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Comment by snakeanus | Hacker News Reader

> I overwhelming majority of child porn sites either require payment

I honestly doubt that but even then the money would go to the site owners, not to child rapists directly. Anyhow, as I said in another post we could simply also hold accountable these who pay for it - after all the act of paying for it would cause the harm, not the data by itself.

> one to provide some child porn of their own as a barrier to entry

Create their own or just post some of what they have collected? Only the first one causes harm.

> the knowledge that their abuse is being watched by people for sexual pleasure all around the world years after it happened is a profound source of psychological trauma

I fail to see how they would know that they are being watched or how watching it being illegal eases their thoughts.

> It harms them.

No, only physical actions like rape could harm them, distributing data on the dark web does not.

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> Only the first one causes harm.

Untrue. We know from interviews of the children, now adults, featured in the images of child sexual abuse that the distribution of those images in itself causes harm.

> No, only physical actions like rape could harm them, distributing data on the dark web does not.

Clearly bollocks.

> that the distribution of those images in itself causes harm.

How do they know that the distribution of these images took place? How did that even affect them in their life?

I honestly doubt that this is the case - and even then it would be only an argument against distributing it, not watching it.

Do you think that people who survived child abuse are unable to use the internet or read media? It's easy to find information about specific examples of child pornography by reading public records of court cases, and people who have survived child abuse are just as likely to make use of the dark web or be aware of porn related maters as anyone else.

People who have been through such experiences typically have extensive and long-running contacts with the legal and law enforcement systems, and at the ry least tend to maintain an awareness of their original abuser's custodial situation.

Just as there are networks of people who like child porn, there are networks of people who monitor its production and distribution. A few unfortunate people go on to become consumers or perpetrators of abuse in turn because they are drawn seek out imagery of what happened to them.

Be aware too that in many cases access to child porn collections are not traded for money, but for the submission of new material, so the distribution of it directly incentivizes further abuse.

>> It harms them.

> No, only physical actions like rape could harm them, distributing data on the dark web does not.

Does that mean that mental / emotional trauma from being robbed at gunpoint is not harm if a physical assault does not occur?

I have been robbed at gunpoint. I was robbed by someone who I met through a third party (not randomly on the street, but at my home). Police arrested the robber after I called 911, but he was released for reasons not easily summarized.

One month later, I pulled into a gas station and saw the perpetrator in the parking lot. I immediately drove home and had a panic attack.

By your argument, no harm was caused. The psychological impact, however, was very real to me.

Edit: formatting.

You were harmed in the real world by being robbed at gunpoint. This is nothing like what I am arguing.

I think you're going about this wrong. The difference is what harm is "valid"; if I laugh at you and humiliate you, it may indeed make you upset and traumatized, and I think it may be morally or ethically wrong for me to do that - but should that mean that there is a law against that?

At some point we draw the line, and in almost all other respects the line is drawn elsewhere - in that mere knowledge of an act occuring is not sufficient to make that act illegal.

The equivalent here would be the fact that the robber is in the gas station, I think? Should the robber not be allowed to be anywhere where he may even be seen by you? In the same way, even though the abuse of the child was problematic, should someone who views the abuse be disallowed from doing so? And further, there is even more disconnect here, making your analogy much weaker - what does the victim know of the instance in which someone views that recording?

All of these apologias seem to depend on the argument that the abuse victim doesn't know when someone else watches the video, and therefore suffers no injury.

Now, they may not know in real time, but yeah they can find out. The contents of child-porn collections are documented in the legal proceedings of court cases, for example. People who consume child porn have social networks of their own, and discuss and comment upon that material in the same way that enthusiasts do anything else on the internet. And as I've mentioned, access to child porn collections/communities is often purchased by the submission of new material, both to bind the would-be viewer with ties of shared criminal liability and to feed the demand for novelty. Thus, the commoditization of child porn incentivizes the production of more of it.

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