For a couple of years now, child pornography has been one of the prime causes of hightech scare, and a center of frantic attention in the tabloid press. It is being touted as a product of the online age, a widespread menace with no end in sight, and an example of profound moral corruption not easily surpassable. Harsh measures are being called for to stop the exploitation of innocent children, and to help end the spread of the abomination of child sexual abuse. Automated filtering of online content, plain old police work, censorship, technological surveillance and liberal use of informants are just a few of the ways people intend to employ to curb kiddie porn. Control is the word of the day.
Once again I have to disagree with the above trends. From my point of
view, child pornography
is not very well defined, much of the
criminalized activity surrounding its production and consumption are
surprisingly harmless compared to the strict sanctions they carry, the
economics of child pornography trade have not been properly considered
by many, and, finally, there is a lot of kiddie porn which cannot be
shown to adversely impact anyone, including the people appearing in
the material.
While my views on kiddie porn are certainly not among the most popular, I
too strongly agree with the idea that society is obligated to protect
its weaker members. If a child really is being abused, I’m all
for incarceration and strict punishment of the abuser. However, the
concept of abuse
is becoming frighteningly broad these days,
and I feel that much of the legislation related to child pornography
and pedophilia is now driven more by ignorance and paranoia than
reason and prudence.
The first and worst of the problems related to kiddie porn is that nobody seems to have considered the economics of child pornography trade, even when the whole practice of criminalized pornography is founded on principles which are basically economic in nature.
For some weird reason, people seem to think that child pornography itself is a problem. But that clearly isn’t the case. If people are to get off of images of children, it is difficult to see what is wrong with that in itself. After all, most ordinary people derive a healthy deal of pleasure from looking at and passing around each other’s family albums. That a pedophile gets something more from looking at children should in itself be quite harmless. The same goes for distribution, since efficient distribution only serves to better connect supply with demand, making the most of what production there is. To justify an attack on distribution, possession or consumption of kiddie porn we then need to show that such an attack reflects favorably on production. The problems with such reasoning is what we’ll now concentrate on.
Two main strategies are used to discourage the production of kiddie porn. The first is supply side regulation, which means that production carries a stiff penalty. That, it is thought, will raise the cost of production high enough to make most of it unprofitable. If we think that all kiddie porn is bad, this strategy is the usual one employed in any legislative system, and is to a first approximation a good idea.
For now, it will have to suffice to say that even production of kiddie porn is not really easy to control. All you need is children and a camera, neither of which is out of reach of a pornographer intent on breaking the law. Production and distribution are relatively cheap as well, unless one is to get caught. There are countries where this is not likely. In fact, there are still countries where child pornography can be legally produced. The only real disincentive becomes the risk of getting caught, and in a global economy with far more serious issues, the relatively limited black market for child pornography isn’t likely to receive enough attention from law enforcement to make the risk very high. For the time being we will assume that supply‐side control is the way to go, though.
Now, the ban on possession of child pornography is an attempt at demand reduction, a strategy where an undesirable third party effect caused by the production or consumption of some commodity is mitigated by reducing the demand for the commodity, presumably choking the market and killing the externality. Demand reduction is the raison d’ȇtre of any ban on possession or distribution of child pornography. However, unlike in the case of the drug prohibition, the externality we’re now trying to control is on the supply side. This means that in the case of child pornography, demand reduction is considerably more fragile, difficult to implement efficiently, and, in case of a commodity which is cheap to produce or replicate, carries a high price both in terms of the level of enforcement required and the structural change it forces on the market being regulated.
The first obvious question is, given the strict controls on production of child pornography, can demand reduction really help further? As child pornographers generally have victims with concerned families, need equipment, have their personal history, often with at least some documentation on their aberrant ways, and have to operate their industry in the surrounding society, they tend to leave a trail of evidence. Enforcement has at least some chance of operating. But the consumer really just downloads something from the Internet, at best in the confines of strict, guaranteed anonymity. If it is really true that even the producer cannot be efficiently controlled, why should we think that enforcement against the consumer would really work any better? The same goes for distributors, with the distinction that they have to have resources in order to distribute, like Web sites, and those resources can often be traced.
Now, about enforcement itself, it is not entirely correct to view its effects on any part of the supply–demand chain as equivalent to a true reduction in market supply/demand. We will now probe questions related to this common misunderstanding a bit.
Remember that supply side regulation necessarily pushes the price of the product beyond the capability of most buyers. This means that only those wealthy enough to purchase the higher priced product and indeed willing to do so will be present after supply side regulation is put into place. I.e. only the most motivated of buyers will remain, and the market will become considerably slimmer. This means both that the buyers are now few are far between, so that they are difficult efficiently to find and punish, and that the mean price of evading demand side regulation will be lower in proportion. Essentially what we’ve discovered is that the marginal benefit of both supply and demand is described by a joint, rapidly decaying function. Demand reduction no longer produces the benefits it would if the supply side was not regulated. We already questioned whether demand can indeed be efficiently lowered if supply cannot be. This point is different in that it concerns relative, not absolute cost. Taken together, we are lead to suspect that the cost of demand reduction is high even as such, is made even higher in the presence of supply‐side regulation, and suffers from a severe case of diminishing returns.
Next, supply side regulation causes us to generate an economy functionally indistinguishable from the theoretical monopoly/oligopoly one. There is less supply than demand, and the price is higher. In effect we cause profit that would otherwise have been evenly distributed over a large number of producers to accumulate to just a few. This increased profit in effect makes it possible for each of the producers to cope with greater risks, and puts in place a sort of extraneous potential barrier to attacking them directly. Strong drug cartels are a primary example: in effect we may end up generating a small number of adversaries with vastly more power than they would ever have in a free market. It is not only that the resistence of many smaller suppliers is gathered into one place, but we have an additional multiplier in place because of the increased profits. This has serious implications on the extent to which we can carry supply side regulation without running into the risk of generating an adversary beyond all control.
But by far the oddest consequence is that, as law enforcement practices aim at completely abolishing kiddie porn, the police commonly destroy any illicit material they find. This creates a loss term dependent on the efficiency of the strategy, and decreases the efficiency of the distribution chain. In an ideal traditional market, this would mean that the price goes up, lowering demand. However, it does not mean that the production will diminish. The result is in fact quite the contrary: the supply will go up to compensate for the loss, and the cost will be transfered to the buyer in the form of higher prices. A part of the pornography is now produced only to be thrown away by the police, and in fact some of the money the buyers put into the market will end up paying for the material destroyed by the police. We’ve come a full circle, substituting a part of the original consumers with law enforcement officials, paid for by the original buyers. I consider this highly ironic.
Summa summarum, we end up with all the trouble of a high risk, high profit market so familiar to those knowledgeable about the drug war. We also pour a lot of resources into control, with only part of it going to the real problem, production.
So, destroying the commodity creates demand without paying for the product. In a market for physical goods, we could now argue that the price can be pushed high enough to make production unprofitable. But when we talk about information on a black market, this applies only partially.
There are two separate sides to producing information, with completely different economics. The first is producing originals, the second copying those for the mass market. Both obey roughly traditional economics, and in the presence of strong copyright protection can be expected to be tied together to form something like a traditional market. In a black market, this does not hold, and copying becomes completely separate from production. Until now we have assumed that production takes the form of traditional markets, where a good can only be sold to two buyers if we put roughly twice the effort into its production. Making copies is practically free, nowadays, and so it must be analyzed separately.
The most important effect of copying is that it makes production almost completely inelastic as far as destroying the product en route is concerned. At the very least the producer always retains a copy of the product, and without destroying all copies of the good, an arbitrary numbers of copies can always be produced at essentially zero cost to replace those lost. Furthermore, each buyer now has the capacity of becoming a producer, since the original information in no significant way differs from what the buyers get. Data is promulgated by people, only to surface at a later date and spread all over the Internet. This makes black markets in information in a sense viral, and makes distribution absolutely impossible to control. Pouring resources into that is essentially useless.
We must also remember that child pornography trade is largely based on a gift‐economy, as opposed to a one operating on cash reward, and is structured so that the producers are usually consumers as well. This means that even in the presence of no external, observable demand, some child pornographers will continue to operate. As the marginal cost of distributing the product of this internally motivated activity is low, if not nonexistent, the pornographers can get sufficient reward even from a very limited audience. It is very difficult to achieve a sufficient reduction in demand to deprive a pedophile totally of the appreciation of his peers.
Then there is the fact that kiddie porn is distributed on a black market, where the stuff itself serves as the currency. Swapping is a common way to add to one’s collection. Earlier examples of this sort of trade in information include pirated software, hacking information and credit card numbers. All of the prior examples suggest that stopping the trade or lowering the reward is very difficult. An item‐for‐item economy is one in which those who can produce are king, and everybody else must compensate by efficiency in distribution. This means that the distribution chains become very efficient, extensive and extremely difficult to unentangle or break.
The gift‐economy aspect combined with the fact that barter economies need not be involved with the financial system at all make tracing black markets in information considerably more difficult than the traditional kind.
Finally, we have the problem with black markets in general—they tend to mesh. Child pornography is likely to become connected first with pirate software, ripped A/V material and other kinds of currently illegal information, then other widespread black markets, like the drug trade, and finally with real child sex business and contemporary slave trade. The most worrysome part, of course, is the connection to the relatively benign trade in someone else’s intellectual property: if kiddie porn becomes a valid payment in the gift‐for‐gift exchange of e.g. software, a huge population of previously harmless software traders will now be exposed to the stuff. This sort of connection would likely mean enhanced distribution to, marketing‐of‐sorts of, and desensitization of the general populus to, kiddie porn. One wouldn’t like it much better if the testosterone overloaded turf battles and routine gundowns of drug trade were to cross over to the child pornography business. In general, causing a criminal subculture to arise is just begging for the people and ideas around it to mix with those of more established black markets.
A normal market can be understood via what you’d find in an economics text book, while black markets modify the rules considerably. As a matter of fact, I can’t be sure I haven’t neglected some crucial aspect of black markets, above, since no comprehensive works on black market economies exist. This all boils down to a single assertion: one should never push the market itself. If you know you can do it efficiently, you can go after the people who cause the immediate damage. In the case of kiddie porn that would be the producers. But as for the rest of those involved, you had better take it easy lest the market do the dim on you.
Up till now we’ve taken at face value the ideas that production of kiddie porn is harmful, that it should be controlled, and that the feat can indeed be accomplished. But like most things, even this simple statement does not come without qualifications.
Many people who read the tabloids do not really know what child pornography is all about. Most have never seen it, and not many are prepared to go through the mental exercise of imagining what it ought to be like. But the real killer is, a sizable portion of what is today classified as KP really isn’t, at least according to common sense.
First of all, even the strict definition of child pornography covers
material that common sense suggests it shouldn’t:
KP is defined as
pornography that involves models under the legal age of consent. But
do you actually call 17‐year olds children? How about people at age
15? Or 12? Likely not. They’re prepubescent, pubescent, teenage, young
or something alike, but not really children in the emphatic sense
people use the term when speaking about
KP. The outraged
public easily forgets that models in their puberty can actually be expected
to know perfectly what is happening, do not suffer considerably from
the imbalance of power so often associated with the production of
KP, are
able to participate voluntarily (though don’t think too extensively
about the possible consequences), can be sexually active instead of
innocent
, certainly are built to engage in sexual behavior and,
in my mind, should have the right to consent for themselves. And why
shouldn’t they? They could have babies should they choose to. I think
it is quite weird that depicting sexual behavior in 15‐year olds is
criminal even while that is pretty close to the age when the average
Western person nowadays gets deflowered.
In fact it is a disturbing thought that a good portion of the audience
for this kind of KP
may in fact be people of age comparable
to that of the models. If this is in fact the case, we might argue
that we are witnessing a breakdown in the sexual upbringing of our
children. After all, if pubescent people are not provided with real
outlets for their sexuality, or possibilities to explore it, what do
they turn to? The unreal. Pornography. Then it would be absurd to think
that criteria other than sexual maturity should be used to determine
whether people can participate in its production. Otherwise we end up
with porn suggesting to young people that the only permissible object
of their sexuality is people significantly older than them, and in a
position to go to prison if the attraction were to ever come to
fruition.
It seems likely to me that pornography as a whole paints a rather realistic picture of people’s sexual fantasies, and that the representation of different age groups in porn closely mirrors the sexual preference of the audience. It is to be expected, then, that no abrupt jumps would be seen if a histogram of model ages were to be drawn. I think that the majority of what is called child pornography today is actually pictures of people in their puberty, and that in this case we should not refer to the material as child pornography, or stigmatize it. I firmly believe that people capable of some activity should be allowed to judge for themselves, which, applied to pornography, would mean both the ready availability of, and the possibility of consenting to be used in, it.
But there is likely a line in here, somewhere, isn’t there? Should we classify any images taken of a child under some specific age as child abuse, regardless of consent? I don’t think so.
Although I’m not an expert, I daresay the majority of current
KP
involving children proper is actually just pictures of them, some of
them not unlike what you’d find in a family album. Some naked, true.
But mostly not the kind of abhorrent brutality one would expect after
reading the tabloids. One might say this is the
KP equivalent of
fashion magazines, gorgeous ad personalities and, perhaps, depictions
of lingerie. The children might not have clothes on, but so what?
People aren’t born that way. When we talk about this class of child
pornography
, the problem is really in our
interpretation—we see that there are pictures of
children, then we see that someone is getting off of them, we
recognize that this is not normal
, perceive the mere idea as
perverse and frightening, and go on to call the material pornographic.
This is not unlike the discussion that surrounds ordinary porn, as the
stigma of illicit sexual gratification is projected on a lot of
harmless material there too. This weird way of looking at things is
best exemplified by the claim that while some of the victims
of
child pornographers are just smiling and playing in the pictures, they
will have suffered some irreparable emotional damage
. To me it
seems uncontestable that the problem is with the reader, not the
writer.
The next interesting misunderstanding is the concept of sexually
touching someone
, and the role it has in the pedophile scare. In
the US, it seems
just about any physical contact between children and adults can be seen
as being sexual in nature. The social‐worker sorta rhetoric equates
touching of this sort with physical harm. Children are taught that some
areas of their body are unlike others, and should be private
,
inviolable or sacred
. Touching those parts is bad touch
and it hurts
. Then the children are asked if they’ve ever been
hurt
like that. The reasoning behind this sort of indoctrination
is well‐intentioned, and indeed people need to understand the right to
their own body from the earliest possible age. Nothing is as important
as grasping the fundamentals of self‐government, and the right to
physical safety is certainly the basis of all of it. But the actual,
current implementation of the intuition is, at least from my viewpoint,
deeply contrived.
For instance, how come a distinction is made between what is perceived
to be the erogeneous zones, and the rest of the body? Why is
all touching in these areas equated with harm, while this
probably contradicts the child’s own experience of the reality of
things? This kind of hypersensitivity surrounding children and
sexuality not only harms children’s development, but it places the
adults in the impossible position of not being able to touch children
at all. It also delegates ridiculous influence to children which soon
learn to use the newly found tool of intimidation to their advantage.
No candy? Mommy hurt
me.
You might ask, why rant about our hyper‐sensitivity? It might be a problem in our culture, but what does it have to do with child pornography? Well, if you grant the premise that children can engage in a lot of pleasurable physical activity by themselves, and with more mature people, and even enjoy mild erogeneous activities, you can suddenly liken perhaps 90% of child pornography to what is shown, again, in a family album. Produced with (the utmost) concern for the well‐being of the subjects, I cannot see the why something like this could not be regarded as normal and, indeed, moral.
But then we have the properly sexual touch, one which is calculated by one of the participants to be perceived as sexual by one or both of the participants, or is otherwise likely to be so. Isn’t this always abuse?
Not likely. After all, not all sexual touch is abuse. It might be that no sexual connotation is intended, it might be that the child initiates the contact (especially if the other participant is a child too), it might be that the child simply likes what is happening. Sound weird? Think about your own childhood. It is very likely that you’ll recall at least some pleasurable thoughts and games that you’ve later identified as having a sexual component. In fact, studies in sexual psychology confirm that children are surprisingly sexual creatures, and aren’t really as inactive or virginal as one might think. Even while I don’t seriously subscribe to the radical views about children’s sexuality advanced by organizations the like of NAMBLA, I still think that the question of whether there is abuse isn’t as simple as just asking if there was sexual activity with a child.
In light of the above, we must then question the origin of the harm
done. Is it really so that any contact between children and adults
with sexual overtones necessarily damages the child? Or is it that
people have been lead to believe so, and most of the damage actually
comes from how the surrounding society reacts to news of child
abuse
. In some cases I’ve read about I tend to believe the latter.
Teaching a child that he is the victim of a terrible crime when he has
only been improperly touched once is sure to put him in the position
of the victim. The reaction of the child’s schoolmates, their parents,
the relatives of the perpetrator, the media and the relevant
authorities also creates a large part of the problem when they morally
condemn what has happened, instead of first asking the child what
happened and how it felt. The child will know whether bad
things happened or if it was just harmless fun, quite without
persuasion, support groups, or the abuse‐Newspeak pedobusters are
so fond of.
Finally, there are the real victims. Even under the most liberal of interpretations, there are still quite a number of these, and their suffering must never be overlooked. Being abused is no laughing matter, recovering from it, when possible in the first place, takes a lot of time and support, and there is absolutely no excuse for such a thing ever happening. But even here some qualifications must be made.
For instance, it is often thought that sexual abuse inflicts irreparable damage for which the harshest of punishments are justifiable. But this isn’t really true. There is little evidence that most victims of child abuse could not indeed fully recover, just as people recover from assaults, illnesses, poverty, and so on. Even in quite serious cases, complete recovery is not unheard‐of. Often we don’t have enduring physical damage, either. When we remember that upon being assaulted, some adults even have to endure permanent handicaps, and still the retribution exacted by the society rarely rises to the level often demanded for pedophiles, we see that something is terribly wrong with the way people think about what can be properly labelled as child sexual abuse. What I’m saying is, instead of assuming there is irreparable damage, each case should be considered on its merits, and the atonement should be chosen to fit the crime. In some cases this means foregoing punishment altogether, in some it means exacting the highest of prices possible.
The point is that while producing dogs–fucking–babies–dead‐sorta KP is the kind of deed for which a pedophile should expect considerable pain, only a very small proportion of child pornography ever goes that far. The makers of the majority of KP simply do not deserve to be sentenced in excess of what they would get for a physical assault on an adult, and as the more blatant forms of child pornography often described in news comprise only a minuscule portion of the total volume of KP out there, they should not be thought of as the norm by legislators. In particular, mandatory reporting provisions and the like, which are only used in case of sex offenders, are a gross violation of civil rights, and should so be abolished.
So far all I’ve managed to do is raise some objections to the way people currently conceive the issue of child pornography. No ideas on how to make things better have as yet surfaced. Next I intend to propose a couple of radical ways to remedy the problem.
Suppose we have some vile, patently objectionable kiddie porn. We see that a child has been hurt, the perpetrator is out there and the child is perhaps missing. What should we do?
First I think we should acknowledge that unless the image surfaces somewhere soon enough, we have a problem. If we—the society at large— do not learn of the incident, no control can be exerted on it. Hence, adequate facilities for reporting the situation should be present, and accessible. Making distribution of kiddie porn easy is important, since the wider the distribution of an image, the more likely it becomes that a morally sound person will get access to it, and report the offense. Telling you have some kiddie porn shouldn’t be a risk, either, since otherwise the child and/or the abuser might never be found in time. In total, distribution and possession of child pornography should be legal, and guaranteeably anonymous reports ought to be possible.
So, we have an image constituting an infraction, and a report. The reporter is anonymous, and shouldn’t be punished. But how about the porn? Should we archive it? Burn it? Weep over it? Analyze it carefully to catch the people responsible for its production?
I claim the last two, but no more. The harm has already been done. Nothing is going to repair it. Now the best that can be done is to make use of the material, and try to ensure it never happens again. I propose it should be publicly archived, possibly at the expense of whatever organization the society in question relies on to control crime and disorganization. In effect, the image should go to Finnish National Archive of Exclusive Hard Core Child Pornography, or something alike, carefully sieved, neatly categorized, backed up, and connected to sufficient bandwidth to be viewed online at will.
The rationale is really simple: we started out with a demand reduction policy, and found out that it wasn’t working quite as well as it should have. The above idea is a simple extension of the principle, only this time around we employ what we have learned above.
Recently I saw a report about a bust where the people apprehended were found to have a collection of some 1000000 KP images. I would say that is plenty enough for anyone to have, and that it takes a fair while even to browse through such a collection. Years at the very least. As that is just the collection of one ring of pedophiles, routinely archiving every picture ever seen by the police would probably comprise a collection of tens of millions of pictures. If you have that available for free online, you never need to go elsewhere. You never need to participate in a Wonderland Club, you never need to produce your own. If you feel compelled to swap, nobody will ever notice if you just swap from the archive. (This can even be facilitated by incorporating functionality to make it difficult to relate an image to its origin: just introduce perceptually insignificant modifications upon download.) The point is, this sort of stunt would saturate the market very cheaply, and for good. This is the kind of real demand reduction that drives down production, and we get it independent of any change that might happen in consumption.
Putting known kiddie porn up for grabs would also ease most of the concerns listed above, and make for a much easier to control, overground market for KP. It would encourage people to report new violations, and would make checking for newly created (hence, needing some real police work) images much easier. It would give at least a cursory form of control over the consumers, as their visits to the site could be logged. It would kill most of the economic, gift‐economic, and item‐for‐item trade incentives one can imagine. It would decouple the harmful activity with regard to KP from the harmless, and would facilitate treatment and research of pedophilia, child abuse and also the more extreme of their counter‐movements, which are beginning to seem pathological in their own right. Such a move would also make the life a lot easier for many pedophiles, since they would no longer have to fear for their life, wrestle with the variable availability of pornographic material of their choice, and would have at least some sort of outlet for the sexual tensions. This could help the children living nearby, as well, if at least some pedophiles had enough kiddie porn to occupy them.
There are some natural concerns about what would happen if the above practice were to actually materialize. Would readily available, legal kiddie porn remove the stigma of child sexual abuse, and lead to more actual child abuse, for instance? I’m not qualified to answer such a question, but I’m inclined to believe that activities with objectively qualifiable harmful side effects will stay stigmatized, no matter what. I also think that there are plenty of people in the world to keep this necessary, useful morality up. In this limited form I am certainly one of the louder advocates of that morality.
But what would the rights of the subjects be, should they wish to have their images removed from the kind of archive outlined above? Here I tend to think that people cannot have claims to information, no matter its quality. The principle should apply regardless of the content of that information. This may sound cruel, but seriously speaking there is little likelihood that people could later be connected to their adolescent selves appearing in such images in any wider scale. Against this background, the benefits of putting together an effort of the above kind could outweigh the personal cost to the victims of appearing in sexually explicit images in the context of an online crime prevention campaign.
The final hypothetical I’d want to raise is not so much about what can
or should be done about child pornography, but whether it can be
integrated as‐is into the fabric of a moral, well‐functioning society.
Again, I think the answer is a qualified yes
. It is conceivable
that adolescent sexuality could assume a place comparable to that of the
currently acceptable forms of sexual expression, without stepping on
people’s rights or the general ethical integrity of our society. But
on the other hand, a society where this is possible is very different
indeed from our current one. With this in mind, this ending section
should be taken as food for thought,
SciFi, rather than a
serious proposal the likes of which one would expect from, for example,
NAMBLA.
If we compare Western industrialized cultures to what is left over, we soon note that the former exhibit a considerable amount of age discrimination when it comes to sex. The most important example is of course USA, where sexuality is rapidly becoming the monopoly of gorgeous young people. When people age from 18 to 30, have a partner of their own age, stature and orientation, have money, look beautiful and succeed in life, they have the licence to shag. Otherwise sex is a big no‐no, a taboo, a shameful little secret, procreation at best. This highly polarized picture of human sexuality then radiates outward via the US media, and is supplanting traditional patterns of sexual behavior all over the globe.
However, the fact is elsewhere there is considerable variation in how sexuality is perceived and practiced. In some cases, common practice is such that it would be labelled criminal or aberrant in the West. For instance, in Japan, the schoolgirl fetish seems to be quite common and is widely accepted as a fact of life, as are sadomasochistic fantasies. In some African and Polynesian tribal cultures, people pair up at a young age and sex before the age of 14 is the norm. So are intergenerational marriages, and not only in the prearranged form common in the Islamic world. And to use a seriously worn out example, there even seems to have been a level of tolerance towards pederastic relationships between master and pupil in the ancient Greece, the cradle of modern Western civilization. It therefore seems obvious that pedophilia as a concept is a creation of the modern Western culture, and has little to do with the basic, promiscuous nature of human beings. It would seem possible to have a culture where intergenerational sexuality is tolerated. There is also very little a priori basis for calling such a culture immoral—it’d just be (very) different.
It comes to mind, then, that even without changing anything in the
West, there might be places in the world where child pornography can
be produced without breaking laws, incurring harm on children, or
indeed doing anything in the least unethical. If this could be shown
to be the case (with an emphasis on the if
), I do not see any
reason not to leverage such a cultural difference to satisfy the
cravings of pedophiles world‐wide. To the extent that actual sexual
contact is not involved, we already know such cultures exist. As for
more explicit material, it still might just be possible to find an
agreeable place to produce it in.
So, if one is to live in such a culture, money can be made on child pornography without ethical quandaries, and even if profit is considered a bad idea in this particular case, a responsible parent spreads as much material about their children online as possible to help satisfy the demand without incurring additional suffering on children living in those cultures where partaking in kiddie porn would constitute severe damage. One should consult the child first, of course, but I already pointed out that the typical Finnish family album would serve as a fine starting point.
Furthermore, older children/young people who have grown old enough to enter the dating game should definitely have a lot to give to the anti‐child abuse campaign. I think young people are quite capable of consenting to such a noble cause. Not to mention the advantage in finding company they might gain over their less overtly sexual classmates in a freer cultural framework. And in the case of adults proper, there might still be early images of the person in question that the now grown‐up citizen could make available. If one is committed to fighting child abuse, one would likely do just that.
Then there is the issue of fake kiddie porn. This has been a hot topic in the US, since actual harm to anyone is not done when producing it, and the strong freedom of speech afforded by the first amendment gives ample reason to question the constitutionality of any stateside ban on it. In the context of the above demand reduction strategy, faked material is as good as anything: it’s sure to be harmless, it’s easy to do both with a computer and with real subjects, and it serves a worthy cause. It is a badly misguided attempt at demand reduction or enforcement indeed if such a useful industry is quenched. In fact, this sort of ban would be akin to creating a thought crime.
The more ardent of pedobusters seem to think that seeing naked children somehow directly leads to wanting to see your dog fuck the neighbour’s four‐year‐old. This is utter nonsense, as everybody ought to know, and is probably based on a misconception along the lines of the infamous gate theory which states that benign misdeeds lead to greater ones.
Gate theory, even in the context of drug use where it has its strongest foothold, has long ago been proven insufficient, if not outright incorrect. As it pertains to information and entertainment, the gate theory has a rich and unfortunate history ranging through the French Revolution, the Middle Ages and ancient Mediterranean cultures. It’s never been any good, but has resulted in a lot of bookburning and unnecessary decapitations. Not that this would bother the moralist, as he doesn’t even understand the fact that in a normal, functional society, to‐be pedophiles will see children naked, occasionally get in touch with them (where it hopefully stops), and get aroused like all people do, sometimes. The precise same thing happens with sexual orientations more in the mainstream, yet people do not easily go on to be serial rapists.
Or to give a more sinister example, zoophilia is quite rare compared to the number of people who get to watch animals mate; people aren’t meant to get it on with Rover, just as they aren’t meant to get it on with children. Seeing the low figures for child sexual abuse tells us that conversion to an active child molester takes more than just visual stimulation, if such conversion is even possible.
Quite interestingly, people often dismiss the deeper implications of the alleged rise in child sexual abuse and the number of active pedophiles. It seems that sexual orientation, with paraphilias as its extension, is largely hardwired. If a considerable portion of the populus is attracted to children, then that’s the way it is. No lesson in abstract morality is going to change that. On the other hand, if this is not the case, as it likely isn’t, what are we worrying about? Any working society will have fringe phenomena, and these can be dealt with quite without resorting to draconian legislation, creating thought crimes and eating away at people’s civil rights. A simple law against child abuse should be sufficient to deal with the kind of problems that kiddie porn can cause.
We tend to think that the majority of people consuming child pornography are active pedophiles, that the current uprise in kiddie porn publicity is a sign of a serious, escalating problem, that lots of innocent kids are being hurt, that there is a unravelling of traditional morality (whatever that is) going on, et cetera. But all of these beliefs leave considerable room for doubt.
First of all, it is arguable that the vast majority of people
consuming kiddie porn are actually normal people who happen to like
something young, and do not act out on their impulses otherwise than
by watching KP.
Since by far the majority of child pornography out there is of
prepubescent and pubescent people, and there is quite a lot of reason to
believe that human males are hardwired to respond sexually to young
girls with ages ranging from prepuberty to mid twenties, much of the so
called pedophiles are just normal males, often with successful,
socially acceptable sexual relationships. This is what I’d call the
Lolita‐defense
: even if one does not agree that
inter‐generational relationships are right, one has to give in to
the fact that they are possible, they have always existed in one form
or another, and that sexual attraction simply does not follow moral
guidelines. You cannot reprogram people’s deeper instincts by passing
laws. If people view pornography, or indeed less benign sexually
charged material, they will not likely discriminate primarily by age.
Second, many of the people convicted of possessing or distributing real child pornography offences actually just seek kiddie porn for momentary thrills, get shocked by it, deal with the mixed emotions, and decide it’s not worth it. This is the typical child pornography offense committed by curious kids, college students and the like, and the kind that media exposure and increased awareness is more likely to incite than to suppress.
Finally, even those who are definitely attracted to children rarely go on to abuse actual, living ones. Even if one is clearly a pedophile, social norms and the human conscience do keep one’s urges at bay, at least to a degree. In this case, having access to child pornography would likely ease obeying the law, and so shouldn’t be forbidden unless a definite reduction in conrete, tangible child abuse can be guaranteed.
I would say that a great part of the KP mayhem is actually unwarranted, and that the means used to combat child abuse are to a degree misguided. KP itself is not the problem, and is perceived as such mostly because people do not understand what they are dealing with. Even the perceived problem is probably smaller than one would think, since KP was never an issue before it got tabloid headlines. It is true that KP is easier to spread online, but that in itself actually makes the real problem of child abuse less, not more. The enormous law enforcement attention given to KP probably has something to do with the KP scare too, as I think that it is unearthing aspects of human sexuality that have always been there, even if people have shied away from them—namely, the fact that young people are not asexual by a long shot.
As it is in the case of drugs,
KP too is a good
enemy. It’s bound to cause strong reactions in almost anyone, and
does not invite rational critique—when we put child
and
pornography
in the same sentence, people tend turn their logic
circuits off. Even if I’m hardly an expert on the topic, I hope this
article increases the chance of balanced thoughts coming out, one day.
Otherwise the KP
scare will cause adverse impact on our civil rights, and
we’ll all be worse off.