| This will most likely result in heavy downvotes, but I don't think child pornography is a problem. At all. There's something else we should be fighting, and the Internet has nothing to do with it: child abuse. I also find it highly ridiculous that politicians (at least here in Germany) still spout crap about "international, millions of dollar heavy child porn rings" or similar nonsense. I'd wager[1] that most child pornography is either a) documented domestic abuse of children by relatives or b) jailbait (ie, suggestive or explicit pictures of legally underage, but physically mature persons). For the former, we're fighting a symptom. As I said, we need to fight the cause, child abuse. But there's a problem with that: it's a long term process, and a difficult one at that. Demanding the takedown of websites with child pornography works way better to get yourself elected. For the latter, I'd go as far as to ask the following: who is hurt by people with a paraphilia involving underage persons[2] masturbating to images? Especially if those images were made in consent with or even by the person depicted? [1] This is another thing about the entire child porn discussion: you can't confirm anything without getting yourself in all sorts of legal trouble. There was a good example of this here in Germany a while back, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joerg_Tauss [2] I'm putting it this way because Pedophilia isn't the only such paraphilia, even though the term is often used to mean "attracted to underage persons", which is very wrong. |