[lbo-talk] Entrapment and Impossibility (Was Re: did Craig commit a crime?)

Mr. WD mister.wd at gmail.com
Fri Aug 31 12:54:24 PDT 2007


On 8/31/07, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:


> Virtual child pornography might be a good way too but the arguments
> against it are that it's used to desensitize real kids and that
> investigators can't tell real from virtual images. I think when it
> comes to pedophilia legislators don't have a problem with the idea
> they might be criminalizing what people are thinking.

Not only is there the issue of essentially creating thought crimes, but the hysteria surrounding child porn actually results in the mass sexualization of children:

-WD

Persecuting Pee-wee A Child-Porn Case That Threatens Us All by Richard Goldstein January 15 - 21, 2003 http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0303,goldstein,41194,1.html ... Is our obsession with child porn creating a climate where kids are commonly regarded as sex objects? Amy Adler, a professor at New York University Law School, suspects so. "The legal tool that we designed to liberate children from sexual abuse," she wrote in the Columbia Law Review, "threatens to enslave us all by constructing a world in which we are enthralled—anguished, enticed, bombarded—by the spectacle of the sexual child."

Consider the photo of a beaming, bare-bottomed 12-year-old boy holding a pole that appeared in the July 1963 issue of Manorama. Back then, it would have seemed charming to many viewers and arousing to a few. Today this same image would make most people faintly nauseous. An image that once seemed tender, since its sexual meaning was repressed, is now terrifying because it reads as explicitly erotic. The process of sensitizing us to child porn also forces us to eroticize children. Whether we intend to or not, we begin to see the world from a pedophile's perspective.

In a climate where the definition of a child can be so ambiguous that prosecutors have to call in pediatricians to decide whether a model is underage, and where cops pore over thousands of images looking for evidence of a sex crime without ever considering intent, the concept of sexual abuse is transformed into something else. It becomes a tool for policing all sorts of desire. Adolescents are governed by it, since they are all children under the law. Gay men are implicated by it, since they are all subject to the stereotype that homos are child molesters. Everyone is prone to worry about what might lurk in the recesses of the imagination. And what of the girl who grows up with the constant message that she's a sex object for adults? "As we expand our gaze and bend it to the will of child pornography law," writes Adler, "we transform the world into a pornographic place." ...

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