This isn't necessarily the case in the US, though I believe only for drawings. AI-generated CSAM probably wouldn't fly in a court of law.
Regardless, it's a naive conception of a system of law to think of it as a utilitarian system of restitution in contexts of "this individual harmed this individual". In fact, that would fall under the category of a "tort" rather than a "crime". The law is just as much about enforcing social mores and norms as it is about dealing with individuals harming each other. Hence why locales like Canada outlaw all forms CSAM, even fictional ones. The victim taken is to be society itself. The possession of this material, implicitly entailing enjoyment of it, is so gross a violation of society's norms and mores that it becomes elevated to a legal matter.
This shouldn't be the case in a society that supposedly values liberty.
The reason why the Supreme Court upheld bans on possessing CSAM is not because it's obscene, but because it incentivizes abuse of children to produce it.
We also acknowledge that participating in pornography requires consent, and that the continued distribution of nonconsensual pornography constitutes a continuing crime against the unwilling subject. Because children have zero legal capacity to consent, CSAM is de facto illegal.
It misses the point to think that CSAM is illegal because it is "obscene". It isn't illegal because it's disgusting; it's illegal because it's egregiously harmful to children. It's like thinking the bad thing a murderer did was make a mess.
On top of that, while there are different types of child abusers, the worst ones almost invariantly collect CSAM to the point of hoarding. So it really isn’t that bad of a proxy.
The root comment is implying that legalizing or decriminalizing csam would somehow help with prosecution of child abuse? I’m kind of speechless. Csam IS child abuse. The fact that there are consumers encourages producers to, well, produce!
I mean, if there were any truth to it, surely our nation would have seen an uptick, in the past 30–40 years, of new generations picking up guns and just mercilessly mowing down soft targets as if playing GTA.
Thankfully, that is all confined to fantasy in cyberspace!
perhaps there is more to it?
Oh, and everywhere in your nation? At the same time?
Sorry, I think I have a button.
Mother Shares How Video Games Radicalized Her Son to Run Around and Pick up Coins
If this were true then widespread availability of pornography on the internet would have resulted in a massive increase in rape of adult females. When in fact, assault numbers have been on a steady decline for decades.
60% of respondents who were found looking for CSAM on the dark web stated that they were fearful that consuming CSAM would lead them to do something to a child in real life: https://doi.org/10.54501/jots.v1i2.29
I'm not taking a position here, but the total amount of pornography is irrelevant to the argument. If the amount of rape pornography available has increased 500x as the total amount of pornography has increased 5000x, the proportion of pornography that was rape pornography has been reduced by 90%.
> 60% of respondents who were found looking for CSAM on the dark web stated that they were fearful that consuming CSAM would lead them to do something to a child in real life
Someone looking for child pornography is somebody looking for child pornography, so their opinion about what the search might lead to seems a bit worthless. There's no reason to assume that they have any insight into what will happen next, but we know for a fact what has already happened.
That out of the way, though, and assuming that child pornography leads to child abuse, the good pro-pornography case that has been made is that when pornography is suppressed rather than regulated, the 95% of people who are exclusively interested in adult pornography will have to go through the same underground channels that child pornography flows through, thus having the perverse effect of exposing more people to child pornography (or at least obtaining access to it.) If exposure to child pornography causes child abuse, then the suppression of adult pornography would then lead to more child abuse.
Hence your theory should be easily visible in rape statistics, yet it’s the opposite.
As well as possession. I don't actually know if those are different for CSAM, but I would assume so because they are for drugs.
Mere possession of a substance is surely not what society cares about.
> Non-consented distribution of sexual images (eg: revenge porn) is also a crime.
There is very compelling empirical evidence that this causes actual harm (suicide ideation in a very big fraction of the victims), even if it is fictional, so here there is no question about the harm.
There have been a handful of convictions based on fictional content, but usually the defendants also possessed real CSAM so there wasn't much point in contesting the charges over fictional images.
> The PROTECT Act includes prohibitions against obscene illustrations depicting child pornography, including computer-generated illustrations, also known as virtual child pornography. Previous provisions outlawing virtual child pornography... had been ruled unconstitutional... The PROTECT ACT attached an obscenity requirement under the Miller test or the variant test noted above to overcome this limitation.
Which, if I'm reading it right, means that GP was correct in saying "conviction of CSAM-related crimes do not require any physical act to have ever occurred to any real person"
> However, the court did not reverse its holding in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition as to virtual child pornography which is not obscene under the Miller standard
Does it surprise anyone else that this is a legal possibility?
Also, in regard to the fictional CSAM depictions that stuff is still wending its way through the courts.
(a)In General.—Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly produces, distributes, receives, or possesses with intent to distribute, a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that—
(1)
(A)depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and
(B)is obscene; or ...
(b)...
(c)Nonrequired Element of Offense.—
It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.
People have infantilization fetishes - where they wear diapers and shit. You can certainly imagine someone making a cartoon of that in a sexual way.
Adults often don't look their ages. John Mulaney famously had a set about resembling a child when he was 29.
What if someone generated an image that looked like a teenager, but there was a driver's license in the frame that said the person was an adult?
Real people have ages. Imaginary people are imaginary.
What about art from the antiquity when what we would call a teenager would have been treated as an adult? Surely someone painted people having sex before "the age of consent" was a well-defined term. Is it illegal to own that painting?
I can't wrap my head around how AI-generated imagery is evidence of child sexual abuse (CAS). How are you abusing a real child by generating an image of a fake one?
[1] https://rainn.org/get-the-facts-about-csam-child-sexual-abus...
- Structured transactions are illegal because we put a minimum on the amount of cash that has to move before government financial surveillance applies. The alternative (at least, one acceptable to the state) would be that the government knows every transaction you make[0] no matter the size. Since we don't want that, it has to be illegal to lie about the size of a transaction. Furthermore, the harder it is to get away with structuring your transactions, the more legible the financial system becomes and the easier it is to catch drug dealers.
- Pedophiles have not stopped possessing or distributing CSAM to reduce their legal liability. Actually, this argument ignores the main reason why pedophiles store and trade CSAM around in the first place: it's specifically to scare victims into silence and revictimize those who tell the cops. In fact, this is why we stopped calling it "child porn" and started calling it "child sexual abuse material" - because it is specifically material designed to sexually abuse children by way of it's mere existence.
If you're a "no touch" pedophile (they do exist!) that's still trading real CSAM around, well... Congratulations, Nobuhiro Watsuki, award-winning author of the hit samurai manga Rurouni Kenshin, you're still doing the dirty work for the full-contact pedo who recorded the damned thing.
As for drawn child porn, involving fictional characters (i.e. not CSAM), it is legal in certain jurisdictions. Notably, America, where the 1st Amendment errs on the side of creative expression[1]; and Japan, the thinking man's Epstein Island, where... I actually don't know why the fuck Japan is so weirdly tolerant of all this sick lolicon trash. Hell, Watsuki didn't even get cancelled when it came out he had 100 DVDs worth of actual CSAM.
There's an additional layer to this, though, in that for all the crimes you brought up, there's been a history of active state complicity in the crime:
- The CIA is a drug trafficking gang that happens to moonlight as a government intelligence agency
- A good chunk of elected officials and heads of state in multiple countries were compromised by notorious child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein
- The government doesn't pay taxes. I mean, obviously, they're the ones levying them.
We like to think of law enforcement as a cat-and-mouse game: criminals do a thing and law enforcement tries to hunt them down within the bounds of 4A/5A. The reality is more complicated. There are cases in which governments actively collaborate with organized crime, either because the government is corrupt as sin, or because the criminals are offering the state a way out.
[0] Fun fact: if you use Bitcoin, you're automatically opting into this.
[1] To be clear, while I agree with the American argument, you still shouldn't actually expose yourself to this kind of porn, because you're training yourself to get horny around kids. I shouldn't have to say this, but just because it's not illegal doesn't mean it's safe to use.
As I noted in another comment:
Currently this is explicitly against the law[0]:
(a)In General.—Any person who, in a circumstance described in subsection (d), knowingly produces, distributes, receives, or possesses with intent to distribute, a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting, that—
(1)
(A)depicts a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; and
(B)is obscene; or ...
(b)...
(c)Nonrequired Element of Offense.—
It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.