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Comment by 75j | Hacker News Reader

Here's mine...

The FBI discovers a child prostitution ring and infiltrates it, but keeps running it and forces the children to have sex for a month to ensnare more customers.

If one accepts the idea of re-victimization, then I'm not sure how what the FBI did here can be considered acceptable, or any different than the analogy above.

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I think the idea in this case is that there isn't re-victimization. The point of these sting operations is to lead to less victims overall.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. If you accept the idea that a child is re-victimized by the viewing of child pornography (which, as I understand it, is one of the justifications for the criminalization of viewing child pornography), then I don't see how what the FBI did can be considered acceptable.

I agree with your logic except the last clause. The FBI are presumably trying to minimise the overall perceived harm caused by the viewing of child pornography, and have judged that enabling some viewing initially will help prevent a greater amount of future viewing.

True, but 1) I question heavily whether this operation will actually prevent a greater amount of future viewing, and 2) would anybody accept that sort of means-justify-ends approach in the context of my initial analogy of continuing to operate a child prostitution ring?

1) Seems like a fair question, but 2) just seems like a completely unfair analogy. Perhaps it's own lack of imagination, but I can't see how someone viewing an image is equivalent to someone having sex with a child prostitute. Is this really the argument? To answer your question, no, I don't think anyone would accept that.

Re-victimization is the (IMO fairly reasonable) ideology that the government uses to criminalize CP. Therefore it's hypocritical for the FBI to operate by a different standard. If re-victimization is valid, the FBI is as bad as any CP distributor. If it's not valid, the FBI has no business serving up malware like this.

Makes sense. Somehow the FBI being philosophically inconsistent doesn't surprise me.

Does it lead to less victims?

From all I have heard and read on the subject of sex crimes, the research and the government policy has nothing to do with each other. Worse, some feminist movements have successfully lobbied to prevent research on criminal sexual behavior, on the principle that deeming such behavior as abnormal will result in lower jail sentence for criminals.

Instead we have this abnormal-but-not-abnormal behavior happening "randomly" by totally "healthy" individuals, and there is very little to explain why it happens or how we can reduce it.

I think there are some pretty strong signs that we don't understand deviant sexuality well, especially with regards to taboo attractions such as hebephilia and pedophilia.

More research I think would go a long way.

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