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> We target child pornography because child sexual abuse is the biggest social problem in the modern era, and we don't know what else to do about it.

In other words, we're executing on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician's_syllogism :

1. We must do something

2. This is something

3. Therefore, we must do this.

I am frankly baffled that there is a jurisprudential theory under which the viewing of a particular arrangement of bits is, in itself, a punishable crime, let alone by such draconian measures as these.

Exploiting children? Absolutely should be prosecuted. Paying for CP (and thereby directly contributing, economically, to its production)? Definitely. But just downloading and viewing an image? I'm no fan of the idea of CP, nor a radical libertarian, but I just can't grok this idea.

I've heard many justifications for it. The most substantial of these seek to establish some connection between demand for this content (by non-paying/free viewers) and the economic motive to create it. I think many people in this thread--and numerous investigations--have found this link to be tenuous/nonexistent. What, are child porn producers running a charity or something? They're in it for the money. If you download pirated/free CP, they don't get paid, and they'll never get paid.

The more ridiculous explanations, frequently deployed by Jesus politicians and law enforcement lobbies, have to do with a link between consumption of CP and real-life sexual abuse/assault/molestation/rape of minors. Even if we assume, for a moment, that there is some connection and that the causality is intelligible[1], how is that compatible with the spirit of hundreds of years of Anglo-American liberal intellectual history and legal theory? Since when is it okay (or constitutional, etc.) to prosecute someone for something they might do, but haven't actually done? Is this possible in any other area of law, or is CP that special? Why's it so special?

[1] Does CP cause sexual abusers of children to go do that? Or is it something they take an interest in it because they're already sexual abusers?

"Paying for CP (and thereby directly contributing, economically, to its production)?"

You can contribute to its production without paying money. It's like people cracking copy-protected software for status, rather than for money. They get 'paid' in other things they value.

Can you illuminate in greater detail the mechanism by which this might take place with CP? How does one contribute to the production of CP without paying for it?

(Obviously, by "paying" I don't mean strictly "paying with fiat currency". I mean paying in any tender, or barter arrangement.)

So your implication is that going after child pornography is a wasted effort ?

Because I would argue that sharing of child pornography encourages people to create it. In the same way every other discussion board encourages people to contribute content.

Like any other content industry, exploitative pornography (which includes child pornography, rape and forced bestiality pornography, hidden-camera pornography at brothels or stuck in toilets, etc.) has both a primary market and a secondary market. (I'm going to speak in these economic terms in the rest of this, because it's kind of disgusting to be more concrete.)

The original producers are part of the primary market, and only pay attention to the consumers that participate in the primary market. The secondary market--where open sharing of "used" content goes on--is ignored by the primary market.

The primary-market producers for exploitative pornography consist mainly of two types: individuals who film their own acts of exploitation to use as currency in trade for the films of exploitation-acts of others; and professionals, usually members of a crime syndicate that has humman trafficking business, who sell their content on the black market in less reputable countries. In both of these cases, the produced works are scarce goods: as few people will see them as can be managed.

Leaks to the secondary market are bad for the producers in the primary market; not only do they increase supply for the consumers in the primary market (and thereby drive down demand), but they also make it much more likely that law-enforcement will get their hands on the offending media, and be able to analyze it for clues to the individual or group's whereabouts, or just as proof in a trial. Thus, the producers in the primary market tend to enforce a loan-shark-like "you break my trust, I break your knuckles" policy on the redistribution of their content.

The incentives are basically just entirely missing for anyone in the primary market to specifically release content to the secondary market. Anyone who "just wants the attention" and releases multiple videos will soon be tracked down and arrested.

Picture it like someone who is manufacturing some form of illegal-but-sought-after drug, like MDMA. Have you ever heard of someone who makes MDMA--not a redistributor, but an originator--giving away large quantities of it to people they don't know, just for the attention? That's just throwing away your assets, your safety, and your profitable business all at the same time, isn't it?

So if I could summarize that: Given that producing child pornography is illegal, making its distribution illegal acts as a sort of de facto extraordinarily draconian copyright law in favor of the unlawful producers. Which increases the market incentive to violate the law against production because many of the non-producing "pirate" distributors are driven out of the distribution market by law enforcement, reducing competition and thereby increasing profitability for the producers.

No: "many of the non-producing 'pirate' distributors are driven out of the distribution market by law enforcement" is exactly the opposite of the case. Law-enforcement has the smallest impact on the secondary-market distributors.

Producers, whose content get leaked to the secondary market, get caught by law-enforcement, because each video available to law-enforcement is one more piece of evidence that can be used to track and trap them.

The consumers in the primary market will get in trouble with the producers for their leaking to the secondary market--much in the same way that Microsoft will get mad at you for leaking your company's Windows/Office MAK key. If a producer has only given copies of a video to five primary-market consumers, it's quite easy to figure out which of those consumers is responsible for the leak. The law doesn't have a good way to catch these people; but the producers do. (In a lot of cases, this amounts to literally being "in trouble with the mob.") Note that this knocks a consumer out of the primary market--but increases the amount of free content available in the secondary market. Since producers and consumers are taken out of the primary market in equal numbers when this happens, supply/demand stays constant.

The "pirate" re-distributors in the secondary market--the people these primary consumers leak to--don't care about any of this. They have no personal relationships with the primary market, and are not personally involved in it, other than in consuming and sharing the content produced there. They also don't have to share any personally-identifying details about themselves to participate in the secondary market (they can just be a TORified IP address, unlike the primary market which operates more through established contacts.)

However, by and large, the secondary market is overwhelmingly larger than the primary market--and so, when a Best Buy repair tech finds exploitative pornography on someone's hard disk, that person will likely be a member of the secondary market. Catching anyone from the primary market requires these social-engineering-based busts that you hear about--where someone infiltrates a primary market--precisely because there's no social "path" from the secondary market back into the primary market.

> Producers, whose content get leaked to the secondary market, get caught by law-enforcement, because each video available to law-enforcement is one more piece of evidence that can be used to track and trap them.

It seems to me that the same materials (or even more) would be available for discovery by law enforcement in the secondary market if the secondary market (i.e. redistribution) didn't carry large criminal penalties.

> The consumers in the primary market will get in trouble for their leaking to the secondary market--much in the same way that Microsoft will get mad at you for leaking your company's Windows/Office MAK key--because, if a producer has only given copies of a video to five primary-market consumers, it's quite easy to figure out which of those consumers is responsible for the leak.

The ability to punish leakers is somewhat irrelevant unless there is near 100% success in doing so and the secondary market is entirely eliminated, which seems implausible.

> Since producers and consumers are taken out of the primary market in equal numbers when this happens, supply/demand stays constant.

Are you assuming a 1:1 relationship between suppliers and consumers for some reason?

> The "pirate" re-distributors in the secondary market--the people these primary consumers leak to--don't care about any of this.

Regardless of whether they care, changing availability in the secondary market will affect demand in the primary market because would-be participants in the primary market may satisfy their demand in the secondary market.

> Picture it like someone who is manufacturing some form of illegal-but-sought-after drug, like MDMA. Have you ever heard of someone who makes MDMA--not a redistributor, but an originator--giving away large quantities of it to people they don't know, just for the attention?

Well actually yes, but not for the attention. It happens with less serious drugs (and amphetamines to a lesser extent) in some of the more social communities which are open minded to drugs (eg randoms in a dance music club or hippies back during the summer of love). The drug sharing happens from there because of the way how those communities are united (eg through music or ideals).

You also see free harder drugs pushed as a way for dealer to get new customers (ie get them hooked and then you have their custom). So even there, it's not about the attention, but about future profit in the long term.

But I do get your point, it's less common for what you say to happen; it's certainly not the norm. But it does happen.

Er, no, you missed the emphasized word in my point. The people doing that are redistributors. You will see dealers distributing "free samples"--after all, they're loss-leaders--but "dealers" are part of the secondary market. You don't see drug chemists going out and freely distributing drugs; they're in it for the money.

My first paragraph is still valid.

The economics of producing child porn and the economics of producing actual physical drugs are wildly different, so I'm not sure how that's even relevant.

You can make child porn with point-and-shoot camera, a memory card, and any location that is available for ten minutes. Mobility is high. Distribution is cheap.

From what I'd heard, Freedom Hosting was knowingly hosting websites for what you refer to as the primary market - groups where people can trade their own videos of children being sexually abused for other members' videos.

>Because I would argue that sharing of child pornography encourages people to create it.

Suppose that's true. Does that mean that sharing of child pornography increases the incidence of child abuse itself? I would argue probably not, or at least that the increase is fairly small compared to the resources that go into combating it. Public forums do encourage sharing, but that doesn't mean that what's being shared wouldn't have been done in the absence of the forum. It just wouldn't have been shared.

The main questions that need to be answered are these:

1. Does viewing child pornography actually encourage child abuse?

2. Does viewing child pornography discourage child abuse by giving pedophiles a sexual outlet that doesn't involve harming additional children.

3. How much more does it cost to catch and prosecute someone who produces CP than someone who merely views it?

It seems likely to me that, at best, we're wasting a lot of money reducing a factor that has a small negative impact on actual child welfare (people who view child pornography), when that money would be better directed at a factor that has a much larger negative impact (people who abuse children). At worst, we may be spending money going after a part of the problem which actually mitigates harm.

Whether or not it is the latter is unfortunately a very difficult question to answer. Most common wisdom about "sexual repression" and "outlets" is pretty much without scientific basis, as is the opposite wisdom that pornography encourages sexual behavior. The one correlation that can be drawn is that the results of studies on these matters tend to align strongly with the politics of their authors.

But in any case, yes I think it's safe to say that the focus specifically on pornography is wasted effort.

You cannot state either (1) or (2). It seems you're trying to believe the latter, and it might be true for some wrong-doers; however common sense suggests that not viewing such videos should contribute to lower abuse rates.

Even if it is too costly to catch the viewers first, there's no better way to find the producers after.

Nature has proven again and again that common sense is unreliable and incorrect in nearly every scientific context. This one (statistics and psychology) should be no different.

I believe studies exist which demonstrate that suppressing deviant behavior results in it manifesting itself more violently, not less. I wish I had a specific source to cite.

Mind you, there are also studies that actively "venting" emotions like rage will keep you angry longer than just ignoring them. (And then there are many social-science statistical surveys correlating the drop in violent crime over the past century with the rise in "things for bored, testosterone-filled adolescents to do that don't harm anybody", like video-games. (And then...))

This isn't one of those things where all the evidence just says something general and simple, and then can be specialized to infer what happens for a case like this; it's really one of those times where we need to test what happens in this case in particular.

>I believe studies exist which demonstrate that suppressing deviant behavior results in it manifesting itself more violently, not less. I wish I had a specific source to cite.

If you search for sources on that, I think you will find that the evidence is pretty divided. I actually had taken this as fact for a long time, but when I looked for sources to back it up, I found that it's not nearly so clear cut.

What does seem to be the case is that making someone feel ashamed over things they can't control is psychologically damaging. For example, shame seems to be a very strong predictor of whether PTSD symptoms will emerge, both in sex crime victims and in war veterans.

This problem of shame causing psychological problems, I think, may be where the idea of sexual repression being harmful came from. Suppression of sexual urges without shame may be completely harmless, but that's not usually how it happens unless you're doing a controlled study.

As a society, we are completely dropping the ball in this respect. We make victims feel ashamed and broken, which is incredibly unfair, and likely exacerbates considerably the psychological harm that they have to deal with.

And I think we're probably doing a lot of harm by making people who have sexual attraction to children feel ashamed. Given two people who are attracted to children, one of whom is relatively stable and secure, and one of whom has huge mental health issues, which one do you think is more likely to hurt a child?

Moreover, if we teach people that having an urge is already wrong, then what is the moral incentive not to act on that urge? Instead, we should be teaching people that attraction toward children is actually pretty common, and that there's no reason to be ashamed of anything that happens inside your head, but that there are some urges and fantasies that you must not act on (or at least must not act out directly; there are some alternatives like role-play and simulated pornography).

>You cannot state either (1) or (2).

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean that evidence is lacking? Because that was my whole point.

>It seems you're trying to believe the latter

I'm not trying to believe anything. That would be a mortal sin. I am saying that we don't have evidence to rule out either 1 or 2, and both seem about equally plausible. It would certainly be convenient for 2 to be true, since it would give us a pretty easy option for deterring child abuse (high quality simulated CP). That's why I think it's important that we find answers those questions.

If 1 is true, I want to believe 1. If 2 is true, I want to believe 2.

Even if 2. were true, you can also easily argue that the prevelance of child pornography is going to increase the amount of people attracted to this "fetish", so can still increase the risk of child abuse. The problem is not one-dimensional

Not to mention that considering viewing to be socially acceptable , in itself, damages society (by lowering social norms). And I'd say it's gotten to a strange level in "internet" society. Think of all child porn jokes out there. Replace it with something else (say, necrophilia), and it's just weird.

>you can also easily argue that the prevelance of child pornography is going to increase the amount of people attracted to this "fetish"

Can you argue that so easily? Because I see the claim made very often. I have seen zero strong arguments supporting it. If you think you can argue for this position effectively, I invite you to try.

>Not to mention that considering viewing to be socially acceptable , in itself, damages society (by lowering social norms)

First of all, there's a gigantic difference between switching enforcement efforts away from people who view CP, and making the viewing of CP socially acceptable.

But if you're saying that it harms society to make having sexual attraction to children socially acceptable, I couldn't disagree more. I think the only plausible hope we have for significantly reducing child sexual abuse is a revolution in how our culture understands morality as it applies to internal mental states. If you want to teach someone not to act on urges to harmful behavior, you aren't going to get very far by telling them that they're evil for having the urge in the first place.

So your implication is that going after child pornography is a wasted effort? The article linked earlier in this thread concludes: "after adjustment for response rates and definitions, the prevalence of child sexual abuse was not found to vary significantly over the three decades reviewed".

If that conclusion is indeed correct, then apparently our efforts to put a halt to it haven't worked. There are then two possible conclusions:

1) We haven't done enough yet. Doubling the available budget will improve the situation.

2) Our current methods are pointless. No amount of effort will do the trick, and going after child porn is indeed a wasted effort.

Personally, I think it's a combination of the two. The advent of the internet has made sharing illegal content orders of magnitude easier. Even if our efforts at curtailing child porn are effective, those efforts have largely been outpaced by technological development. In this it's similar to general internet piracy.

On the other hand, it is questionable whether going after child pornography is the right way to combat child sexual abuse at all. The jury is still out on the question whether watching porn increases one's likelihood of committing sexual assault, though recent studies seem to conclude this is not the case, even for violent porn, and that there might even be an inverse relation.[0]

If that is indeed the case, then child pornography is not a trigger for child sexual abuse, merely a result thereof. Then going after child porn is justified to prevent the abuse of the children involved, but no more important than preventing the abuse of children whose abuse is not recorded and distributed: we should be focusing on preventing child abuse altogether, and place less emphasis on whether there's a camera present or not.

[edit] In my comment, I implicitly assume that (violent) legal pornography is to sexual abuse as child porn is to child sexual abuse. That may not be entirely accurate. See derefr's post[1], which discusses some of the differences in economic incentives between the creation and distribution of normal porn and those of child porn.

_____

[0] http://www.tamiu.edu/~cferguson/pornography.pdf

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155015

throwingaway78's account is banned, but they posted an interesting comment. Here it is for non-showdead readers: http://content.screencast.com/users/shawnpresser/folders/Jin...

They are apparently a pedophile, and they give an account of what life is like for a pedophile and on darknets. They also assert that there were little to no rapists / people selling CP on Freedom Hosting.

Here's a pastebin of his comment for screen readers: http://pastebin.com/9uuQK4ME

>CSA is quite honestly the most insane and awful aspect of Western society bar none

I'm not sure why you're singling out Western society. Erotic child-adult relationships seem to have been fairly common throughout history and throughout the world. Both in ancient Greece and feudal Japan, pederasty was common and accepted. Muhammad's youngest wife was nine years old when he consummated their marriage, and this wasn't really seen as notable until the 20th century.

The psychological impact on children notwithstanding, the stigmatization of pedophilia seems to be a pretty modern phenomenon.

I think he meant that non-Western societies have other problems that compete for most insane and awful.

I would not just say Western society. The VICE documentary "This is What Winning Looks Like"* seems to show CSA has a tradition in Afghanistan.

* http://www.vice.com/vice-news/this-is-what-winning-looks-lik...

Ya it's really shocking how accepted in it.

One of the higher up police chiefs(I think) said "..what else are they suppose to other than to fuck boys."

Im not sure if that is the most depressing number in the world, or the fact that double that amount of children are physical abused (beaten) in the US. Sexual abuse declined 62% from 1992 to 2009, while the long-term trend for physical abuse went down by 56% since 1992. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abuse#Prevalence)

What percent of US males is the subject of genital mutilation? What percent of childeren in Africa suffer from malnutrition? How many people die simple for the lack of the basic medical help? Somehow I think your view on biggest social problems is distorted. And I am not sure how jailing teens for sending self pics to other teens helps to solve it.

"CSA is quite honestly the most insane and awful aspect of Western society bar none."

Certaintly you meant the world population. It's not like this is exclusive to us Westerners.

"the most insane and awful aspect of Western society bar none."

I assure you it's not limited to "Western society", at all.