Atheism
Politics
Memes
Mind
Matters
String
Random
Interact
Feedback
Links
Debate
Home
Paedophilia is Not a Crime
Conspiracy Theories
War: What is it Good For?
Americans are...
For the Love of America
Guns
Does God Bless America?
The Right to Bare Arms
It's Our Money!
9/11 Inside Job?
One World
Is Prince Charles Gay?
Billionaires and Capitalists
Free Pornography
Why Bolsheviks don't want to kill Billionaires
Are atheists communists?
Ticket Touts
Give Peace a Chance
Libertarians and Fascists
The latest idiocy from the clowns of New Labour is the idea of making it a criminal offence to possess drawings of child abuse. Drawings. Now they want to be able to send people to prison for three years for the possession of drawings which could depict the imagined abuse of imaginary children. What are they on?
Child pornography is an offensive trade. Encouraging people to think about criminal activities is nasty and anti-social. I don't like Grand Theft Auto and similar games for just this reason. But it is absurd to make this criminal or to suggest that the only reason anybody would have a copy of Grand Theft Auto was because they were psyching themselves up to go out and start stealing cars and killing people. Possessing photographs of children who have been raped and abused is not something to be encouraged but neither is the owning of images of soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. When the policeman holds up the photograph it is Exhibit A, and the jury are shown it, presumably one or two jury members are a little apprehensive in case they get an erection. The policeman possessing the image does not cause the image to be made. But can we be certain that the paedophile owning the image has caused the image to be created? Possibly if he paid for it, or swapped it for a photograph he had taken of another child, but in many cases it would be difficult or impossible to prove any causation between possession of an image and abuse of a child.
If you watch a video on YouTube which purports to show American troops torturing animals, prisoners or civilians have you caused that abuse? If you read an account by a journalist have you been an accessory to the My Lai massacre forty years on? If you subscribe to the History Channel are you responsible for encouraging the rise of The Third Reich? If you have watched Starship Troopers or Star Wars have you encouraged a war in space? No of course not. So in what way is owning a drawing of an imagined child being abused in imagined circumstances encouraging real abuse of real children? Can you show any mechanism? If you can't then why prohibit such material? Well yes it's sick and nasty and in poor taste but poor taste should never be illegal.
Japan is awash with sexualized images of children in graphic novels and the like. It was only in 2003 that Japan outlawed photographic child pornography. Some estimates put it as high as one in four of every published documents in Japan has a theme involving sex and girls under the age of 18. And yet somehow Japan fails to fall into the pit of fire and sexual assaults and rape figures are lower than in the west.
Making a sexually explicit drawing of a child being sexually abused does not require the involvement of any children. A combination of imagination, photographs of children in non-sexual situations and photograph of adults engaged in sexual activity is more than enough. A girl's pudenda looks like a woman's, but less so. Don't include any pubic hair, make the inner labia smaller and don't push the vulval cleft so far to the rear and you can make as convincing a drawing or painting of a girl's pudenda as your artistic ability will allow from a few observations of photographs of adult women. At no time would it be necessary to have seen a child, or even a woman, naked yourself. Using a real child to model for you would be a totally unnecessary risk. Only photography requires real models, although of course photography also has plenty of scope for art and artifice.
The trade in photographs of children being abused or engaged in sexual activity (let's not pretend that children will only have sex if coerced) is vile because it necessarily involves real sexual activity and real children engaged in at least exploitative and often deeply abusive activity. I can see how wanting to stop such activity can lead to a good reason to prohibit the trade in such material. But I am not convinced that freely exchanging such material can possibly have any effect on the likelihood of its production in the same way as you watching film of the invasion of Normandy isn't a cause of the battle. The demand for illegal downloads does not drive the creation of new music and films. Your appreciation of the tune Yesterday playing in a supermarket cannot have any impact on the creative processes of Paul McCartney in 1964. Or indeed your appreciation of the sculpture “David” cannot do anything one way or the other to influence the life of its model. If you have made a copy of an image somebody else made you have not necessarily done anything to encourage the production of any more such images or to make any form of communication between the “consumer” of this image and its creator. The encouragement to make such images requires payment of some kind. Prosecuting somebody for owning a stolen copy of a bit of fabricated pornography portraying an imaginary child in an imaginary situation is thoroughly absurd.
Is it the thought that is being prosecuted? If it is not the possession of the image which did not feature real events and did not lead to any encouragement of abuse in its production or distribution perhaps it is the idea that owning such an image might encourage somebody to commit an offence themselves. Try as they might to find it there has been precious little evidence found that suggests that owning pornography leads inevitably to copycat behaviour. This is hardly surprising, my wife watches several hours per week of cookery programs and she leaves all the cooking to me. Does watching professional sport make people go out and compete themselves? I have never travelled through time and saved a planet or drank a Martini at a gaming table with a semiautomatic nuzzled in my armpit. I haven't even driven an Aston Martin or destroyed a caravan. And yet somehow the New Labour nannies think that everybody who has an image of Lisa Simpson being screwed will go out and rape the little girl next door. I can't see it myself.
The other thing that worries me about this law is the thought that there are probably millions of men who have come across (in the innocent and entirely figurative sense) images like these without really going far out of their way to look for them and have not deleted them because they are not photographs and therefore not illegal. Now suddenly not deleting an image which was not illegal at the time it was last viewed may become a crime (possession) punishable by imprisonment and labelling as a sex offender unsafe to be around children. There have certainly been times when I have been surfing while tired and or drunk, I have seen such images, often in the form of adverts on other websites or illustrations within articles about the subject. If those images still reside on my hard drive am I now at risk if my hard drive crashes and some computer repair gimp at PC World exercises his Gary Glitter rights to look uninvited at the images to be found on my hard drive? Hard drives these days are huge, mine is 200 GB and it has never been defragged because it has never been fragged enough to justify it. Yes you probably could find drawings of child abuse on my hard drive but I no more solicited them than I did the images of replica Rolex watches and penis enlargements. None of that apparently cuts much ice with the Gestapo who persecute child pornography offences, if it’s there you’re guilty, if things look suspicious the porn-sniffer will go and pull your house apart looking for evidence of deviance which can be punished. Or is that just stories put about by the paranoid?
Lots of people can watch a film which features robbery and murder, deception, treason, adultery and driving cars on two wheels through pedestrian precincts but they don't go out and do the same themselves.
No doubt those who have sex with children are also interested in photographs of it in a similar way that I as a heterosexual married man have a proven history of heterosexual activity and at times have been in possession of images of heterosexual activity. To make matters worse I can say that I owned pornographic images before I ever engaged in any sexual activity that featured other people. Is this convincing evidence that pornography made me an incurable heterosexual and contributed to my decline from being a mere fantasist to being a practicing heterosexual? I think not.
Stop this ridiculous bill. Collecting drawings of children being abused is sick and sad, it is not child abuse or evidence of child abuse or evidence of a definite intention to abuse children. It is not a good reason to bust into somebody's house, to ruin their life and to take their children into custody. To me it is far less likely to be encouraging a genuine criminal act than is publishing a newspaper article about a new fashionable crime.
Abusing a child is an offence, buying an image of such an activity is being an accessory to that original offence, that set a precedent, but that precedent does not extend to making criminal anything which might conceivably be thought to be reinforcing thoughts which if acted upon would be criminal. It is a fundamental distinction, thoughts are not crimes. Making a drawing of something is not by definition inciting somebody to act out similar events. This subject is far better handled through voluntary action, if you don't like such images don't buy them, don't download them, shun people who you see with them.
