17 ms·

Slightly off-topic, but I never understood the obsession of legal enforcement with child pornography. Don't get me wrong, the idea of pre-pubescent children bei

• INTPenis 13y ago
  I can tell you don't have children. Politicians almost always have kids. It changes your perspective on things. Suddenly they're number one and you'll do anything you believe is right for them. Including outlawing soft drugs and filtering the internets.
  • pasquinelli 13y ago
    i have children and i think people are hysterical with pedophileophobia.
  • chii 13y ago
    another word for that is 'selfish' - they are making laws, enacting rules and enforcing behaviour which their constituents did not really want, simply because it's something they wanted for themselves. I don't want my politicians to have a perspective which only includes themselves. Unforutnately, its all far too common.
    • anigbrowl 13y ago
      Most of their constituents have kids do, and want similar things. Your assumption that politicians are unilaterally imposing this on others is wrong. There are a lot of people out there who want the state to aid them in protecting their children from what they consider to be malign influences, and they vote.
  • rimantas 13y ago
    Well, it they would do anything they should ban kids from having families, because that's where abuse happens most often.
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  • sillysaurus 13y ago
    Could I see a source on that $10b figure?
    • fixxer 13y ago
      Here are some quick sources from the almighty Google: $9.5 billion in US claimed by the Covering House; link to source at UN is old and I can't verify their number (not unreasonable given the other sources listed): http://thecoveringhouse.org/act/resources-2/sex-trafficking-statistics-source-documentation/ http://thecoveringhouse.org/act/resources-2/sex-trafficking-... $32 billion global market (per UN) http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/2012/July/human-trafficking_-organized-crime-and-the-multibillion-dollar-sale-of-people.html http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/2012/July/human-traf... $15 billion generated in industrialized nations...(some digging required) http://www.amsa.org/AMSA/Homepage/About/Committees/CEH/HumanTrafficking_Action.aspx http://www.amsa.org/AMSA/Homepage/About/Committees/CEH/Human... Roughly half of market derived from US customers: http://www.mncasa.org/Documents/svji_facts_17_3570942294.pdf‎ http://www.mncasa.org/Documents/svji_facts_17_3570942294.pdf...
      • makomk 13y ago
        The trouble with sex trafficking stats is that a lot of them are misrepresented or even have no basis in fact whatsoever - even ones from supposedly-reputable sources like the United Nations and the Department of Justice - and it's very difficult to figure this out since they're usually not properly cited. For example, that 9.5 billion figure isn't anywhere in the UN page it's cited to. So far I've traced it as far as a DoJ report from 2004 which claims: "According to the UN, human trafficking is the third largest criminal enterprise worldwide, generating an estimated 9.5 billion USD in annual revenue according to the U.S. intelligence community." No specific citation for that claim, naturally, but it looks like originally it was just a guess that some unnamed intelligence community pulled out of their ass.
• phaus 13y ago
  It's a big deal because child abuse is rampant in our country, and in most other places, it's even worse. I can't recall the source (I'll try to find it tomorrow), but allegedly the amount of child pornography on the darknet is equivalent to a quarter of the legal pornography on the internet. That's a shocking amount of children being abused. Law enforcement makes such an effort to go after people who view child pornography because many of them are members of underground communities. In any such network, someone is providing the material, as in, someone is raping children and posting it to the darknet. It might sound stupid, but their mentality is often similar to that of serial killers. They want evidence of their crimes to keep as "trophies", and they want recognition from their peers for their "achievements." If you find some random sick fuck who downloads that kind of thing, chances are that he would rather dime out his buddies than feel the full force of the DOJ come crashing down on him. This is how you find the actual abusers. I for one think that the DOJ needs to stop fucking worrying about how many people downloaded an episode of GOT without paying for it and start using all of those wasted resources to find more pedophiles.
• tptacek 13y ago
  Every time this topic comes up on HN, someone feels the need to litigate its importance, or even its validity. The resulting threads are repellent. I downvoted this comment and hope others will too, rather than dignifying the idea that we should be debating the whole concept of child pornography on Hacker News.
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  • sillysaurus 13y ago
    Are you saying that the audience is too immature to discuss the issue responsibly, or that there can be no reasonable discussion on the topic of child porn? I had no idea it was a $10b industry, and if not for HN discussion then I probably wouldn't have learned that. EDIT: after re-reading, tptacek seems to be saying "threads questioning whether child porn is valid to be hysterical about result in useless discussion." That's probably reasonable.
    • foobarbazqux 13y ago
      A previous discussion on rape porn in general, which obviously applies to child porn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6083193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6083193 I've noticed over the years that any mention of child porn on an internet forum usually leads to a few posters making arguments that take the side of people with pedophilia. First, it's not easy to overcome, like any paraphilia or fetish, and if you don't hurt children you aren't a criminal. Second, merely distributing images doesn't directly harm anyone or conclusively promote harm. Third, not having access to images might increase acting out in the real world. Fourth, animated simulations could be tolerable substitutes. At any rate, I find pedophilia so abhorrent that these kinds of arguments never really crossed my mind before I started reading forums. Which means I don't think they're entirely useless. I could probably tolerate legal simulations.
• dylangs1030 13y ago
  Honestly, I have to say I don't think this is an appropriate comment for a forum like this. It opens up a possibly disgusting debate. That said...it's an incredibly common problem. I'm not going to point you where to look for proof, but you could easily find it if you wanted to. And that's horrific. The reason why it's so bad is because it's exploitation of children, who could not have led themselves into a vulnerable situation of their own accord. There's no reason to get into it any further, it's vile. And I want to reiterate...this really isn't the place for questioning why it shows up so much.
  • nawitus 13y ago
    So your position is correct because it's correct, and nobody should question your position because that would be "disgusting"?
    • dylangs1030 13y ago
      You missed the more important part of my comment - that this shouldn't be up for discussion. That has nothing to do with whether or not I'm right. I think I'm right in my view, and if you think I'm wrong that's okay. But let's not argue that kind of point here on Hacker News. That's not to say you can't question my view; I was answering a question. But I'm not going to engage in debate about it because I find it abhorrent to do so.
      • jules 13y ago
        So basically, you stated your side of the argument, and then preemptively disqualify anybody who may disagree with you by calling that abhorrent. Had you simply limited your comment to "this is inappropriate to discuss here" then that would be one thing, but right now it's very hypocritical.
  • mistercow 13y ago
    >The reason why it's so bad is because it's exploitation of children, who could not have led themselves into a vulnerable situation of their own accord. Yikes, the flip side of that is that adult rape victims are at least partially at fault because they put themselves in a "vulnerable situation". Is that really a position you agree with?
• scythe 13y ago
  >Yet, almost every time some morally righteous politician talks about regulating the Internet, he or she mentions "Child Pornography". I can see how the words would have the desired effect in a political speech, but is it really THAT common a problem? Yes, it is, but no, it isn't. I present, for your consideration, the most depressing number in the world: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2FS0145-2134(96)00180-9 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2FS0145-2134(96)00180-9 "female and male child sexual abuse prevalence estimates [...] were 14.5% and 7.2%" That's one in seven girls, one in fourteen boys. CSA is quite honestly the most insane and awful aspect of Western society bar none. And decades of crackdowns, teacher-initiated interventions, and, well, spying on every phone call in the country have failed to make a real difference. So we target child pornography. We target child pornography because child sexual abuse is the biggest social problem in the modern era, and we don't know what else to do about it. I don't, honestly, know of any real evidence that there is much to be accomplished this way. Porn isn't correlated with rape and even though in this case there's no way that the porn could be made ethically it's a bit like stomping termites in a sinking boat. The thinking is really that by damaging pedophiles' online support network they will be discouraged from engaging in such repulsive acts. Unfortunately, while I'd like to see it work, it doesn't make sense to me: people were raping children long before fiber optics got involved. I don't really have a good answer. I hope this guy rots in jail. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/NIH_child_sex_abuse_disorders_graph.svg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/NIH_child...
  • agilebyte 13y ago
    I would not just say Western society. The VICE documentary "This is What Winning Looks Like"* seems to show CSA has a tradition in Afghanistan. * http://www.vice.com/vice-news/this-is-what-winning-looks-like-full-length http://www.vice.com/vice-news/this-is-what-winning-looks-lik...
    • TheLegace 13y ago
      Ya it's really shocking how accepted in it. One of the higher up police chiefs(I think) said "..what else are they suppose to other than to fuck boys."
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• nikcub 13y ago
  I would mostly agree with your position - that prosecuting child porn users doesn't achieve much and a lot of it is a scare campaign. But i'll tell you the argument from the police and prosecutor side. I spent some time speaking to a high-level police officer about this some years ago. They aggressively prosecute downloaders of child porn for a number of reasons: a) No matter how far down the chain somebody is, demand for child porn necessitates child abuse somewhere up the line. Someone is taking these photos to supply a demand. By taking out users you suck up the supply of child porn. b) Unlike with drugs, which are used by a much larger portion of the population, it is feasible to cut down child porn supply by arresting people on the demand side. Child porn addicts, on average, spend a lot of money and resources on obtaining material, so even the arrest of a small hub can have an impact on demand and break up trading networks. c) The approach to stopping child porn is to find the publishers and distributors by taking out users. Again unlike the drug market most users of child porn are also distributors - trading is very common. If you find one person in possession you can very quickly map out the network that person is within, which often results in the big and wide busts you hear about on the news d) This police officer told me that in a majority of cases the child porn user treats the arrest as an intervention. Most know that they have a problem but can't stop and in many of his arrests the child porn users were thankful and became co-operative. It took an arrest to "snap them out of it". It convinced me (I think - still undecided) that you can't legalize or be soft on child porn possession, as all that demand is going to lead to a child being abused somewhere in order to satisfy it.
  • babarock 13y ago
    Maybe I wasn't clear enough. I wasn't exactly asking about child pornography prosecution (which quite frankly, I know nothing about and am probably the least qualified person on Earth to have an opinion about), but about its automatic mention every time "online crimes" are mentioned. I mean, I've been practically living online for too many years, stumbled upon some dark corners of the web and I can honestly say that I never came across CP (I mean inadvertently. I never actually targeted anything like that, so I don't know how easy it is to find if you actually want to. And I wish I could try it out to validate my claims, but the whole paranoia about the subject makes me afraid of having "underage porn images" in my search history). My point is that if you listen to politicians, you'd think that the Web is ridden with kids exploited for porn. I can think of so many crimes I come across quasi-daily on the web: Credit card fraud, identity theft, copyright infringement, banking scams, stalking, harassment, ... I suspect, although I don't have the data to back it up, that these are more prevalent by several orders of magnitude, yet in our collective mind: "online crime == child pornography". I honestly didn't mean to start a debate whether we should or should not prosecute offenders and how. I just find it weird that we mention it so much, and the slightly paranoid conspiracy-theory-loving voice in my head can't help but think that someone is spreading deliberate FUD by amplifying actual events.
• mahyarm 13y ago
  Because culturally and instinctually for any parent it pushes all of the right buttons.
  • alan_cx 13y ago
    Yeah, because statistically the person most likely to abuse children is, their father...
• Daniel_Newby 13y ago
  > Slightly off-topic, but I never understood the obsession of legal enforcement with child pornography. It polls well with the sort of people who think lottery tickets are good value for money. Ditto for the war on drugs, jailbait laws, TSA shoe searches, and so forth. You didn't seriously think this madness was bad luck, did you? > the idea of pre-pubescent children being exploited by pornographers horrifies me as much as anyone It doesn't horrify me. In a world with billions of people, there have to be quite a number of prepubescent 10 year olds who are eager and happy to be porn stars. In fact they barely move the needle on the weird-kid-o-meter, when you consider the autists, schizos, animal torturing junior psychopaths, etc.
  • foobarbazqux 13y ago
    Assuming that all children in child porn actually say that they want to appear in child porn (and this is a huge assumption), the reason it's exploitation is that children are unable to consent. For example, an infant will happily suck on a man until he comes in its mouth, and there are films of such acts. For better or for worse, we've decided that you have to be 18 years old to be able to consent.
• nilved 13y ago
  It's never been about child pornography. That's a nuclear option that immediately invokes every American's maternal/paternal fears. It's a scare tactic used to manipulate and justify attacks.