Let's instead examine what really is the cause for concern--is it merely a child being pictured during a stimulating activity? Or is it when that activity is being forced on them? If it's the former, it would be just as wrong to picture a child playing baseball as it is to picture him playing doctor. But that rendition doesn't lend itself to intuition, and it doesn't seem to do justice to the children who are brutalized into performing sexual acts in other, more severe forms of child pornography. It merely trivializes abuse to the "greater sin" of a child simply seeking pleasure before the eyes of an adult. And yet, ironically, that's how most people would prefer we structure our rationales. Simply put, most people believe that a child pleasuring themselves is as bad as a child being brutalized and drugged into performing a heinous act, and don't see that the former trivializes the abuse of the later.
But if sensible people can be in agreement that when force is involved (when children are brutalized, drugged, and manipulated to engage in a sexual activity to produce an image) that an unspeakable evil has occurred, our shock and judgment really only ought to apply to cases where the child is actually being forced, drugged, and brutalized into it, whether sexual or not, and not simply for any child who may accidentally have an erection in a candid photograph outside the photographer's control. If that isn't the case, then we can conclude that society is more afraid of a child's exhibition of natural sexual exploratory behaviors than it is of them being at risk of exploitation. The distortion on this topic is so high that it becomes difficult to know what side of that pendulum our society is on as we create justifications for the exploitation of children in the service of ridding the same.
We have to agree that there are levels of child pornography, and that the real thrust of our attention ought to be on killing the evil perpetuated where children are being forced, drugged, and brutalized, or in some way manipulated into a situation they most likely wouldn't willingly get themselves into had they known all the parameters. Those images and their producers ought to be where we exercise our main law enforcement thrust--where we ought to be going in with the hammer and taking no names. Consequently then, one would think we ought to be placing less emphasis lower "levels," like teens who consensually exchange nude pictures of themselves over their cellphones, or parents with nude pictures of their children in their possession (the horror!). But then it seems almost contradictory when one sees that so few child porn cartels are brought to justice, compared to how many teens are implicated in illegal behavior for possessing nude images of themselves and others, if not arrested and charged and stuck on sex offender registries. Studies have even found that more than third of all "sex crimes against children" are committed by juveniles themselves. How are these "children" being protected by the laws put there to protect them?
Nobody advocates for the rape of children in pictures, least of which those like me who merely criticize the efficacy of our child pornography legislation at reducing child rape, but that is often what critics are accused of doing. Questioning efficacy is like siding with the child molesters to some people, so it becomes better not to question it. And while that silence has been an effective "thought-stopping cliche" waged against those who value efficacy over political expediency by those who value the opposite, it has produced little else but the opposite. The prevailing silence on this issue--the "political expediency"--has turned our teenagers into child pornographers and our sexually active youths into "child rapists," not technology, not culture, and not anything else our adult population likes to blame the trend on. It was the broad brush strokes of the law--the politician running for office on simple-minded sentimental sloganeering, the sensationalist tabloid and drama television special--that caused us to pit children against their own nature and then criminalize or at least pathologize them for it.
The real issue of child pornography is not a dichotomy between siding with rapists or with the justice system, as it has often been made the case. It has to do with whether we treat parents who take a picture of their kids in the bath any different than the perverts who keep runaway children in a cage. It has to do with whether we ought to treat people who are visibly brutalizing children on film the same as those who may draw two crude stick figures of different sizes "doing it." In one instance, physical children are being exploited, and in another, a perceived audience for exploitation is being physically apprehended. In one instance, our focus is on stopping the show, in another, it's on apprehending the audience while the show goes on. The questions of strategy get ignored for the purposes of political expediency--so long as it looks like people are being busted, it makes no difference who gets selected for justice and what they have done to deserve it.
All images featuring children "could be" child pornography. That is how we've let them define it for us. "We know it when we see it," the US Supreme Court has declared. So if you have a picture of a child, it can be pornography in the right context. If you have a drawing of a fictional child, it can also be pornography. And until all those who create any images of children have been painted over with the broad brush strokes of "justice," it seems, our reservations will not rest. The definition of child porn has been de-specified so much that the "swift hammer of justice" is being brought down more against simulated CP possession cases, not because they establish some kind of audience for child porn, but because they are the most cost-effective for law enforcement to bring to justice and give the public what they want, which is "more busts."
Agencies involved in busting possessors are automatically granted the title "saviors of children," and yet they don't even have to do the real "dirty work" of breaking up an actual prostitution ring to receive such a distinction, much less rescue the traumatized kids (who can be such a drag on the psyche). Due to this diversion, law enforcement inevitably invests their interests into busting dad for picturing his child in the bath and then tries to sweep the child porn cartels under the rug as "too difficult" to assess or capture--although there are always "small strides" being made. The public is happy with this narrative, and we move right along to the next bust.
So we fret about at best and arrest at worst those who may carry Caravaggio's "Amor Vincit Omnia" on their computer--a painting of a naked boy of antiquity (Cupid), and on the other hand, for the photographer who intentionally caused actual children to cry in an series of shots for an exhibition, leave without a second look. Apparently, seeing the naked Cupid's genitals could be considered a crime where the infliction of emotional distress onto actual children (by giving them favored toys and forcefully taking them away before the camera), is perfectly acceptable. One has to wonder between these two events where the harm was done, and why it is so disproportional as to where where the justice fell. Have we truly become a society where it is acceptable to cause a child emotional distress on film (so long as it is not sexual), but reprehensible to possess a picture of a happy child, as in the case of Carravaggio's Cupid, simply nude?
Caravaggio, by the standards of his time was no child pornographer, but those who would argue it perhaps have missed the intention behind such a striking image and the eternal message that it teaches: "Amor Vincit Omnia," or "Love Conquers All." Those who attempt to clothe Cupid are themselves the ones possessed by his nudity. They make it the primary detail. They are as the Biblical Adam and Eve who have discovered they are naked--whose sin is in simply acknowledging the guilt of their nakedness. It actually takes a less depraved mind to see Amor Vincit Omnia for what it is: "Love Triumphant." Children are beautiful. Child porn is destructive. Children are naturally sexual. Child porn is exploitation. Beware of those who would disguise evil as good, but just as well beware those who look upon what is good and only see evil.
Causing emotional distress, drugging, brutalizing, and otherwise manipulating children to do things on camera against their will should always be the focus of our attention when prosecuting for the crime of child pornography. However, we are unable to do just that, and effectively rescue actual children from exploitation, if we continue our misguided quest to be the most politically expedient by simply apprehending the audience instead.
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