Laurabelle's Blog

This piece in the Times Online entitled Child abuse, or a crime in the eye of the beholder? (link thanks to Neil Gaiman) touches me, cognitively rather than affectively, in a couple of ways. I would say that it makes some good points, but its effect on me is really much more than can be expressed in those trite words.

The article is about child pornography and the fact that in UK law, downloading pornographic pictures of children to one's computer is equated with the creation of those pictures, whereas looking at a physical copy of that picture (or looking at an electronic copy, for that matter) is perfectly legal.

One of the first points the article makes is, Make a criminal of someone in his own imagination, make him feel he has already crossed his personal Rubicon, and control over his subsequent behaviour is lost not gained. I very much agree with this argument. If the object of law is to prevent people from doing things that would hurt others, then the way to do that is not to criminalize them before they have actually done anything (especially since people who look at the same pictures in another medium are not criminalized). I have thought for years that the way to have more control over drug use is legalization, which would allow standardization of drug quality and dosage, more thorough distribution of sterile needles, and more open treatment for recovering drug users, among other things. Laws are not about ideology; they are about manipulating people.

A good example of this sort of utilitarian philosophy is liquor laws in some town, I don't remember where, maybe West Virginia. I forget. The point is, it was illegal to sell beer and wine but not hard liquor. Beer and wine were illegal for religious reasons, but the hard stuff was legal for public-health reasons, because otherwise people would just make moonshine and end up poisoning themselves or whatever.

The article's author, Matthew Parris, also describes three arguments used by supporters of the law. He calls these arguments Protection of Elephants, Catch Them Before They Start, and Punish These Beasts Now. (Read the article for a full elaboration of each; I will not repeat it here.) I think I can truthfully say that I've never used the first argument, but I plead guilty to the second. I realize that it doesn't really stand up, in that I have no real evidence, and that in fact my inclinations against child pornography fit into the last category. (I must admit that my inclination is against pornography of any type, whether computer-generated or using live models, male or female, adult or child. My reasons are a sort of vague distaste and a sense that it portrays the photographed person as an object rather than as an individual.)

This also reminds me of something co-MLIS student Michael Harkovitch said in relation to computer-generated child pornography. If you're a librarian and someone is at a computer looking at this stuff, you're not going to stop and ask whether it was made using real children. It's a really gut reaction, and it highlights the problem of ideals of freedom of speech and privacy and such, even or particularly in a library setting. Librarians are human, after all.

I'm kind of rambling at this point. I'm just trying to figure out where I really stand on this issue. I know I don't like pornography, but that really has nothing to do with it. I don't like olives either, but I don't object to the fact that other people eat them. The real difference is that kids are hurt in the making of child pornography, which can be alleviated with computer-generated images (but how would it be possible to tell what's computer-generated and what's not?). There is no proven causal relationship between viewing this stuff and abusing children. My reasons are debunked; I have no choice but to concede to logic.