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

[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)