Yes, it can, by encouraging a small subset of the population to engage in pedophilia.
You be the judge - sexual assault?
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And I haven't gotten an answer to my question yet: Does a drawing harm children?
People used to think that homosexual was harmful until some other people questioned it.
Why is a question so frightening?
No doubt. Should we ban all words and images?
You're equivocating. I asked if drawings and stories harm children.
And fictional violence normalizes violence.
You keep equivocating. I questioned whether drawings or stories should be illegal.
I asked if they should be illegal, just like people asked if homosexuality should be illegal.
And more equivocating.
And a drawing of violence can encourage a small subset of the population to engage in violence. Is that a justification for banning drawings?
Bells
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By leaving out the context of what "drawings and stories" we are actually discussing.
And you accuse me of equivocating?
Yep.
And you keep trying to change the context of the discussion, which by any sense of measure, is inherently dishonest and disingenuous.
My point was very clear, repeatedly. What part of 'child pornography harms children' didn't you quite understand?
Child pornography should be illegal. You still cannot understand that?
And why are you comparing child pornography and paedophilia to homosexuality?
And more dishonest and disingenuous dodging from you.
I need to ask. What's your stake in this? What's in it for you?
Because people tend to not go to bat for child pornography. What's the deal?
I am only discussing a limited context. You keep trying to extrapolate everything I say to a broader context.
I am comparing people's attitudes. Your argument against drawings and stories is the same argument used against homosexuality. You claim that it's absolutely harmful and that your opinion should never be questioned in any way.
There you go, equivocating again. I am not going to bat for anything. I'm asking if and/or why drawings and stories should be illegal.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. As I mentioned before we place a higher value on protecting children than we do on protecting adults. Thus the prohibition on kiddie porn, but not regular pornography.
Yes, I understand the rationale. I'm just wondering why some people consider it Verboten! to question the rationale.
The supreme court nominee du jour, I emphatically do not - make that more emphatic DO NOT like.
Here is your answer: Do you propose that we eliminate all laws against child endangerment? Or is your focus on harm issue-specific according to your needs?
A point I raised a few days ago↑ is to consider that by the time we identify this or that person or circumstance as the perfect test case, just how much effort will we have put into finding the perfect test case to justify what everyone else, including the predators who want it, would acknowledge is child pornography.
This is hardly a Supreme Court of anything, but, still, political word games about a subject like this raise questions of priority. And that's the thing about the idea of the test case; as ill-conceived chatter the line of inquiry you pursue requires any number of unwise presuppositions about the behavior of the associated subsets.
Is it The Song Remains the Same that includes a scene with naked English children running around near a stream? What about those old National Geographic photos? How many horror writers of the 1980s pushed what boundaries? Even still, just how perverse do we want to get? Young people's literature: Judy Blume, and no, not for what you think. Robert Newton Peck. Madeleine L'Engle.
What makes society really skittish is not simply the fact of people who can get off little bits and pieces that would otherwise seem innocuous if the question arose, but in their abstract potential are supposed to be somewhat vérité; there is also a question of proximity that arises when people are expected to entertain that those who cannot tell the difference between certain this, that, and the other are somehow expected to be received as if rational.
I remember, back in the Eighties, learning the obsolete Roth standard that in 1957 finally superseded English Common Law, and the Miller test that superseded Roth, along the way in the music censorship disputes. The Dost test, focusing on the prurience prong of Miller in a pornography question gives, in light of known pathology, such extraordinary benefit of doubt that it has been criticized as making children themselves pornographic.
And the idea that we need to pick such nits in the first place is itself controversial. The answer, of course, is that we do because we must because we are asked to by people who think they need us to. And people perceive a dangerous question of proximity when they are expected to entertain such vagary so near to sensibility. And while I can remember an unsettled feeling in the time of Miller and Dost, what has become that much more evident in the time since is the consuming and escalating pathology of sex predators.
There has also been this weird apparent backlash in American society by which some moralistic attitudes seem to have given over to their own straw men; like after Obergefell, of course someone was going to write that one article, and what stood out was that HuffPo published it. That is, the question is whether HuffPo is the outlet for that discussion. That someone went and wrote it? Nobody should have been shocked and amazed at the advocacy for pedophiles; given the preceding decades in which determined supremacists labored to manufacture an overlap, of course someone seeking justification in the world would try.
And, of course, there is irony in Miller and Dost that we only needed to parse in the first place because of moralists incompetent to observe and comprehend basic functional differences. Eventually, what stands out is that virtually any approach vector for this range of issues is problematic; I say virtually because there might be in this Universe a logical argument that appears to work and defies by sheer scale efforts to look beyond it, but at that point, someone has thrown down a hell of an effort, and everyone else is unsettled by the proximity of such priorities, that this really is so important.
That's not an answer.
But of course not. I have proposed nothing. I have asked a question.
Are the drawings and stories for strictly personal use or are they to be shared with others?
It is worth noting that laws regarding drawings and stories for personal use can not be enforced so no, they can not be made illegal. However once they become shared with others ( other wise published) then the law can enforce laws preventing such.
As to whether they (created for strictly personal use) SHOULD be illegal, IMO this is more a self hygiene issue, a mental health issue, a moral issue.
In some ways it is like asking if Hoodoo or Voodoo should be illegal. To make it illegal is to legitimize the witch craft as being "real" and scientifically grounded. In most cases the drawing of imagery etc is done because the creator of such believes secretly that he / she is psychically priming or grooming someone. Not unlike those cliche depictions of a psychopath keeping hundreds of images pinned to his bedroom walls. An extreme example of severe obsession due to "addiction" to "special powers arousal" ( perhaps?)
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And the answer has been: when they endanger children, threaten children with harm.
Compare storing dynamite in one's city garage.
because you sound like you dont think fucking a child is a big a deal
You are disgusting.
Actually, PJ has a point.
We're how many years into the Gay Fray, and we still hear these child-abuse comparisons by which the moralists would seem to not recognize consent.
Bob's comparison↑ achieves the same thing.
The whole point is just to piss people off. Like I said, whether one just lands there, or deliberately calculates their ingress, the fact of the territory is significant. And his lazy advocacy of child pornography is pretty much indicative; there are plenty of ways to go out of one's way to piss people off, and child pornography is what our neighbor Sideshowbob finds important.
And he wants to compare that to adults having consensual sex.
Yeah, PJ's got a point.
Why because i have a problem with sexual abuse? just how the fuck am i disgusting here? seriously your attacking the guy who has a problem with child diddling? serious i need an explanation here because you saying this makes zero sense.
Bells
Staff member
You are changing the context, from essentially how does child pornography that is drawn and written, harm children to 'how does drawing harm children'. It is disingenuous and frankly dishonest.
Look, we've seen people pull these stunts many times over the years. Demands that we are equivocating because we are answering the actual question and not playing with your change of context is also a well known tactic.
So I'll be blunt. Cut the crap. No one is buying it.
And you compare it to homosexuality again..
Do you ever stop?
In comparing people's attitudes, you keep ignoring the bleeding obvious.
Experts have often wondered what proportion of men who download explicit sexual images of children also molest them. A new government study of convicted Internet offenders suggests that the number may be startlingly high: 85 percent of the offenders said they had committed acts of sexual abuse against minors, from inappropriate touching to rape.
[...]
Those who are arrested on charges of possession or distribution of child pornography generally receive lighter sentences and shorter parole periods than sexual abusers. They do not fit any criminal stereotype; recent arrests have included politicians, police officers, teachers and businessmen.
“It’s crucial to understand the sexual history of all these offenders, because sometimes the crime they were arrested for is the tip of the iceberg, and does not reflect their real patterns and interests,” said Jill S. Levenson, an assistant professor of human services at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., and head of the ethics committee of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers.
Previous studies, based on surveys of criminal records, estimated that 30 percent to 40 percent of those arrested for possessing child pornography also had molested children.
[...]
At least some men convicted of sexual abuse say that child pornography from the Internet fueled their urges. In a recent interview, one convicted pedophile serving a 14-year sentence in a Canadian federal prison said that looking at images online certainly gave him no release from his desires — exactly the opposite.
“Because there is no way I can look at a picture of a child on a video screen and not get turned on by that and want to do something about it,” he said. “I knew that in my mind. I knew that in my heart. I didn’t want it to happen, but it was going to happen.”
[...]
Those who are arrested on charges of possession or distribution of child pornography generally receive lighter sentences and shorter parole periods than sexual abusers. They do not fit any criminal stereotype; recent arrests have included politicians, police officers, teachers and businessmen.
“It’s crucial to understand the sexual history of all these offenders, because sometimes the crime they were arrested for is the tip of the iceberg, and does not reflect their real patterns and interests,” said Jill S. Levenson, an assistant professor of human services at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Fla., and head of the ethics committee of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers.
Previous studies, based on surveys of criminal records, estimated that 30 percent to 40 percent of those arrested for possessing child pornography also had molested children.
[...]
At least some men convicted of sexual abuse say that child pornography from the Internet fueled their urges. In a recent interview, one convicted pedophile serving a 14-year sentence in a Canadian federal prison said that looking at images online certainly gave him no release from his desires — exactly the opposite.
“Because there is no way I can look at a picture of a child on a video screen and not get turned on by that and want to do something about it,” he said. “I knew that in my mind. I knew that in my heart. I didn’t want it to happen, but it was going to happen.”
Now certainly, he may not be the norm, or he could be. Is it a risk you are willing to take? Because you keep asserting and questioning whether it really is harmful.
In my experience, yes it is.
But then again, you are also the one who queried whether sexually molesting children was even really that harmful or if the harm came from having the children know what happened to them or understand what happened to them. So I would imagine the concepts of harm to children may actually be beyond you at this point in time.
And there you go, ignoring the actual answer and whining because no one is giving you the answer you want us to give.
I have to ask, why do you want to legalise fictional child pornography? I mean, there are many things one can throw one's self onto one's sword for. You pick child pornography and sexual violence against people who cannot consent.
Because there is trying to stir debate and then there is pushing to the point where one can validly question an underlying motive. Because you are not trying to stir debate. You are trying to demand we agree with you on child pornography. Any answer we give you is not acceptable because it is not the answer you agree with. So what's the deal?
But that is not what you are doing here.
Everyone has answered why. You simply refuse to accept it.
In 2012, two Dutch sex therapists argued that virtual child pornography, could help paedophiles in reducing their urges to molest. This is despite all research to the contrary. But that was the argument they put forward.
It sparked a huge debate in the Netherlands and rightly so. The consensus from the medical, law enforcement and from the academic community can be summed up fairly succinctly:
During a televised debate former parliament speaker Gerdi Verbeet said “it’s really not a good idea” and psychotherapist Jules Mulder of the De Waag clinic warned that computer-generated child porn could actually encourage paedophiles to sexually assault someone.
Dr Elena Martellozzo, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Middlesex University, agreed and told Huffington Post UK that she’s dismayed by the Dutch researchers’ theory.
She said: “I definitely don’t support their view at all. An indecent image of a child is just a picture of a rape in progress. And they look so real, that it’s difficult to tell the difference between real and a computer generated image.
“I’m amazed that intelligent people have thought of this. It’s a violation of a child’s safety.
“Viewing indecent images of children in any form or shape can increase demand.
“So it could have the opposite effect. We lose sight of the act. We’ve learnt though experience that sometimes indecent images can trigger an increase in the desire of wanting more. It’s called the cycle of abuse. It may trigger an even stronger desire to want to have sex with a child. If we were to legalise these images we normalise the whole process.”
Christian Sjoberg, CEO of NetClean, an investigative computer tool used by police forces around the world, added his voice to the ranks of the detractors.
He said: "The scale of the child sexual abuse problem continues to grow. The idea of legalising virtual child porn to reduce the number of crimes being committed would have a negative effect on law enforcement agencies. Police forces already have to examine huge amounts of child sexual abuse content in order to identify, capture and prosecute paedophiles."
Dr Elena Martellozzo, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Middlesex University, agreed and told Huffington Post UK that she’s dismayed by the Dutch researchers’ theory.
She said: “I definitely don’t support their view at all. An indecent image of a child is just a picture of a rape in progress. And they look so real, that it’s difficult to tell the difference between real and a computer generated image.
“I’m amazed that intelligent people have thought of this. It’s a violation of a child’s safety.
“Viewing indecent images of children in any form or shape can increase demand.
“So it could have the opposite effect. We lose sight of the act. We’ve learnt though experience that sometimes indecent images can trigger an increase in the desire of wanting more. It’s called the cycle of abuse. It may trigger an even stronger desire to want to have sex with a child. If we were to legalise these images we normalise the whole process.”
Christian Sjoberg, CEO of NetClean, an investigative computer tool used by police forces around the world, added his voice to the ranks of the detractors.
He said: "The scale of the child sexual abuse problem continues to grow. The idea of legalising virtual child porn to reduce the number of crimes being committed would have a negative effect on law enforcement agencies. Police forces already have to examine huge amounts of child sexual abuse content in order to identify, capture and prosecute paedophiles."
The rationale is because it will be harmful to children. It will normalise sexualising children or viewing children as sexual objects, specifically for the people who seek to have sexual relationships with children and thus, harm them.
Do you understand now?
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