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Comment by alsetmusic | Hacker News Reader

>> 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.

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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.

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

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