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Comment by Czarnian | Hacker News Reader

Banning child porn is hardly the beginning of a slippery slope to the iron fist of reddit censorship.

Child porn is probably the one subject that is so indefensible that no one in their right mind would consider it a great loss that a major distribution channel for it was turned off.

Not that I believe for a second that the degenerates won't figure out some way to either skirt the rules or find another friendly site to aid and abet them.

It's a good first step, even if it was made under extreme duress.

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There are people on Reddit trying to make the case that (based on a study from the University of Hawaii), access to child porn (or, more reasonably, artificial child porn like lolicon) can significantly reduce the rates of child sexual abuse:

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2010/11/30/legalizing.child...

By the way, I'm not in any way supporting that opinion, just presenting the case that some people are making. I personally think there are probably better ways to combat child abuse than giving people lolicon.

Sure, I would bet that there are better ways to prevent child abuse than making sure that pedophiles have access to no-children-involved virtual child porn. But would it be an improvement over the current situation? I think it might; there are definitely a lot of anonymous posts on Reddit from pedophiles who use erotic fiction and lolicon hentai to suppress desires for anything involving actual children.

The broader question is: how can we improve the pedophile situation? Banning "questionable content" is politically easy, but doesn't seem to do much to protect anyone; as long as the stuff is being produced, there will be way to obtain it. It would be nice if pedophiles could get effective counseling to minimize their chances of molesting children, but currently it's very hard for pedophiles to get any sort of counseling without being reported to the police. That hardly seems ideal.

Any ideas?

For starters, remove the mandatory reporting rules for psychiatrists. Currently, if a patient tells a psychiatrist that he has pedophile tendencies, the doctor is bound by law to report him to the authorities. This causes all of the pedophiles who don't want to be pedophiles to not seek treatment, increasing their risk of actually offending.

That's kind of surprising to me, patient confidentiality doesn't apply for psychiatrists?

It does, but most states/countries have some exception. For example, here in Australia a psychiatrist has to report someone they think is going to cause harm to themselves or others.

In the US, at least, see Tarasoff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarasoff_v._Regents_of_the_Univ...

I don't think the mandatory reporting rules (generally) require reporting for tendencies. I think the common rule is a report has to be made if there has been contact with a child. Of course, pedophiles are so vilified that I can't imagine too many are knocking on therapists' doors asking for help. And those that do certainly aren't advertising it.

Looks like the journalist didn't bother reading the study. The author fails to mention that where cp was de-banned resulting in a reduction in (reported) child abuse cases, that the reduction was temporary and was back up, and increasing, within a few years. Also plenty of correlation = causation going on in that article.

The author fails to mention that where cp was de-banned resulting in a reduction in (reported) child abuse cases, that the reduction was temporary and was back up, and increasing, within a few years.

How so?

The striking rise in reported child sex abuse depicted for the last half decade of the 1990s, according to notations and records in the Year Book of Ministry of Internal Affairs, do not apparently relate to the same types of child sex abuse recorded previously or afterward. They are believed to more closely reflect a concerted effort by the government to deal with a rise in child prostitution and the influx of foreign pimps, their prostitutes, and clients following the introduction of capitalism. This phenomenon seemed to be caused by the new economic situation and the society’s attempt to cope. Once the child prostitution surge was dealt with, the downward trend in overall reports of child sex abuse continued.

The author of the article fails to mention it. The author of the paper does, but fails to consider that maybe the decrease in reported cases in 1989 is just as spurious as the increases in the late 90s. The decrease in reported child sex abuse started in the 70's, according to the study.

The article on the Diamond report is terrible.

Fig 1 of the report shows a continual decline, then shortly after the liberalisation there is a 60-70% increase in child sexual abuse and massive rise in rape ...

I don't find that report's hypotheses well supported by the Czech Republic study. Will be interesting now they've de-liberalised to see how things pan out.

I understand that you are not supporting that opinion, but I would like to rebut anyway.

Whether it significantly reduces the rates of child sexual abuse is besides the point. If someone thinks it's okay for one child to be abused so another may or may not be abused later, they need to check into the nearest psychiatric ward immediately.

We are human beings, for fucks sake. We should be holding ourselves to a higher standard than that.

Someone should make a site to permanently enshrine all the bugfuck insanity these people are trying to use to defend the indefensible.

Not to mention the sinister side-effect of allowing CP to reduce abuse- last I heard, much of it is produced via children from second-world countries. So in the end, we internalize all the benefit within the USA, and externalize all the suffering to downtrodden nations and their children.

I see little reason why we couldn't ban CP which was produced with real children, but legalize CP which was not (e.g., cartoons, CGI, etc).

Note that /r/lolicon is one of the banned subreddits.

So in the end, we internalize all the benefit within the USA, and externalize all the suffering to downtrodden nations

Kind like what happens with industrial production, natural resources and democracy, then?

Nobody is excusing the abuse of children. The only thing being petitioned for the title of 'okay' is image linking.

But there are definite flaws in the plan, especially when it comes to the rights of the victims.

That's a distinction without a difference.

You make no distinction between actively hurting children and copying photos of someone else hurting a child in the past?

I recently made the same distinction on HN, but there's not much point to it because the Moral Majority has made real discussion of CP so toxic that pretty much everyone avoids it. The situation is so bad that your very question might get you branded as a "pedophile". I believe that what Reddit is doing represents a slippery slope, one made out of legal convenience, and that the above distinction, rather than issues of copyright, represents the real battlefield for online freedom of speech.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3560923

They began on the slippery slope - they didn't shut down some kiddy porn ring today, they shut down something that might be illegal. You can see kids in bikinis in movies, magazines including by their parent company [1], at the beach, etc.

Reddit's got a lot of content that might be illegal, that few people would be sad to see gone, and that the community as a whole would be a better class of people without.

[1] Is this CP if it's submitted to reddit? http://www.teenvogue.com/style/market/feature/2011/05/tribal...

"I would think banning something that may be illegal plants you pretty firmly on that slippery slope … "

Not sure I agree there. A forum (non-tech, it's actually a model-specific motorcycle forum) that I'm involved in has explicit rules against discussion of "politics, firearms, and police", not because it's illegal, but because there's such a strong track record of well intentioned discussions of those topics degenerating into arguments and fights that are _clearly_ not worth whatever "benefit" the free and open discussion of those topics on a motorcycle forum might have.

Whether or not you agree that grey-area images of children are technically legal, the owners/admins of Reddit clearly have the right to say "legal or not, we choose not to host those images/discussions here." You wouldn't expect a church or McDonalds to feel happy with you arranging a group of friends to meet there and swap bikini model photos - even if they're completely legal images, they're inappropriate for someone else's venue and they've got every right to say "not here, please". (and have you moved along if you persist).

I think fears of "slippery slopes" here are unfounded.

I think it's different when the rules are explicit from the start like in most forums, versus Reddit's case of actively upholding free speech and the right to like and link to (sometimes really) gross stuff.

So you believe teen girls in swimsuits is child porn? I'm sure you can find these same pictures all over facebook, should facebook remove those "child porn" images too?

Teen girls in swimsuits can be child abuse images: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dost_test#Criteria

In point of fact, nothing under discussion here is child porn. Child porn implies porn, and none of this was porn.

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