibited penile arousal to pedophilic stimuli that equaled or exceeded arousal to adult stimuli.
[..]
Eighty subjects completed the study. [..] Twenty-six subjects [approximately 33%] exhibited sexual arousal to the child slides that equaled or exceeded their arousal to the adult slides.
[..]....a sizable minority of men in normal populations who have not molested children may exhibit pedophilic fantasies and arousal. In recent studies, 12 to 32% of community college samples of men reported sexual attraction to children (B &R, 1989, H,G & C. 1990) or exhibited penile response to pedophilic stimuli (B&M, 1989, F et al, 1992, F&L, 1989, F & W, 1989). Thus, arousal to pedophilic stimuli does not necessarily correspond with pedophilic behavior (Hall, 1990; Schouten & Simon, 1992), although there are arguments to the contrary (Quinsey & Laws, 1990).
A self-administer questionnaire was given to a sample of 92 female and 91 male public sector child care workers. Results showed a significantly higher percentage of males (15 per cent) than females (4 per cent) expressed a sexual interest in children.
In a sample of nearly 200 university males, 21% reported some sexual attraction to small children, 9% described sexual fantasies involving children, 5% admitted to having masturbated to sexual fantasies of children, and 7% indicated they might have sex with a child if not caught (Briere & Runtz, 1989). Briere and Runtz remarked that "given the probable social undesirability of such admissions, we may hypothesize that the actual rates were even higher" (p. 71). In another sample with 100 male and 180 female undergraduate students, 22% of males and 3% of females reported sexual attraction to a child (Smiljanich & Briere, 1996).
Laboratory researchers have validated physiologically the self-report studies of nonclinical, nonpedophile identified volunteers. In a sample of 80 "normal" volunteers, over 25% self-reported some pedophilic interest or in the plethysmographic phase exhibited penile arousal to a child that equaled or exceeded arousal to an adult (Hall, Hirschman, & Oliver, 1995). In another study, "normal" men's erections to pictures of pubescent and younger girls averaged 70 and 50%, respectively, of their responses to adult females (Quinsey, Steinman, Bergersen, & Holmes, 1975). In a control group of 66 males recruited from hospital staff and the community, 17% showed a penile response that was pedophilic (Fedora et al., 1992). Freund and Watson (1991), studying community male volunteers in a plethysmography classification study, found that19%were misclassified as having an erotic preference for minors. Freund and Costell (1970) studied 48 young Czech soldiers who were shown slides of children between 4 and 10, both male and female, as well as adolescents and adults, male and female. Penile responsivity to female children, ages 4-10, was intermediate to adolescent and adult females and males in o
I suspected that something like this would happen. Recent events suggest that several countries are cooperating to censor controversial content which opposes their use of fear-based government.
Last week, an international operation against a pro-paedophile website/forum led to arrests of people in several countries, including the USA, The Netherlands, Chile, New Zealand and Brazil. One of the men was arrested for merely possessing an illegal weapon and drugs. Some people were raided but not arrested, as they hadn't violated any laws. The FBI claimed that the website was a "child pornography ring", however I know a number of people who posted at the forum, who provide information which debunks the claims of the FBI. According to one person, the website had been online for 8 years, with a membership of over 50,000 people. It had apparently not masked its location (a major web host in The Netherlands), so if it was a child pornography ring, it would presumably have been taken offline years ago. Furthermore, an operation against a real child pornography ring with over 50,000 members would have made international headlines.
In a post on another pro-paedophile forum, I suggested that the closure of the pro-paedophile website was an attempt to test the feasibility of international cooperation in online censorship, in cases where evidence of criminality is limited or fabricated. Very few people believe that paedophiles can ever be innocent, so a pro-paedophile website was an easy preliminary target. I suspected then, and even more so now, that Wikileaks is the ultimate target of international online censorship. No government likes criticism or dissent on the internet, and one shouldn't assume that China is the only country who will crush internet-based dissent.
I agree with your concerns about children's liberty being restricted in the name of "protecting" them. I also agree with your belief that there are some serious issues which are often ignored by the majority; the hysteria over paedophilia allows significant risks to children to remain undetected or trivialised.
"the effect of 0.00001% of the population having a predilection for children is frankly irrelevant compared to dangers such as traffic accidents, non-sexual abuse, violence and murder"
Actually, the percentage of people who are attracted to children is much higher than that, even if the men who like sexually mature 15 year old girls are not included in the statistics. Despite the widespread occurrence of paedophilia within the general population, most paedophiles refrain from abusing children for several reasons:
Most paedophiles have a conscience.
Most paedophiles don't want to be arrested and ostracised by their community (although frankly, many of us feel marginalised even though we haven't offended).
Most paedophiles have suffered bad childhoods and don't wish to create problems for other children.
I'm not just making assumptions based on the fact that I live responsibly with a paedophilic orientation. I know many other paedophiles who are also responsible people.
I have posted this information previously, but it remains relevant:
"Consistent with previous data (Barbaree & Marshall, 1989; Briere & Runtz, 1989; Fedora et al., 1992; Freund & Watson, 1991), 20 % of the current subjects self-reported pedophilic interest and 26.25 % exhibited penile arousal to pedophilic stimuli that equaled or exceeded arousal to adult stimuli.
[..]
Eighty subjects completed the study. [..] Twenty-six subjects [approximately 33%] exhibited sexual arousal to the child slides that equaled or exceeded their arousal to the adult slides.
[..]....a sizable minority of men in normal populations who have not molested children may exhibit pedophilic fantasies and arousal. In recent studies, 12 to 32% of community college samples of men reported sexual attraction to children (B &R, 1989, H,G & C. 1990) or exhibited penile response to pedophilic stimuli (B&M, 1989, F et al, 1992, F&L, 1989, F & W, 1989). Thus, arousal to pedophilic stimuli does not necessarily correspond with pedophilic behavior (Hall, 1990; Schouten & Simon, 1992), although there are arguments to the contrary (Quinsey & Laws, 1990)."
"A self-administer questionnaire was given to a sample of 92 female and 91 male public sector child care workers. Results showed a significantly higher percentage of males (15 per cent) than females (4 per cent) expressed a sexual interest in children."
"In a sample of nearly 200 university males, 21% reported some sexual attraction to small children, 9% described sexual fantasies involving children, 5% admitted to having masturbated to sexual fantasies of children, and 7% indicated they might have sex with a child if not caught (Briere & Runtz, 1989). Briere and Runtz remarked that "given the probable social undesirability of such admissions, we may hypothesize that the actual rates were even higher" (p. 71). In another sample with 100 male and 180 female undergraduate students, 22% of males and 3% of females reported sexual attraction to a child (Smiljanich & Briere, 1996).
Laboratory researchers have validated physiologically the self-report studies of nonclinical, nonpedophile identified volun
"My question is, how is it that the "defenders of children" never have a clue about children?"
The "defenders of children" are not really "defenders of children". Many of the larger children's charities are self-promoting organisations who do very little to help children. They plead for donations, but rather than using those donations to protect children, they use the money to pay for advertising and other marketing activities. The extra donations which they receive as a result of those marketing activities can be used to pay for more advertising, and the cycle of growth continues, with the organisations becoming increasingly profitable, without helping children.
Frank Furedi dicussed this issue a few years ago, in an article at Spiked Online.
"Are 1 in 4 children really sexually abused by the Internet?"
If you ask organisations such as the NCMEC - who know that their funding depends on misinformed hysteria over children's safety - one in five children are sexually abused online. The reality is that the NCMEC and similar organisations use bizarre definitions of child abuse, so if a 13 year boy asks a 13 year old girl to show her breasts, the girl is reported to be a "victim of sexual abuse".
Most studies on this topic are remarkably biased (for financial reasons, or because they have been commissioned by governments) and based upon grossly inappropriate methodologies, so that question will probably never be answered. Consider Bennett Haselton's article article about NCMEC "research" as an example of how such data is biased.
Verizon may be in violation of the first principle of net neutrality by blocking access to controversial websites and justifying such blocks by falsely alleging that such websites are illegal. In 2006, Slashdot discussed how Verizon terminated its service to Epifora (a host for legal pro-paedophile websites, to whom Verizon provided a backbone). According to a friend who uses Verizon as his home ISP, the company is now blocking access to websites formerly hosted by Epifora (albeit intermittently), sometimes by falsely alleging illegal activites and sometimes through a covert redirect.
One particular website (NSFW but nonetheless legal) which is sometimes inaccessible for Verizon users is LifeLine, which provides support for people who are contemplating suicide or other irrational actions as a result of their attraction to children.
Paedophilia is a sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children. There is no offence of "pedophilia" and there is no legal definition. The people who get stung on To Catch a Predator are often charged with crossing state lines to engage in sex with a minor and for attempting to commit the sex offence which they allegedly intended to commit.
Is there no law against harassment in the USA? That would be the most appropriate charge in this case and the maximum sentence would presumably apply.
"No person shall be convicted of any criminal or civil offence solely on the basis of the data contained within any digital storage media within their possession and the recording of any of their network addresses upon any other digital storage medium"
I'll be honest about my motivation for making this suggestion; I am appalled by the fact that people are frequently imprisoned for possessing/accessing child pornography which they did not produce, purchase, trade, or solicit. The argument that viewing child pornography creates an increased demand was formulated in a pre-internet era when people who were determined to view child pornography had to either produce, purchase, trade, or otherwise solicit the material in order to view it. In those cases - and in cases where pornography was abusive rather than just offensive to the sensibilites of the time - I believe that prosecution was justified. In the era of the internet, however, people are able to access child pornography without encouraging production, yet many of those people are traced through access logs, then arrested, convicted and imprisoned.
The suggested clause would not prevent the prosecution of people for purchasing child pornography, as card details would be recorded; these details could be coupled with data from the hard drive to secure a conviction. Anyone who trades child pornography could presumably be convicted, as evidence of trading should be available on another person's property. Anyone who solicits child pornography could likely be caught through their dealings with those who produced or distributed such images.
The suggested clause would also stifle attempts to introduce a local equivalent of MediaSentry et al, as such organisations rely heavily on evidence from users' computers and on the logging of the IP addresses of people who download copyrighted media.
Such a clause would also hinder the introduction of victimless criminal offences which are falsely alleged to discourage the commission of harmful crimes; the British and American legislators have begun to introduce such laws to bypass allegations of creating a police state obsessed with the concept of pre-crime. In the UK, for example, it is illegal for a person to possess information which could be useful to terrorists, on the absurd basis that anyone who wishes to view such material intends to engage in terrorist behaviour.
The reality is that the excuses provided for intrusion into peoples' digital lives are generally an excuse for the state to investigate the private lives of anyone who is presumed to wish to challenge the state, or anyone who may offend the electorate which legislators are forced to represent in order to maintain their seats.
"The right to fantasize, daydream, and drool over violating people and committing crimes? I'm pretty sure I missed that right when reading the constitution."
The right to breathe isn't in the US Constitution either, but people have the right to do it. Lawmakers decide what people can't legally do, however they don't list everything that a person can legally do. The probable reason for the right to fantasise about crime being absent from the Constitution is that its authors couldn't comprehend the existence of a society where people tried to dictate what others could fantasise about.
"Things that depict abuse."
Violence and other abuses are frequently depicted in video games, on TV, etc. The UK media recently showed images of a baby who had been beaten to death by his parents.
Millions of African children die each year from a lack of food and water, however you seem to be more concerned about people who play video games where depictions of non-existent people are harmed. Please stop trying to dress prudism as a genuine concern for childrens' welfare.
"Those who have those urges towards children may feel prodded seeing the depicted acts to try them in the real world."
Research suggests otherwise. People need a harmless and legal outlet for their urges; for teleiophilic adults, options include sex with another consenting adult or adult pornography for those who can't find a partner. For paedophiles, the already short list of harmless and legal outlets is becoming ever shorter due to the moral crusaders who seek to ban everything which they find offensive. Shotacon/lolicon are one of the few outlets which are still legally available in some countries (although cartoons are quickly being criminalised). If you ban everything which may arouse paedophiles, you'll be left with people who simply ignore the law or people who are dangerously bitter, angry and hostile towards society.
Policy advisors would benefit from actually doing research with responsible paedophiles rather than making assumptions about the effects of certain stimuli. Listening to childrens' charities is a huge mistake, as charities have a motivation to make things worse in order to encourage further donations from naive, shallow citizens.
"from the child-porn-world-needs-more-suicides dept."
Several people who I know have been victims of child porn laws, despite not having paid for or traded anything and having therefore not encouraged or facilitated production. Rather than making assumptions about child pornography, you may consider researching the issue. You should also remember that visiting websites which are alleged to contain illegal images - without loading the images (by disabling images in the browser) - is not illegal and can provide significant insight into the issue.
I'd also suggest a critical consideration of the FTC's statements. The war on child pornography is often used as a cover for wars on slightly more popular content which happens to offend the state. I find it rather bizarre that so many people who are critical of the state tend to believe whatever the state and its subsidiaries says about child porn.
"I once put the issue of the etymology of the word paedophile to someone after noticing it's frequent usage on the news in relation to crime stories. The response I got was one of 'well it's the accepted usage, I don't think you can expect people to differentiate'."
Well, many people are lazy and will not "waste" their energy by thinking about issues which they don't feel they have a responsibility to think about. They currently feel that they don't have a responsibility to consider the difference between paedophiles and child molesters because they assume that all paedophiles abuse children and so aren't deserving of their time, but it's difficult to persuade people that most paedophiles don't abuse children because of the existing conflation of terms. It's a vicious cycle.
"I think it has a lot in common with attitudes towards other perversions. Those who regard 'deviant' thought as harmful are often the same people who have their moral boundaries set out for them by their peers."
Ignoring the obvious reasons for anti-paedophile attitudes (such as sensationalist media, governments looking for easy, emotional issues to exploit, etc), I think the issue is also a result of laziness (people don't want to think about everything themselves), as well as a desire to fit in and to be above the bottom of the social tree. People who beat their wives, take advantage of drunk women, or engage in any other unethical behaviour can all say "I may have done x, but at least I'm not y". At the moment, y happens to be "a paedophile". It's somewhat comforting for x to believe that y abuses children (as x can believe that he is even further above the "lowest" members of society), and so the conflation of terms benefits x. People can also fit in with other members of society by uniting with others over a common interest (think about how people support professional sports clubs and hate local rivals). Paedophiles are easy to demonise because we are incredibly difficult to identify, which means that attacking paedophiles has become an easy and "acceptable" way of uniting and fitting in with others. It's no coincidence that the worst bigots have some serious issues of their own.
So yes, the hatred of paedophiles probably does have a lot in common with attitudes towards other "perversions", as everyone needs a group over which they can confirm moral and social superiority.
"Having erotic fantasties about molesting a child is only a small step away from acting out those fantasies."
Are you also one of those people who believes that a man who is attracted to a woman is a "small step" from raping her if she doesn't want to have sex with him? Or do you understand the concept of self-control? It's not difficult.
"a young child does not have the emotional or intellectual maturity to consent to such acts."
I've never argued that a child does. You're setting up a straw man argument here (and showing the ridiculous, presumptious nature of your arguments).
"In a similar way to how the police monitor other suspicious activity to prevent crime, it is completely correct that they monitor known paedophiles."
No. They have no right to harass someone on the basis of their sexuality (which is not an activity); it is unethical, discriminatory, and in some countries (such as the UK) it is also illegal.
"I can see that you don't like this, but obviously, you are biased."
Whereas you are not? I think you're one of the "I was molested by a paedophile so all paedophiles must be child molesters" trolls. You can't apply the behaviour of one "paedophile" (note that most child molesters are not paedophiles) to every other paedophile, especially when 33% of men experience significant sexual arousal to pre-pubescent children.
As for me not liking the popular myths which you rehash, I feel a little more strongly than that. I am going to make my point very publicly, by creating a website which encourages non-offending paedophiles to work with children. The website will include a selection of job/volunteer adverts from other websites, advice on how to avoid having one's sexuality discovered in interviews, and an explanation of why most paedophiles are safe to work around children. No matter how much the misinformed masses will hate me, the controversy should at least attract attention to my arguments.
"The UK government has further detailed plans to track all communications -- mobile phone calls, text messages, email and browser sessions -- in the fight against terrorism, pedophiles and organized crime. The government said it's not looking to see what you're saying, just to whom and when and how."
Like everyone else, paedophiles choose to communicate with like-minded people. This does not mean that we're breaking the law; we discuss sexuality, politics and unrelated topics. We also discuss children (from TV, places of work, etc), but we can have such a discussion without plotting to commit crimes.
While the UK government claim that they will only target people who are suspected of illegal activity, the UK authorities simply cannot be trusted to differentiate between someone who is attracted to children and someone who actually tries to act on that attraction. Despite having been informed of the difference between paedophiles and sex offenders, the Metropolitan Police have refused to explain the meaning of their plans to engage in "proactive disruption of 130 individuals with a sexual interest in children". In other words, their so-called "Paedophile unit" is happy to knowingly and unashamedly harass innocent people.
People who aren't even attracted to children are also at risk from the proposed database, as it's very difficult for most people to know whether they're communicating with a paedophile. Studies have indicated that up to 33% of adult men experience sexual arousal to "pedophilic stimuli" (pre-pubescent children). Few people can connect their friends or colleagues to a penile plethysmograph, and very few people will admit to being attracted to chidlren (for obvious reasons), so this database could put anyone at risk of being investigated.
This extension of the authorities' powers will lead to more innocent people being harassed, as many of the iron tentacles of the UK state cannot be trusted to act in a sane or balanced manner.
"I thought closing down might be more effective than trying to block them, which won't work anyway..."
If a BKA officer closes a child pornography website, he's just doing his job. Whether he closes a child pornography website, arrests a drug dealer, or identifies fraudsters, he gets paid.
If a politician successfully crusades for a blacklist which filters child pornography, he becomes a hero in the eyes of the public. This furthers his career and he makes more money in the future. He may not have the intellectual or political skills to achieve such a high position in other ways.
Politicians have chosen a filter because it's good for their career. The blacklist doesn't really need to work for it to have significant political value; how many voters are actually going to test it?
"Germany's government has passed a draft law for censorship of domains hosting content related to child pornography."
I don't know whether the summary was inaccurate, but the phrase "related to child pornography" is extremely disturbing. I run a website which frequently criticises child pornography laws, but doesn't contain child pornography. Will that be censored too?
Even if child pornography is the only material which is blocked, I still don't agree with the filter. Studies have shown that the majority of prohibited material involving children does not depict sexual abuse. It is also ridiculous to claim that simply accessing freely available child pornography encourages the sexual abuse of children (the music industry certainly doesn't take kindly to people downloading their content without paying, so why should child pornographers?). In Germany, possessing a non-photographic "pornographic" depiction of a character who appears to a virtual child can result in a lengthy prison sentence. Will the filter "protect" cartoon children too?
The methods which the authorities used to push this filter are somehwhat suspect. Germany has, for some time, battled to persuade its citizens to accept internet filtering, however there is a fairly large civil rights community and a strong belief in the freedom of the internet, resulting in much opposition to such censorship. Just a week before the vote on the draft legislation to implement filters, German police coincidentally "broke up" a huge "child pornography ring", allegedly involving 9000 people. This was presumably a sting operation which involved the logging of the IP addresses of every visitor to a police-operated website, followed by raids on the properties linked to every IP address which had been logged. It doesn't matter that only 50 or so people will be convicted, because the authorities have already won....
Anyone who now opposes internet filtering will be reminded of the huge "child pornography ring" and accused of supporting the horrific sexual abuse of children for huge child pornography networks. Nobody can check the police's evidence because that would be illegal and a child would be "revictimised", while anyone who wanted to check would obviously be a paedophile. And so the draft legislation passed.
"it's more "Any kind of filtering is bad" thin end of the wedge type of thing. First it's Child porn, once that's gone we'll move on to the next most horrific thing, until eventually all we have left are things we don't consider bad at the moment."
Actually, they're already starting to use child pornography as a wedge tactic for wider censorship of the internet. A research paper for the Coroners and Justice Bill mentioned that a clause criminalising foreign ISPs who violate UK virtual child porn laws "could potentially provide a test bed for the future development of wider internet regulation."
As soon as you use those words, you have lost your argument in the eyes of the general public. Studies have shown that most illegal images of children do not involve sexual abuse. Data from Garda (linked above) shows that the most serious image possessed in 44% of "child pornography" cases in Ireland (whose child pornography laws mirror those of the UK) decpited no sexual activity whatsoever.
Pictures of naked children, which presumably comprise the majority of blocked images, should not be called "child abuse images". That term is just newspeak designed to justify the vast powers of censorship and funding which are handed to the IWF.
"If several people came forward to say that the IWF had blocked, for example, their photographs of nudist children (which are not illegal), then it might undermine support for the IWF blacklisting system and for their mission in general."
An image is "child porn" in the UK if it offends against "the recognised standards of propriety", even to a minor extent. In other words, images are illegal if they are offensive to the jury (who are considered able to "apply the recognised standards of propriety"), and some juries have found nudist photographs to be illegal. Such juries include those in R v Graham-Kerr (1988), R v Mould (2000) and R v O'Carroll (2003). Those cases are notable for reasons other than the fact that a person was convicted for possessing nudist material and should threfore not be seen as anomolies as regards the nature of the offending material.
As I have said before, the IWF is not solely to blame for blocking access to pages which contain photographs of nude children; the issue is that the UK has a law which criminalises the possession of images which a random group of people find to be morally offensive. On the other hand, if the IWF didn't deliberately mislead people into believing that indecent images are always "child abuse images", people wouldn't be so shocked when they find that photographs of nude children are labelled as child pornography and therefore blocked.
Slashdot Mirror
"Pedophiles use children for their own self-serving purposes"
I understand the point that you were trying to make with your post, but that's a rather misguided statement. If you think that paedophiles "use children for their own self-serving purposes", you clearly haven't discussed the topic with any paedophiles or other neutral and informed individuals. Most people who are attracted to adults don't hunt adults to "use for their own self-serving purposes", so why do you think that most paedophiles do that? Most people who are attracted to adults obviously try to have sex with people they are attracted to (if both are available, consenting, etc), but for paedophiles there are some very, very good reasons to not act on one's feelings.
As someone who is attracted to children, I know many other people who are attracted to children, both online and offline. Many of the people who I know have friends who are children, but the majority of those people understand the importance of not actually acting upon their feelings towards children (and the others are apparently deterred by potential legal consequences).
Your view of paedophiles is bastardised by the media and the governments whom you are critical of. When everyone accepts the absurd constructed image of "the paedophile", the authoritarian legislators win.
"Children are sexually and emotionally abused. Would you say that it's okay to molest children as long as its just a "hobby?""
Neither I nor any of the respondents suggested that children being abused is "okay"; that would be a ridiculous assertion. My argument was that distribution and availability of child pornography on anonymous networks is extremely unlikely to encourage people to produce it.
I also question your assumption that "child pornography" is necessarily a depiction of children being molested. I don't know of any definition in any part of the word which dictates that an image must show children being molested in order for the image to be considered "child pornography". In the UK, for example, an image is illegal if, in the opinion of the jury, it "offends against the recognised standards of propriety"; the image does not need to meet any other criteria.
"Nobody profits from being a pedophile, but they still hurt children in ways you obviously could never sympathize with."
Paedophilia is a sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children. Most paedophiles don't hurt children for the same reasons that you wouldn't try (nor wish) to hurt adults who you're attracted to. Do you really think that most paedophiles fantasise about children suffering and don't know the difference between fantasy and reality? The alleged "threat" of "paedophiles" is as overblown as the threat of terrorism.
I think ObsessiveMathsFreak was accounting for context, which is a key issue here.
If you think that child pornography is a depiction of children being molested, do you not feel that those producing the images would molest the children anyway? In cases where children are actually molested and filmed, it is the molestation that is the problem, not the camera.
While everybody is panicking about child pornography, children are being abused by their parents and being killed by armies around the world, while the inherent rights of all people are being systematically stolen by governments in the name of protecting those children.
In the context of all that is done to children and also to adults, ObsessiveMathsFreak's statement is understandable.
If child pornography is being freely distributed amongst anonymous networks of paranoid people, what is the problem?
The vast majority of people who use onion routing are very cautious people, so very few will be stupid enough to leave a trail which could identify them (such as a payment) as doing anything which is seriously controversial or illegal. It would be absurd to suggest that anybody is going to profit from producing child pornography and distributing it through anonymous networks.
If somebody produced child pornography as a "hobby" (instead of for profit, which would result in a swift arrest anyway), it's pretty obvious that the producer would produce the pornography for themself regardless of whether they distributed it. So again, anonymous networks are not contributing to a problem, nor is the alleged availability of child pornography.
The majority of perpetrators of child sexual abuse are the parents of the child. If people genuinely wanted to stop child abuse, they would focus on protecting children from abusive parents. Instead, politicians and police chiefs tend to focus on matters which score politicial points and win votes; parents are not an acceptable target because they constitute a major component of the electorate. Claming to fight child pornography is much easier for politicians and police chiefs, as they will not lose significant support and they can easily claim a victory without any risk of being exposed as liars; after all, who is going to check the evidence?
"The law covers indecent images of children. They must be engaged in, or appearing to suggest, a sexual act."
That is not true at all. An indecent image of a child is a photograph or pseudo-photograph which offends against the recognised standards of propriety*. Figures collected by Garda, the Irish police, showed that 44% of convictions for indecent images did not involve images depicting any suggestion of sexual activity**. Some people have even been successfully prosecuted for possessing images of children which contained no erotic posing; just nudity*.
Don't believe the claim that UK law only criminalises images of child abuse. CEOP, the IWF, the NSPCC and others make a lot of money by untruthfully claiming that they require significant funding to fight a massive industry which systematically abuses children.
The images produced by airport scanners are likely to offend against the recognised standards of propriety and will therefore be illegal under UK law.
* http://newgon.com/wiki/Indecent_images_of_children#Indecency
** http://newgon.com/wiki/Research:_Child_Pornography#The_Nature_of_Child_Pornography
"Pictures of naked kids are only a problem if there's a reasonable possibility that they will end up in the wrong hands."
So if somebody masturbates to an image of a child, the child is harmed, but if nobody masturbates to the image, the child is not harmed? In the case of the airport scanners, the feeling of one's privacy being breached will be caused by being forced to walk through the scanner. Harm cannot be caused by the sexual interests of the person who views the scan, which are obviously not known to the child. Photographs of children are only harmful if a child was forced into a situation which made him or her feel uncomfortable, and in such a case, the child will be harmed to the same extent regardless of who views the image.
The moral panic about paedophiles viewing images of children is an adult concern, not a typical child's concern.
Actually, there's no reason to be more "cautious" simply because sexual attraction to children is fairly common. The majority of the population is attracted to adults, however sexual violence against adults is not a regular occurrence (in the context of billions of people) because people have an instinctive aversion to hurting those who they fall in love with, and that doesn't change simply because the subjects of one's fantasies are of a different age or gender. A sexual attraction to and a tendency to care for and love children in a platonic way are therefore not mutually exclusive, and only a very small minority of paedophiles actually "touch" children.
I am sexually attracted to children, but I would never try to have any kind of sexual contact with a child (or anyone else), and I know many other paedophiles (not just on the internet) who have the same policy. The fact that our sexual orientation didn't develop as we developed into adults does not mean that we didn't develop a conscience or an understanding of consequences. Furthermore, the fact that most paedophiles had difficult childhoods means that many of us know what tramautic childhoods are like, and don't wish to have such an effect on other children.
Anyway, most offenders against young children are generally not paedophiles (adults with a primary or exclusive attraction to young children); they are typically non-paedophilic men or women who have suffered trauma as a result of sexual relationships with other adults (which is of course no excuse for their abuse of children). Many child molesters are parents or other close relatives of the children who they abuse, so if a non-abusive parent is confident about the behaviour of their close family, they shouldn't be consumed with fear over the relatively small risk of their child being sexually assaulted.
"Does anyone have statistics on what percentage of the population are pedophiles? I'm willing to bet that it's a pretty low number."
It's not a low number at all, although the occurrence of "paedophilia" of course depends on how you define "paedophilia". I've posted these figures before, but since you asked the question, I'll take the risk of sounding repetitive:
From Hall, et al -
From the British Journal of Social Work -
From Is Pedophilia a Mental Disorder? -
I suspected that something like this would happen. Recent events suggest that several countries are cooperating to censor controversial content which opposes their use of fear-based government.
Last week, an international operation against a pro-paedophile website/forum led to arrests of people in several countries, including the USA, The Netherlands, Chile, New Zealand and Brazil. One of the men was arrested for merely possessing an illegal weapon and drugs. Some people were raided but not arrested, as they hadn't violated any laws. The FBI claimed that the website was a "child pornography ring", however I know a number of people who posted at the forum, who provide information which debunks the claims of the FBI. According to one person, the website had been online for 8 years, with a membership of over 50,000 people. It had apparently not masked its location (a major web host in The Netherlands), so if it was a child pornography ring, it would presumably have been taken offline years ago. Furthermore, an operation against a real child pornography ring with over 50,000 members would have made international headlines.
In a post on another pro-paedophile forum, I suggested that the closure of the pro-paedophile website was an attempt to test the feasibility of international cooperation in online censorship, in cases where evidence of criminality is limited or fabricated. Very few people believe that paedophiles can ever be innocent, so a pro-paedophile website was an easy preliminary target. I suspected then, and even more so now, that Wikileaks is the ultimate target of international online censorship. No government likes criticism or dissent on the internet, and one shouldn't assume that China is the only country who will crush internet-based dissent.
I agree with your concerns about children's liberty being restricted in the name of "protecting" them. I also agree with your belief that there are some serious issues which are often ignored by the majority; the hysteria over paedophilia allows significant risks to children to remain undetected or trivialised.
"the effect of 0.00001% of the population having a predilection for children is frankly irrelevant compared to dangers such as traffic accidents, non-sexual abuse, violence and murder"
Actually, the percentage of people who are attracted to children is much higher than that, even if the men who like sexually mature 15 year old girls are not included in the statistics. Despite the widespread occurrence of paedophilia within the general population, most paedophiles refrain from abusing children for several reasons:
I'm not just making assumptions based on the fact that I live responsibly with a paedophilic orientation. I know many other paedophiles who are also responsible people.
I have posted this information previously, but it remains relevant:
From Hall, et al -
From the British Journal of Social Work -
From Is Pedophilia a Mental Disorder? -
"My question is, how is it that the "defenders of children" never have a clue about children?"
The "defenders of children" are not really "defenders of children". Many of the larger children's charities are self-promoting organisations who do very little to help children. They plead for donations, but rather than using those donations to protect children, they use the money to pay for advertising and other marketing activities. The extra donations which they receive as a result of those marketing activities can be used to pay for more advertising, and the cycle of growth continues, with the organisations becoming increasingly profitable, without helping children.
Frank Furedi dicussed this issue a few years ago, in an article at Spiked Online.
"Are 1 in 4 children really sexually abused by the Internet?"
If you ask organisations such as the NCMEC - who know that their funding depends on misinformed hysteria over children's safety - one in five children are sexually abused online. The reality is that the NCMEC and similar organisations use bizarre definitions of child abuse, so if a 13 year boy asks a 13 year old girl to show her breasts, the girl is reported to be a "victim of sexual abuse".
Most studies on this topic are remarkably biased (for financial reasons, or because they have been commissioned by governments) and based upon grossly inappropriate methodologies, so that question will probably never be answered. Consider Bennett Haselton's article article about NCMEC "research" as an example of how such data is biased.
Verizon may be in violation of the first principle of net neutrality by blocking access to controversial websites and justifying such blocks by falsely alleging that such websites are illegal. In 2006, Slashdot discussed how Verizon terminated its service to Epifora (a host for legal pro-paedophile websites, to whom Verizon provided a backbone). According to a friend who uses Verizon as his home ISP, the company is now blocking access to websites formerly hosted by Epifora (albeit intermittently), sometimes by falsely alleging illegal activites and sometimes through a covert redirect.
One particular website (NSFW but nonetheless legal) which is sometimes inaccessible for Verizon users is LifeLine, which provides support for people who are contemplating suicide or other irrational actions as a result of their attraction to children.
Paedophilia is a sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children. There is no offence of "pedophilia" and there is no legal definition. The people who get stung on To Catch a Predator are often charged with crossing state lines to engage in sex with a minor and for attempting to commit the sex offence which they allegedly intended to commit.
Is there no law against harassment in the USA? That would be the most appropriate charge in this case and the maximum sentence would presumably apply.
"No person shall be convicted of any criminal or civil offence solely on the basis of the data contained within any digital storage media within their possession and the recording of any of their network addresses upon any other digital storage medium"
I'll be honest about my motivation for making this suggestion; I am appalled by the fact that people are frequently imprisoned for possessing/accessing child pornography which they did not produce, purchase, trade, or solicit. The argument that viewing child pornography creates an increased demand was formulated in a pre-internet era when people who were determined to view child pornography had to either produce, purchase, trade, or otherwise solicit the material in order to view it. In those cases - and in cases where pornography was abusive rather than just offensive to the sensibilites of the time - I believe that prosecution was justified. In the era of the internet, however, people are able to access child pornography without encouraging production, yet many of those people are traced through access logs, then arrested, convicted and imprisoned.
The suggested clause would not prevent the prosecution of people for purchasing child pornography, as card details would be recorded; these details could be coupled with data from the hard drive to secure a conviction. Anyone who trades child pornography could presumably be convicted, as evidence of trading should be available on another person's property. Anyone who solicits child pornography could likely be caught through their dealings with those who produced or distributed such images.
The suggested clause would also stifle attempts to introduce a local equivalent of MediaSentry et al, as such organisations rely heavily on evidence from users' computers and on the logging of the IP addresses of people who download copyrighted media.
Such a clause would also hinder the introduction of victimless criminal offences which are falsely alleged to discourage the commission of harmful crimes; the British and American legislators have begun to introduce such laws to bypass allegations of creating a police state obsessed with the concept of pre-crime. In the UK, for example, it is illegal for a person to possess information which could be useful to terrorists, on the absurd basis that anyone who wishes to view such material intends to engage in terrorist behaviour.
The reality is that the excuses provided for intrusion into peoples' digital lives are generally an excuse for the state to investigate the private lives of anyone who is presumed to wish to challenge the state, or anyone who may offend the electorate which legislators are forced to represent in order to maintain their seats.
"The right to fantasize, daydream, and drool over violating people and committing crimes? I'm pretty sure I missed that right when reading the constitution."
The right to breathe isn't in the US Constitution either, but people have the right to do it. Lawmakers decide what people can't legally do, however they don't list everything that a person can legally do. The probable reason for the right to fantasise about crime being absent from the Constitution is that its authors couldn't comprehend the existence of a society where people tried to dictate what others could fantasise about.
"Things that depict abuse."
Violence and other abuses are frequently depicted in video games, on TV, etc. The UK media recently showed images of a baby who had been beaten to death by his parents.
Millions of African children die each year from a lack of food and water, however you seem to be more concerned about people who play video games where depictions of non-existent people are harmed. Please stop trying to dress prudism as a genuine concern for childrens' welfare.
"Those who have those urges towards children may feel prodded seeing the depicted acts to try them in the real world."
Research suggests otherwise. People need a harmless and legal outlet for their urges; for teleiophilic adults, options include sex with another consenting adult or adult pornography for those who can't find a partner. For paedophiles, the already short list of harmless and legal outlets is becoming ever shorter due to the moral crusaders who seek to ban everything which they find offensive. Shotacon/lolicon are one of the few outlets which are still legally available in some countries (although cartoons are quickly being criminalised). If you ban everything which may arouse paedophiles, you'll be left with people who simply ignore the law or people who are dangerously bitter, angry and hostile towards society.
Policy advisors would benefit from actually doing research with responsible paedophiles rather than making assumptions about the effects of certain stimuli. Listening to childrens' charities is a huge mistake, as charities have a motivation to make things worse in order to encourage further donations from naive, shallow citizens.
"from the child-porn-world-needs-more-suicides dept."
Several people who I know have been victims of child porn laws, despite not having paid for or traded anything and having therefore not encouraged or facilitated production. Rather than making assumptions about child pornography, you may consider researching the issue. You should also remember that visiting websites which are alleged to contain illegal images - without loading the images (by disabling images in the browser) - is not illegal and can provide significant insight into the issue.
I'd also suggest a critical consideration of the FTC's statements. The war on child pornography is often used as a cover for wars on slightly more popular content which happens to offend the state. I find it rather bizarre that so many people who are critical of the state tend to believe whatever the state and its subsidiaries says about child porn.
"I once put the issue of the etymology of the word paedophile to someone after noticing it's frequent usage on the news in relation to crime stories. The response I got was one of 'well it's the accepted usage, I don't think you can expect people to differentiate'."
Well, many people are lazy and will not "waste" their energy by thinking about issues which they don't feel they have a responsibility to think about. They currently feel that they don't have a responsibility to consider the difference between paedophiles and child molesters because they assume that all paedophiles abuse children and so aren't deserving of their time, but it's difficult to persuade people that most paedophiles don't abuse children because of the existing conflation of terms. It's a vicious cycle.
"I think it has a lot in common with attitudes towards other perversions. Those who regard 'deviant' thought as harmful are often the same people who have their moral boundaries set out for them by their peers."
Ignoring the obvious reasons for anti-paedophile attitudes (such as sensationalist media, governments looking for easy, emotional issues to exploit, etc), I think the issue is also a result of laziness (people don't want to think about everything themselves), as well as a desire to fit in and to be above the bottom of the social tree. People who beat their wives, take advantage of drunk women, or engage in any other unethical behaviour can all say "I may have done x, but at least I'm not y". At the moment, y happens to be "a paedophile". It's somewhat comforting for x to believe that y abuses children (as x can believe that he is even further above the "lowest" members of society), and so the conflation of terms benefits x. People can also fit in with other members of society by uniting with others over a common interest (think about how people support professional sports clubs and hate local rivals). Paedophiles are easy to demonise because we are incredibly difficult to identify, which means that attacking paedophiles has become an easy and "acceptable" way of uniting and fitting in with others. It's no coincidence that the worst bigots have some serious issues of their own.
So yes, the hatred of paedophiles probably does have a lot in common with attitudes towards other "perversions", as everyone needs a group over which they can confirm moral and social superiority.
"Having erotic fantasties about molesting a child is only a small step away from acting out those fantasies."
Are you also one of those people who believes that a man who is attracted to a woman is a "small step" from raping her if she doesn't want to have sex with him? Or do you understand the concept of self-control? It's not difficult.
"a young child does not have the emotional or intellectual maturity to consent to such acts."
I've never argued that a child does. You're setting up a straw man argument here (and showing the ridiculous, presumptious nature of your arguments).
"In a similar way to how the police monitor other suspicious activity to prevent crime, it is completely correct that they monitor known paedophiles."
No. They have no right to harass someone on the basis of their sexuality (which is not an activity); it is unethical, discriminatory, and in some countries (such as the UK) it is also illegal.
"I can see that you don't like this, but obviously, you are biased."
Whereas you are not? I think you're one of the "I was molested by a paedophile so all paedophiles must be child molesters" trolls. You can't apply the behaviour of one "paedophile" (note that most child molesters are not paedophiles) to every other paedophile, especially when 33% of men experience significant sexual arousal to pre-pubescent children.
As for me not liking the popular myths which you rehash, I feel a little more strongly than that. I am going to make my point very publicly, by creating a website which encourages non-offending paedophiles to work with children. The website will include a selection of job/volunteer adverts from other websites, advice on how to avoid having one's sexuality discovered in interviews, and an explanation of why most paedophiles are safe to work around children. No matter how much the misinformed masses will hate me, the controversy should at least attract attention to my arguments.
"The UK government has further detailed plans to track all communications -- mobile phone calls, text messages, email and browser sessions -- in the fight against terrorism, pedophiles and organized crime. The government said it's not looking to see what you're saying, just to whom and when and how."
Like everyone else, paedophiles choose to communicate with like-minded people. This does not mean that we're breaking the law; we discuss sexuality, politics and unrelated topics. We also discuss children (from TV, places of work, etc), but we can have such a discussion without plotting to commit crimes.
While the UK government claim that they will only target people who are suspected of illegal activity, the UK authorities simply cannot be trusted to differentiate between someone who is attracted to children and someone who actually tries to act on that attraction. Despite having been informed of the difference between paedophiles and sex offenders, the Metropolitan Police have refused to explain the meaning of their plans to engage in "proactive disruption of 130 individuals with a sexual interest in children". In other words, their so-called "Paedophile unit" is happy to knowingly and unashamedly harass innocent people.
People who aren't even attracted to children are also at risk from the proposed database, as it's very difficult for most people to know whether they're communicating with a paedophile. Studies have indicated that up to 33% of adult men experience sexual arousal to "pedophilic stimuli" (pre-pubescent children). Few people can connect their friends or colleagues to a penile plethysmograph, and very few people will admit to being attracted to chidlren (for obvious reasons), so this database could put anyone at risk of being investigated.
This extension of the authorities' powers will lead to more innocent people being harassed, as many of the iron tentacles of the UK state cannot be trusted to act in a sane or balanced manner.
"I thought closing down might be more effective than trying to block them, which won't work anyway..."
If a BKA officer closes a child pornography website, he's just doing his job. Whether he closes a child pornography website, arrests a drug dealer, or identifies fraudsters, he gets paid.
If a politician successfully crusades for a blacklist which filters child pornography, he becomes a hero in the eyes of the public. This furthers his career and he makes more money in the future. He may not have the intellectual or political skills to achieve such a high position in other ways.
Politicians have chosen a filter because it's good for their career. The blacklist doesn't really need to work for it to have significant political value; how many voters are actually going to test it?
"Germany's government has passed a draft law for censorship of domains hosting content related to child pornography."
I don't know whether the summary was inaccurate, but the phrase "related to child pornography" is extremely disturbing. I run a website which frequently criticises child pornography laws, but doesn't contain child pornography. Will that be censored too?
Even if child pornography is the only material which is blocked, I still don't agree with the filter. Studies have shown that the majority of prohibited material involving children does not depict sexual abuse. It is also ridiculous to claim that simply accessing freely available child pornography encourages the sexual abuse of children (the music industry certainly doesn't take kindly to people downloading their content without paying, so why should child pornographers?). In Germany, possessing a non-photographic "pornographic" depiction of a character who appears to a virtual child can result in a lengthy prison sentence. Will the filter "protect" cartoon children too?
The methods which the authorities used to push this filter are somehwhat suspect. Germany has, for some time, battled to persuade its citizens to accept internet filtering, however there is a fairly large civil rights community and a strong belief in the freedom of the internet, resulting in much opposition to such censorship. Just a week before the vote on the draft legislation to implement filters, German police coincidentally "broke up" a huge "child pornography ring", allegedly involving 9000 people. This was presumably a sting operation which involved the logging of the IP addresses of every visitor to a police-operated website, followed by raids on the properties linked to every IP address which had been logged. It doesn't matter that only 50 or so people will be convicted, because the authorities have already won....
Anyone who now opposes internet filtering will be reminded of the huge "child pornography ring" and accused of supporting the horrific sexual abuse of children for huge child pornography networks. Nobody can check the police's evidence because that would be illegal and a child would be "revictimised", while anyone who wanted to check would obviously be a paedophile. And so the draft legislation passed.
"it's more "Any kind of filtering is bad"
thin end of the wedge type of thing. First it's Child porn, once that's gone we'll move on to the next most horrific thing, until eventually all we have left are things we don't consider bad at the moment."
Actually, they're already starting to use child pornography as a wedge tactic for wider censorship of the internet. A research paper for the Coroners and Justice Bill mentioned that a clause criminalising foreign ISPs who violate UK virtual child porn laws "could potentially provide a test bed for the future development of wider internet regulation."
As soon as you use those words, you have lost your argument in the eyes of the general public. Studies have shown that most illegal images of children do not involve sexual abuse. Data from Garda (linked above) shows that the most serious image possessed in 44% of "child pornography" cases in Ireland (whose child pornography laws mirror those of the UK) decpited no sexual activity whatsoever.
Pictures of naked children, which presumably comprise the majority of blocked images, should not be called "child abuse images". That term is just newspeak designed to justify the vast powers of censorship and funding which are handed to the IWF.
"If several people came forward to say that the IWF had blocked, for example, their photographs of nudist children (which are not illegal), then it might undermine support for the IWF blacklisting system and for their mission in general."
An image is "child porn" in the UK if it offends against "the recognised standards of propriety", even to a minor extent. In other words, images are illegal if they are offensive to the jury (who are considered able to "apply the recognised standards of propriety"), and some juries have found nudist photographs to be illegal. Such juries include those in R v Graham-Kerr (1988), R v Mould (2000) and R v O'Carroll (2003). Those cases are notable for reasons other than the fact that a person was convicted for possessing nudist material and should threfore not be seen as anomolies as regards the nature of the offending material.
As I have said before, the IWF is not solely to blame for blocking access to pages which contain photographs of nude children; the issue is that the UK has a law which criminalises the possession of images which a random group of people find to be morally offensive. On the other hand, if the IWF didn't deliberately mislead people into believing that indecent images are always "child abuse images", people wouldn't be so shocked when they find that photographs of nude children are labelled as child pornography and therefore blocked.