[Micand]

The issue of how to deal with people who seek out child porn troubles me. The tone accompanying an article such as this inevitably vilifies those who consume such material, as though this is a clear moral issue. This implies all of us have pedophilic urges, with only those who lack the moral fortitude to resist going on to seek out child porn. But this is not accurate -- I don't have the least desire to view such images, but instead feel a visceral disgust. Most others, I imagine, have the same reaction.

People who want to view sexually explicit images of children are sick, not immoral. They suffer from a deviant urge from which the rest of us are free. The issue, then, should not be how to punish them, but how to cure them of this urge. (Whether such a cure is possible is another matter altogether -- our sexual desires exert regrettable power over our behaviours.) In conjunction, we must do everything we can to halt the dissemination of such material, just as Microsoft is doing here. By shifting our reaction from wanting to punish consumers of child porn to wanting to rehabilitate them, we will encourage more to come forward for treatment, ultimately reducing the amount of such material that is consumed, and thus the number of children harmed in its creation.

[mistercow]

I appreciate that you are trying to take a reasonable stand here, but I do think there are some things wrong with your reasoning.

First of all, it is not at all clear that mere consumption of child pornography leads to the production of more child pornography. This gets asserted all the time, but I have never seen anyone produce a shred of evidence for it. Because people tend to see red at this point and stop reading closely, I want to be very, very clear that I am not advocating child abuse in any way. Rather, I think that focusing on consumers of child pornography is a waste of energy that would be better directed at the producers.

When I press people on this (which is not usually a popular move), the response I always get is along the lines of "they wouldn't make it if people weren't watching it", which is, in addition to begging the question, totally at odds with what we know about human sexuality in general. Look at non-pedophiles and you'll find no shortage of people documenting their sexual experiences in various ways that are never meant to be public. Hell, the whole "revenge porn" thing can only exist because people enjoy documenting their sexuality. Perhaps if you eliminated consumption of child pornography, so that the producers of it were truly shouting into the void, you would cut down on some of it. But that's not going to happen, and there's no middle ground. As long as they have some audience, those seeking an exhibitionist thrill will keep doing it.

And if CP stopped existing, would that really plausibly lead to less child abuse? I seriously doubt it. It seems overwhelmingly likely that people who abuse children on camera are doing so primarily because they like to abuse children. Yes, having images of their abuse float around the internet probably adds to the child's psychological pain. But that seems like kind of a drop in the bucket compared to the abuse itself, and the globs of shame and disempowerment that our society smears on victims.

And that's my point here. We waste a tremendous number of resources on trying to solve what is a fairly minor part of the problem. Why? Well, as far as law enforcement is concerned, I suspect that it's because it's easier to catch the consumers (there are more of them), and the rest of us cheer just as hard for either. As far as the rest of us are concerned, I reckon that part of it is that we need someone to pin our anger on for the injustice that's happening to these children. And, reaching into the darker parts of our psyches, we really love to see someone get stomped down, and not have to feel guilty about cheering for it, or worried that we might be next (for evidence of this, pick a random page from any history book and start reading).

Now sometimes, every once in a while, someone notices that consumers of CP are people, like you did. But seeing the cognitive failure is often not enough to recognize the damage that it has done. People's brains are consistency engines, and wrong ideas tend to pollute the ideas they're connected to, like a ripple of wrongness. It's natural, then, when you see a problem with the way people are thinking, to smooth over the inconsistency by saying "well, we should focus on curing them instead of punishing them", and to miss that we're actually focusing on entirely the wrong part of the problem.

And that brings me to one last point: pedophilia is very likely not something we're going to cure - at least, not until we're able to do extensive, direct brain modification. A lot of effort has been put into trying to cure paraphilias and sexual orientations, and it just doesn't seem to be something you can do.

But what we might be able to do is help people who are sexually attracted to children to find harmless outlets for their urges, and teach them to handle them without acting on them. It would also help if we could stop filling them with shame and guilt over something they can't control.

And it would help even more if we could stop filling the victims with shame and guilt over something they can't control. When someone says something like "child abuse is soul murder", we shouldn't let that slide, and we certainly shouldn't nod sadly in agreement to such a fucked up sentiment. We have to stop telling people that they're broken, that they're lost causes, no matter how much delicious anger at the perpetrators it stirs in us. It's selfish.

And it's also selfish to bask in our moral superiority as we obsess over the easiest and most futile part of the problem.

[airnomad]

I just can't understand how mere reading, watching or even private storing any content could be illegal.

I just don't like where this (or that NSA thing) goes and I don't think trading freedom for safety is neccessary a very good deal.