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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 arg
by 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 agoMaybe 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.
- mistercow 13y ago>all that demand is going to lead to a child being abused somewhere in order to satisfy it. At the "all or nothing" level, this is perhaps true. But where is the evidence that aggressively going after CP consumers has a significant marginal impact on child abuse? If you arrest 10% of CP consumers (a ludicrously optimistic goal), will that reduce child abuse by even 1%?