Casuistry: The Good Pedophile?
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TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
Dogdoctor said:
Yet his total number of victims is zero. Nobody was molested, and nobody was even indecently exposed, as the pornography was entirely fictional: no real people were exploited. So, who has he hurt? Lock him up even though nobody has been hurt? Does that sound just?
jjramsey
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Piscivore said:
I would not be surprised to find out that a difference exists in "brain wiring" between those who are attracted to young adolescents, who are sometimes called ephebophiles rather than pedophiles, and those attracted to pre-pubescents. (I also think I've been watching too much Law & Order: SVU.)
Back to the OP, it seems like a real bear of a question. On the one hand, I get the feeling that he is playing with fire. The fake child porn may sate his urges in the short term only to whet them in the long term. He could be a disaster waiting to happen. On the other hand, the pedophile in question hasn't hurt anyone, and sending someone to jail merely for having bad thoughts sets a bad precedent.
I would rather that he have been committed to a psychiatric facility, maybe even something like a halfway house, rather than jailed. That would take seriously the potential threat he poses, without necessarily implying that his actions are criminal.
jjramsey said:
That's an interesting take on it.
I suppose if we had the evidence that said "5 out 10" people who use "fake paedophilic material" will commit a paedophilic act in their lifetime then as a society I believe we can argue on the premises of the "greater good" the person should be somehow rendered unable to harm another. It is still the argument that you can use to support the death penalty e.g. if the hanging of 1 innocent person prevents the murder or 100 innocent people.... so I’m uncomfortable with it.
However I suspect we have no such data and that it may be at least practically impossible to ever arrive at that data?
Touching on another poster’s point: Personally I do think it should be a criminal act to have real paedophilic material that shows harm to a child. To me it doesn’t matter if you paid for it or not, somewhere along the chain a child was harmed, OK not directly by you but by someone. However I do not think you should be judged to be as guilty as the person that took the photos, arranged the act and so on.
Z
Variable Constant
Another interesting point has been touched on: ephebophilia. My wife's grandmother (or was it great-grandmother) married at the ripe old age of 12, to a man old enough to have 12-year old kids by his first wife. My great-great-great grandmother was 14 when my great-great-grandfather was born. I'm sure, if we look back, most of us can find a slew of ancestors who, by today's standards, would have not been 'of age', having kids and marrying and doing all those things that, arbitrarily, we have come to apply to the 18-21 and older crowd alone.
Our modern culture has come to place an enormous emphasis on the statuatory age of consent/adulthood/etc., to the point that we've lost sight, largely, of the cultural standards of our ancestors. Not that this implies that it is somehow a 'bad thing' - after all, many of our ancestors insisted that children had no souls (nor did women), and that any child was a sex object until the soul entered their body, upon reaching adulthood (wasn't that the general opinion in Classic Roman society?). I think cultural changes are probably rather good.
But there is a basic biological problem that our society has yet to conquer: that people reach reproductive viability and maturity at an earlier age, quite often, than the arbitrary 'age of adulthood' established by our culture. I think this has had several observable effects on our lifestyles. For one thing, we're kept 'children' for far longer, meaning we learn adult responsibilities and duties later in life than previously; for another, we're coddled through those difficult years where our bodies are still trying to finish all those annoying changes - which could be good or bad, depending on your situation.
Our culture, however, has not managed to establish a uniform mental state for our age of adulthood. Let's face it: some of us were mature enough, mentally, to have been fine parents and responsible citizens as early as 13, 14, 15, etc. Others of us will never, no matter how old we get, be sexually mature or responsible, or civilly responsible. Mentally speaking, we give free liscence to have sex, drive cars, own handguns, vote, and drink to children, and deny these rights and priveleges to adults. Mentally speaking.
However, any prepubescent person has absolutely no business posing nude, semi-nude, or even provocatively for the camera, and no adult of any form should be exploiting prepubescent children in any way. Adolescents are another story: I think we would have to handle that on case-by-case situations, and I think that's a point largely left to the lawyers, judges, politicians, and philosophers of our time to handle.
On the subject of 'thought crimes': as much as it gives me the heebie-jeebies to say this, I don't think anyone should be 'locked up' for what goes on in their heads. Forced into treatment, yes - depending on what the problem is. I can understand, for example, if this admitted pedophile were made to undergo psychiatric treatment for his condition, and was placed on a protective watch list; understanding, of course, that psychiatry is far from a perfect science, and there is no guarantee that he would, in fact improve under treatment. But if this guy had been an ephebophile - which our culture makes no clear distinction concerning - I don't think he should have been forced into treatment at all. There is a sort of biological imperative to be attracted to women who are 'newly ripe', who have many years of reproductive viability left to them. Obviously, those of us who have had a few years under our belt recognize that older women have more experience and less inhibitions, and are therefore more fun; and the reproductive drives of our society have generally lessened in favor of other factors, allowing us to fully appreciate sex without the need to bear children. But the drive is certainly still there, and to punish someone for having a strong attraction to young, sexually viable females seems a violation of common sense.
As for the idea of fake child pornography, this is a very grey area in law, as I understand it. There is some question as to whether it constitutes child pornography to attach a child's face to a woman's body. I seem to recall that this instantly transformed ordinary, legal pornography into illegal pedophilic pornography. However, I also seem to recall that hentai - animated pornography, whose subjects are often young-adolescent and sometimes even prepubescent - is still quite legal, regardless of intent and subject matter. And text stories are, I believe, always considered legal - freedom of speech, and all that - so it seems like a double-standard of decency is being liberally applied. It could be argued, I suppose, that using a child's face causes potential harm to that child, when some actual pedophile recognized the child from some fake photo and crosses the line to 'help himself', whereas there is no child in danger from drawing Pokemon kids nude or writing about elementary sex education classes... supposedly.
I've sometimes wondered if stiff fines wouldn't be a more suitable punishment for possession charges, rather than jail time; but as is often the case with fine-oriented crimes, this might merely serve to tell the wealthy that owning such material is OK, as long as you can afford to pay the fines. This could, in turn, start an entire black market of child pornography designed for the wealthy - meaning more impetus to produce this stuff.
While we're on this subject, what's the deal with all these child-model sights? Is this stuff illegal, or not? I mean, some are clearly wrong - sights that offer nude images of prepubescent girls cannot possibly be legal (at least in the U.S.). But what about these web pages that feature girls in thong bikinis or lacey underwear? Is this legal, or not?
I was once directed to a website, which for decency's sake I will not give the URL for, that featured video clips of various young Russian women posing in swimwear and underwear. By 'young' I mean 10-14. Many of the sample clips featured the girls posing in such ways that their nipples were exposed, or the outermost edges of various naughty bids (just how much can a THONG hide, anyway), or they were posed in such a way that brief 'cookie shots' ensued... I was absolutely appalled, and reported the URL to a couple of Child Porn watch sites, but they all replied that, while yes these were disgusting, they were also protected by some international freedom of media law or other, and that, strictly speaking, they did not constitute 'child pronography'.
So we're dealing again with a huge section of grey matter - is it is or is it ain't???
(FWIW, my own attraction, oddly enough, is to images of pregnant women. Weird... I suppose, in part, the idea of verification that they are fertile, but then again, you can't get a pregnant woman pregnant, so... well, just weird.
)
OK, ok, TMI. But this whole thread is a can of worms - what's a few more? As long as Darat doesn't bring up that granny-porn stuff...
Our modern culture has come to place an enormous emphasis on the statuatory age of consent/adulthood/etc., to the point that we've lost sight, largely, of the cultural standards of our ancestors. Not that this implies that it is somehow a 'bad thing' - after all, many of our ancestors insisted that children had no souls (nor did women), and that any child was a sex object until the soul entered their body, upon reaching adulthood (wasn't that the general opinion in Classic Roman society?). I think cultural changes are probably rather good.
But there is a basic biological problem that our society has yet to conquer: that people reach reproductive viability and maturity at an earlier age, quite often, than the arbitrary 'age of adulthood' established by our culture. I think this has had several observable effects on our lifestyles. For one thing, we're kept 'children' for far longer, meaning we learn adult responsibilities and duties later in life than previously; for another, we're coddled through those difficult years where our bodies are still trying to finish all those annoying changes - which could be good or bad, depending on your situation.
Our culture, however, has not managed to establish a uniform mental state for our age of adulthood. Let's face it: some of us were mature enough, mentally, to have been fine parents and responsible citizens as early as 13, 14, 15, etc. Others of us will never, no matter how old we get, be sexually mature or responsible, or civilly responsible. Mentally speaking, we give free liscence to have sex, drive cars, own handguns, vote, and drink to children, and deny these rights and priveleges to adults. Mentally speaking.
However, any prepubescent person has absolutely no business posing nude, semi-nude, or even provocatively for the camera, and no adult of any form should be exploiting prepubescent children in any way. Adolescents are another story: I think we would have to handle that on case-by-case situations, and I think that's a point largely left to the lawyers, judges, politicians, and philosophers of our time to handle.
On the subject of 'thought crimes': as much as it gives me the heebie-jeebies to say this, I don't think anyone should be 'locked up' for what goes on in their heads. Forced into treatment, yes - depending on what the problem is. I can understand, for example, if this admitted pedophile were made to undergo psychiatric treatment for his condition, and was placed on a protective watch list; understanding, of course, that psychiatry is far from a perfect science, and there is no guarantee that he would, in fact improve under treatment. But if this guy had been an ephebophile - which our culture makes no clear distinction concerning - I don't think he should have been forced into treatment at all. There is a sort of biological imperative to be attracted to women who are 'newly ripe', who have many years of reproductive viability left to them. Obviously, those of us who have had a few years under our belt recognize that older women have more experience and less inhibitions, and are therefore more fun; and the reproductive drives of our society have generally lessened in favor of other factors, allowing us to fully appreciate sex without the need to bear children. But the drive is certainly still there, and to punish someone for having a strong attraction to young, sexually viable females seems a violation of common sense.
As for the idea of fake child pornography, this is a very grey area in law, as I understand it. There is some question as to whether it constitutes child pornography to attach a child's face to a woman's body. I seem to recall that this instantly transformed ordinary, legal pornography into illegal pedophilic pornography. However, I also seem to recall that hentai - animated pornography, whose subjects are often young-adolescent and sometimes even prepubescent - is still quite legal, regardless of intent and subject matter. And text stories are, I believe, always considered legal - freedom of speech, and all that - so it seems like a double-standard of decency is being liberally applied. It could be argued, I suppose, that using a child's face causes potential harm to that child, when some actual pedophile recognized the child from some fake photo and crosses the line to 'help himself', whereas there is no child in danger from drawing Pokemon kids nude or writing about elementary sex education classes... supposedly.
I've sometimes wondered if stiff fines wouldn't be a more suitable punishment for possession charges, rather than jail time; but as is often the case with fine-oriented crimes, this might merely serve to tell the wealthy that owning such material is OK, as long as you can afford to pay the fines. This could, in turn, start an entire black market of child pornography designed for the wealthy - meaning more impetus to produce this stuff.
While we're on this subject, what's the deal with all these child-model sights? Is this stuff illegal, or not? I mean, some are clearly wrong - sights that offer nude images of prepubescent girls cannot possibly be legal (at least in the U.S.). But what about these web pages that feature girls in thong bikinis or lacey underwear? Is this legal, or not?
I was once directed to a website, which for decency's sake I will not give the URL for, that featured video clips of various young Russian women posing in swimwear and underwear. By 'young' I mean 10-14. Many of the sample clips featured the girls posing in such ways that their nipples were exposed, or the outermost edges of various naughty bids (just how much can a THONG hide, anyway), or they were posed in such a way that brief 'cookie shots' ensued... I was absolutely appalled, and reported the URL to a couple of Child Porn watch sites, but they all replied that, while yes these were disgusting, they were also protected by some international freedom of media law or other, and that, strictly speaking, they did not constitute 'child pronography'.
So we're dealing again with a huge section of grey matter - is it is or is it ain't???
(FWIW, my own attraction, oddly enough, is to images of pregnant women. Weird... I suppose, in part, the idea of verification that they are fertile, but then again, you can't get a pregnant woman pregnant, so... well, just weird.
)OK, ok, TMI. But this whole thread is a can of worms - what's a few more? As long as Darat doesn't bring up that granny-porn stuff...
Ryokan said:
How does that follow from what I said?
Mycroft
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Dogdoctor said:
But having urges is not a crime. Molesting children is. Viewing child porn is.
Technically, it's not child porn if the people photographed are not children.
I think the person should be commended for finding a way to satisfy his urges without victimizing children. His actions are no more harmful than viewing adult porn, and should be treated as such.
Dogdoctor said:
No, he admitted to being attracted to young girls, but said nothing of molestation, rape or any other sexual act with them. Following your logic, anyone who is attracted to a dead body should be locked up for being a necrophiliac.
Mycroft
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zaayrdragon said:
So long as it involves only consenting adults and there is no physical harm, go for it. There are all kinds of fetishes that I personally find disgusting (or maybe just don't understand) but I don't see that as any reason why someone else shouldn't enjoy it.
zaayrdragon said:
Earlier this year, Norway toughened up their laws regarding child pornography, so that fake child porn, drawn child porn (hentai included) and text files is considered equally as real child porn.
Child porn here is defined as porn (videos, pictures, drawings or stories) involving people under the ag of 18. The irony is that the age of consent here is 16.
So I can do whatever I want sexually with a 16-year-old, but if I read about it I can be sent to jail
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
Ryokan said:Earlier this year, Norway toughened up their laws regarding child pornography, so that fake child porn, drawn child porn (hentai included) and text files is considered equally as real child porn.
Child porn here is defined as porn (videos, pictures, drawings or stories) involving people under the ag of 18. The irony is that the age of consent here is 16.
So I can do whatever I want sexually with a 16-year-old, but if I read about it I can be sent to jail
Is Romeo and Juliet banned in Norway, then? Juliet is underage.
Dogdoctor
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Now I am no expert at child pornography but I imagine there is a lot of different kinds of child pornography. I have first hand seen some when I was a kid. My good friend's family ran a car rental and he was cleaning a car and found a manila envelope with child porn in it. There were pictures of children engaged in all kinds of un-childlike behavior and other ones with them just standing around or bathing or changing their clothes. So the question is why the law? What seems obvious to me is that it is not only about stopping people from forcing kids to do these unnatural or natural acts. Otherwise pedophiles would all use pictures of kids doing ordinary day to day things where they weren't forced to do anything abnormal. So the child porn laws were meant to catch and stop pedophiles. So if they were using fake child pictures that would be just as good of a reason to arrest them.Ceritus said:
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
Dogdoctor said:
What about art? How many nude cherubs are in Renaissance paintings? Are they child pornography? Apparently in your view anything is child pornography if a pedophile looks at it and is aroused. So if a pedophile finds the cover of the earlier Harry Potter books arousing, it's child porn?
Dogdoctor
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Unfortuantely we don't have aveneues to force someone into treatment for desires to have sex with children unless through the legal system. I don't know if any of you have known any criminals really well. I have known a few. The ones who scare me the most are those who say "Oh well I got 3 years for that crime. I will be out in 1 year most likely and they did not catch me for the other 50 crimes I commited." Our legal system is designed to protect us from criminals and doesn't do a good job of it. I think we need to protect our children even more. I am willing to give up any right I may have to look at child porn in order to allow a larger number of pedophiles being caught. If we need scientific data then there needs to be some studies done, however common sense can suffice for now.
crimresearch
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I too, would like to see more evidence that it is a criminal offense to have pictures of adults that had been made to appear younger than the models actually were.
I seem to recall that some country was trying to pass such legislation, but not how they intended to make it workable.
Maybe you've got the intent, but where is the requisite guilty act? And where does the slippery slop stop?
Is Burt Reynolds' famous pose on the bearskin rug kiddie porn?
Or pictures of AB/DLs?
An 18 year old looking like a 17 year old?
Or as mentioned earlier, a 30 or 40 year old Emmanuel Lewis looking like a 7 year old?
I seem to recall that some country was trying to pass such legislation, but not how they intended to make it workable.
Maybe you've got the intent, but where is the requisite guilty act? And where does the slippery slop stop?
Is Burt Reynolds' famous pose on the bearskin rug kiddie porn?
Or pictures of AB/DLs?
An 18 year old looking like a 17 year old?
Or as mentioned earlier, a 30 or 40 year old Emmanuel Lewis looking like a 7 year old?
billydkid
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Significant point
Does anyone else agree that this is a very significant point: By equating looking at images of child porn with actually abusing a child we are unconsciously diminishing the distinction between actually harming a person and not? Are we not lessening the sense of the awfulness of harming a child by making roughly equivalent to an activity that is not harming anyone, in and of itself? Don't you think it is important to draw a very distinct line between activities which we merely find very offensive and activities which actually harm the welfare of another person? I am assuming the mere looker is not in anyway supporting the activity of the child abuser. Instances where a person is renumerating a child abuser are a different matter.
Should the act of merely viewing material be a crime? If so, then why isn't it a crime for FBI agents to scour the web for this material and to maintain it on their computors. Of course the answer is that they are not using the material for gratification. It is their job, but who is to say that there aren't one or two of them who don't find their work more gratifying than others? Is the real crime not, in this sort of case, what one thinks or feels. Want a society where there are thought crimes? Should a person be labeled a criminal merely for his offensive preferences even if he has not victimized anyone? To my mind, I think it is important to maintain the position that there is a very great distinction between harming or participating in the harming of another person and activities which, however deeply offensive to virtually everyone, harm noone.
Dr Adequate said:
Does anyone else agree that this is a very significant point: By equating looking at images of child porn with actually abusing a child we are unconsciously diminishing the distinction between actually harming a person and not? Are we not lessening the sense of the awfulness of harming a child by making roughly equivalent to an activity that is not harming anyone, in and of itself? Don't you think it is important to draw a very distinct line between activities which we merely find very offensive and activities which actually harm the welfare of another person? I am assuming the mere looker is not in anyway supporting the activity of the child abuser. Instances where a person is renumerating a child abuser are a different matter.
Should the act of merely viewing material be a crime? If so, then why isn't it a crime for FBI agents to scour the web for this material and to maintain it on their computors. Of course the answer is that they are not using the material for gratification. It is their job, but who is to say that there aren't one or two of them who don't find their work more gratifying than others? Is the real crime not, in this sort of case, what one thinks or feels. Want a society where there are thought crimes? Should a person be labeled a criminal merely for his offensive preferences even if he has not victimized anyone? To my mind, I think it is important to maintain the position that there is a very great distinction between harming or participating in the harming of another person and activities which, however deeply offensive to virtually everyone, harm noone.
