Re: Is it wrong to view child pornography?
dlowan wrote:a. As I have said before, nourishing sexual fantasies about children is a significant risk factor for going on to abuse them. You attempted to wiggle out of that one by saying that two things occurring together do not prove causality, however that is firstly an entirely reckless and self-serving wiggle
It's an inescapable fact that correlations say nothing about causality. If A and B are correlated, there are at least three plausible possibilities:
1) A causes B
2) B causes A
3) C causes B and A
In the case we're discussing, it doesn't seem that B could cause A (i.e. that abusing children could cause one to look at child porn). You are right to think that A may cause B (looking at child porn may cause one to be more inclined to abuse children). But you are wrong to ignore the third possibility: that something else gives people the inclination both to look at child porn and to abuse children. One extremely plausible candidate for C is paedophilia itself: paedophilia causes people to want to look at child porn, and it causes them to want to abuse children. The correlation between looking at child porn and abusing children is fully accounted for by this third possibility. There doesn't need to be a causal link between looking at child porn and abusing children. And if there is no such causal link, then looking at child porn is not a harmful practice.
Quote:(surely you would err on the side of caution when it comes to child abuse? Hmmmmmm????)
Should we ban porno models who wear school uniforms or have small breasts, then? Paedophiles could use them to feed their fantasies. How cautious do you want to be? I only want to be as cautious as we need to be to protect children from
actual threats (such as people who actually rape children).
Quote:and secondly this information is based on more than data analysis...it also comes from long interviews with paedophiles themselves, who speak of the progression from ever more intrusive fantasies to actual abuse.
I don't doubt that child abusers progress from looking at child porn to abusing children. But this is consistent with the notion that being paedophilic causes people to want to look at child porn and to abuse children. It doesn't prove that the process of looking at child porn actually has causal effects that lead to the phase of actually abusing children. What if these guys didn't have access to child pornography? Might they not skip that stage of the progression and get on with the child abuse? I'm still not sure that viewing child pornography makes things worse.
Quote:b. Your "pay for" argument is also a pathetic attempt to wiggle out of reality. Do you really defend getting your rocks off by looking at helpless humans being abused? Really? Are you truly attempting to deny that all participants in the child porn industry maintain it.....both by creating demand (lots of this **** is never paid for, anyway...it's made by men who do it because that is what they love to do...it's not like they pay most of the kids...and who love to share it because they, like you, try to pass it off as harmless...the real nice guys say it is out of love for the little kiddies, whom they are liberating) and by having a pool of people out there who can say "other people like this stuff, it's not wrong".
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, except at the very end. You could be right, maybe child abusers are encouraged by the fact that there are other paedophiles out there. But what if a paedophile looks at the images on a website, and never makes any contact whatsoever with the person who made them. The only difference the paedophile makes to the life of the child abuser is that the number on his website, which counts how many people have viewed it, goes up by 1. That's it. Is that really harmful? Will that really encourage a child abuser to seek out more victims than he would have done otherwise?
I don't think it will comfort or encourage the child abuser any more than the mere existence of other paedophiles encourages him. The child abuser already knows just by reading the news that there are other people in the world who have the same desires as him. He doesn't need to look at the number on his website to find this out. So as long as a paedophile really does
just view the images for his own pleasure, I still don't see what harm is caused.
