Comment

Google Starts Caring About Child Porn

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Obdicut (Now with 2% less brain)11/20/2013 4:39:51 am PST

re: #194 A Mom Anon

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the concept of child pornography and sex trafficking being information that falls under some kind of protection.

Well, I can construct a very partial defense against it. I’m actually wildly anti-censorship, though let me reiterate that this is in reference to government action, not to private action. And in the end, I’m entirely for the banning of child porn both privately and by the government, and I also think the adult pornography industry needs a lot more investigation into the conditions of employment and the amount of coercion there.

We allow, currently, for gory crime scene photos, photos which show the aftermath of a terrible, horrible crime, to be reproduced and spread around the internet. There is journalistic merit to this that nearly everyone sees, even if it seems abhorrent to us that people are literally profiting about this. There was a famous NYC photographer, Weegee, (who said dumb names came about on the internet?) who specialized in the kind of film-noir style murder scene photography that came to be so iconic.

There is reason to believe that some spree killers, mass killers, etc. know that their actions will gain them attention and that this is part of their motivation. I think that it’s true, that some killers are motivated by the idea of what they’ve done being seen by others, and that if we didn’t sensationalize death and suffering in the way we do, we’d have fewer mass killings.

Yet, I’m still highly against censorship of photos of murder victims and videos of murder: I think the right of the public to know and see the conditions that crimes were committed under, and the way the police respond to them, is important, and I don’t think the (statistically) small effect it has is important.

This argument can be transposed to child porn: that publication of it as a record of a crime, in the same way. Yes, some sickos will gain pleasure from it, but some asshole racists also gain pleasure from pictures of lynchings, pictures of Trayvon Martin dead, etc.

The main problems with this argument are twofold. First, actual child porn is very different from these records of murders. Records of murders take place after the fact, or if during, are from static cameras, like security cam videos, which place the crime as happening in the public sphere; child porn is created intentionally, and that aspect of presentation matters, it has influence in the way the information is received. If we had very large numbers of killers recording their own crimes and selling them— the mostly mythical snuff films— then we would respond heavily to that problem. But we don’t. So with murder, we have a situation where we painfully allow pictures that may humiliate, wound, anger, dismay the families and friends of victims, because there is real journalistic and public interest in those photos. Obviously, sometimes this steps over the line, but censoring it would be problematic. There is no such problem with child porn: child porn is by its nature a ‘positive’ packaging of a criminal act, it is presenting the crime as not a crime, and there is sufficient societal interest in repressing it, for the sake of victims, for the sake of sociological attitudes towards child porn, etc. We don’t have an ongoing societal problem of people torturing others who they then kill and selling those videos; we do have a problem with people torturing children sexually and selling those pictures/videos. Basically, you’re not really censoring the information you’re attacking the means of production of that information, which cannot occur in anything other than a horrific and terrible way.

And that’s not even getting into the fact that the victims are children, and that we treat children’s participation in public sphere very differently.