This must be serious because he didn’t roll out the usual defence, “Lets us all admit that mistakes have been made. Rather than apportioning blame, we should concentrate on the valuable lessons that can be learned from this situation and move on…”. That’s what the ConDems normally roll out, unless Cameron says the accused has his “full support”.
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Have you considered that the child porn is of REAL CHILDREN, who now have to live the rest of their life with the knowledge that their image is being shared amongst hundreds (or more) eyes? And they have no control over it?
Child porn IS child abuse. Child porn isn’t just an image.
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Snuff?
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I’m sure that the definition of “extreme BDSM” can be stretched to cover snuff. It is, after all, a political definition.
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Citation, please.
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BDSM is actually fully consensual, no matter how “extreme”. What you’re looking for is rape. Hooray! Rape jokes! /s
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I always thought that Satan was male.
I recently had the opportunity to listen to a talk given by Corinne Dettmeijer-Vermeulen, the Dutch National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings and Sexual Violence against Children. Apparently the preferred term nowadays is “child abuse images,” which is still kind of vague. The desire is to emphasize that the creation of child porn is child abuse, however you feel about that.
One of the interesting/surprising elements of her discussion is that most people who are oriented towards minors are passive and never actually act out their desires/fantasies of having sex/abusing minors, and that most actual acts of abuse are committed by those who are not particularly attracted to minors per se but have access to them and see them as easier targets for sexual exploitation: “preferential” or “committed” offenders actually commit fewer physical abuses than “opportunistic” or “situational” offenders. Can’t find a copy of her presentation, but there’s some info in section 1.4.2 of her report on child porn, as well as on page 124.
Harsh… but… no, too harsh…
So, let’s say just for the sake of argument (this doesn’t need to be particularly plausible), you’re enjoying some porn featuring an eighteen year old ‘woman’. Not many folks would get up in arms over that. Pretty much everyone would consider it porn.
But wait, it turns out she had fake ID or something, and she’s really seventeen and nine months, which of course makes her a ‘child’.
Suddenly, whole different ballpark and what everybody thought seemed very much like porn was actually the documentation of child abuse, despite in this possible hypothetical it being a case of an aspiring porn actress being overeager to join the workforce. No overlap whatsoever, it’s all just plain black and white, you say.
A journalist would have called me a ‘man’, but I didn’t suddenly feel like one the day I turned eighteen. Reality is a hell of a lot fuzzier than legality.
Maybe we should be a bit more creeped out by the teen genre of porn, and a little less freaked-out by images of post-pubescent adolescents?
It just seems more than a little ridiculous to carry on about some arbitrary line in the sand as if it’s woven into the fabric of the universe like pi.
Very little, if anything in reality is a case of black/white; even less so in the sphere of humanity.
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What I was thinking is that, it may be consensual, but ,like participating in any kind of porn making, it must be uncomfortable and degrading. Both experiences that I feel would benefit our lords and masters 
Its MILF all the way for me; and I don’t mean the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. That was a confusing blind date, let me tell you.
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Sure, whatevs.
What anyone here prefers is irrelevant to my point, of course.
The fact is, you can find teen porn with young women in fake freckles, pigtails and school uniforms sucking lollypops, which is apparently perfectly acceptable, while the sword of Damocles hovers above any minors shooting naked selfies.
also these laws were probably made before the iphone and the ubiquitous cameras
Mostly. However, cameras have been nearly ubiquitous in the US for almost a century. The ease of replicating and distributing images is much newer. The spirit of the law isn’t altered by technological developments, though.
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yes, but children more often than not, did not have such an easy access to a camera. And if they did, the more conservative (?) society did not allow for nude selfies. Hence a 15 year old distributing naked selfies must have been a rarity. I do not think that the law accounts for that currently.
You make an extremely valid and necessary point. Mental sexual maturity can basically be ignored in favor of physical sexual maturity, especially given the dearth of available pornography. Exploitation be damned, nuts MUST be busted!
The ONLY paper carrying this on the front page is the Mail, FFS. It’s very annoying.
Dear BoingBoing:
I need some help here. For a long time, I used “what the fuck”[1] to express my incredulity in cases like this. But some time around the Snowden leaks, I realized it was just not adequate for the job.
Since then, I have been using “what the actual fuck”[2]. But now I can see that it, too, just can’t keep up with the hectic pace of modern WTAF-heavy life. I think I need a new thing to say when I am so utterly gobsmacked by some act of chutzpah or blatant stupidity, something that adequately expresses my complete bamboozlement with my fellow human beings.
I’d like to know if anyone has a possible substitute. In any event, I will be testing out the following expressions in future:
“Holy shitsnacks” (too general?)
“What the actual frickin’ fuck?” (prolix?)
“I have been gobsmacked right in my most sensitive gob” (also prolix)
“Reality just sharted again”
“Bam! I am boozled!”
[1] “WTF”, in polite company.
[2] Since it is not well-known, I don’t use “WTAF” as an alias in polite company; I’ve had to spell it out too many times, which defeats the purpose.
You can’t run a real scientific study on this, but we know most people become sexually active before they turn 18, and in a developed society like the US, all have access to digital cameras. We also know that a majority of adults take erotic photos of themselves or their partners. Furthermore, we know no magical transformation happens on one’s 18th birthday, so we can assume that the behavior of those who are developed but under 18 is roughly the same as legal adults. So it is perfectly reasonable to estimate that double digit % of young people today of sexual age possess or have possessed “illegal” photos of themselves or their peers.
Cases of adults abusing minors aren’t nearly as common. If crime data is any indication, only a fraction of a percent of the population rape minors, and only a fraction of them record evidence.
It’s not something we openly talk about, due to the combined stigma of sex as a private matter and of the act being illegal, and the extreme taboos against youth sexuality, but young people experimenting with creating pornography is probably ubiquitous. I know that in every intimate relationship I have been in, once I got comfortable enough to talk to my partner about such things, my partner admitted to taking such photos, and sometimes sharing them. I was underage a decade ago, at a time when digital cameras and cell phones were universal among the preppy crowd, but had not yet become so common among the rest of society. Today the trickle down is complete. People in their teens, and people who were in upper-middle class families and are now in their 20s know what’s up. Older folks largely have no clue.
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