thought-crime?

[tamaranth]

Second Life 'child abuse' claim

I agree that the exchange of 'real' (as opposed to virtual) pornography is criminal and immoral: but I'm less definite on the criminality of virtual abuse and virtual pornography -- "so called "age play" groups that revolve around the abuse of virtual children", in the words of the feature.

Is virtual crime victimless? Does it harm others? Is it a safety-valve? or preferable to people committing (or planning) those crimes in real life?

There are a great many things that are illegal in reality and legal (even favoured) in game-worlds: mass murder, theft, reckless driving, cruelty to animals, slave-trading, prostitution. I am thinking about what makes virtual pornography a real-world crime.

Comments

[ladymoonray.livejournal.com]

That's very odd. I can absolutely understand the difficulty with the exchange of real child pornography. That's wrong, wherever the exchange takes place, because a child would have been harmed in the making of it. For that reason, I can understand why the Second Lifers have to be tracked down and prosecuted.

But virtual child abuse - I'm having trouble getting my head around whether it's harmful of itself, or not. I'm amazed that Germany has an actual sentence for it, though; that seems amazingly progressive. I wonder if it really is a sentence for virtual child abuse, or whether that activity incidentally falls within the sentence for an existing crime.

[ajshepherd.livejournal.com]

Why is it that everything I've ever read about Second Life makes me think people really need to get a first one?

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Where's the dividing line between realistic CGI representations of illegal acts and grainy video footage of the real thing?

The answer is that UK law makes no distinction, and the issue has existed for over a century: images can be created by hand as well as by camera, and anyone can hire actors who look a lot younger than they are - who can of course simulate rather than commit an illegal act...

So the law is about images depicting illegal acts, and a Second-Life sequence that depicted underage sex would be in clear breach of the law.

As for the morality of it all, English law has a sound moral principle which is difficult to define in practice: we forbid material likely to 'corrupt and deprave'. I believe that an immersive reality that allows people to develop and act out fantasies of sex with children is doing precisely that.

If someone has a fascination with children that has sexual overtones, that's the worst thing that they could do - and by the time they sought help from a psychiatrist, they would be thoroughly conditioned to sexual arousal by children - 'real' as well as virtual - and very difficult to treat. Corrupted and depraved, indeed.

[tamaranth.livejournal.com]

Where's the dividing line between realistic CGI representations of illegal acts and grainy video footage of the real thing?

The law may make no distinction, but the dividing line should be clear: whether or not an actual person was the victim of the illegal act depicted.

As for 'the law is about images depicting illegal acts' ... I'm not convinced. Does that mean the recent series of Barnardo's adverts, including a child injecting itself with heroin, were illegal?

One person's corruption is another person's creepy fantasy. I suspect there are quite a lot of sites (words, images, video, music) on the internet that are neither legal nor moral, but nevertheless allows someone to get a thrill from imagining the behaviour described.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

The existing law already criminalises images where nobody has been harmed; photoshop a girl's head and torso onto a woman's nude lower body and you have created an indecent pseudo-photograph. But proposed changes to the law (see my other comment) could widen the scope for this enormously.

There are two usual arguments for criminalising such material:

- It is liable to reinforce paedophile tendencies.

- It is used for grooming children prior to sex abuse.

I am not sure how much the first argument has been validated (the counter-argument is that it could act as a relatively benign substitute) but the second does seem to be a serious concern.

[andrewducker]

So surely criminalising the use of it to groom children would be the answer?

(I'm sure that's already illegal, of course)

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

The Home Office has issued a consultation document (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/cons-2007-depiction-sex-abuse?view=Binary) discussing whether non-photographic visual depictions of child sex abuse should be criminalised. Reading it, the key concern seems to be extreme animé-style material or CGI, but the latter clearly extends into MMORPG avatars. At present, the law bans photographs and 'pseudo-photographs' - simulated images that appear real - but is silent on the matter of non-realistic images.

I can see several problems with this, not least of which is a huge blurring of what is and is not acceptable material. Bearing in mind that a little-appreciated consequence of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 was to raise the cut-off age for child pornography from 16 to 18, could this make any drawing of a teenage girl in a sexy pose potentially suspect? And the less said about furry pix - especially since anthropomorphised animals are often seen as having child-like attributes - the better...